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Today, legal science considers itself a monopolist in prison research, placing itself in a vicious circle of formal thinking, where openly romantic penological hypotheses are perceived as axioms.
Subsequently, the formal science of criminal law ‘consumes’ the same things, creating largely template formal legal studies with relevant conclusions, the authors of which do not dare to question the following statements: 1) the objectives of punishment, approved in the criminal law, cannot but be achieved; 2) the objectives of punishment, established by law, cannot but be initially determined incorrectly.
Such penological overoptimism applies to all rationals of punishment without exception (retribution, deterrence and special prevention). However, most of all, this academic and legal optimistic fiction ‘spills over’ into the goal of offender rehabilitation (regardless of how this goal is shaped in criminal and prison legislation).
Considering the goals of social control measures for deviants as a system, it can be argued that traditional classical views on them and the corresponding symbols are characterised by stability and inviolability. At least such mythical images are created by Ukrainian criminology and the science of criminal law. For them, everything is as simplified as possible, simplified to the limit. Even if we are talking about the ‘crisis of punishment’, which is sometimes mentioned in the national criminological literature (although this crisis has characterised European and American penal systems for over 50 years), this problem seems to be by no means a problem for national science. The introduction of new rehabilitation techniques (although their novelty is questionable), adequate funding of national criminal justice systems, respect for human rights (or at least exemplary human rights activities), numerous programmes and projects of international organisations, “innovative” projects such as mediation or restorative justice, widespread introduction of a very bright brand of probation with the corresponding maximum (even aggressive) social advertising – all this and more, at first glance, ensures that the traditional goals of punishment (retribution, deterrence, special prevention, correction), ‘nurtured’ within the classical school of criminal law, remain on the surface of the stormy Eurocentric penological sea.
Both theoretical grounds for criticism of the traditional goals of classical punishment (for example, the lack of clear criteria for measuring the achievement of these goals) and practical arguments (for example, the incomprehensible for classical interpretation growth of the number of prisoners worldwide in both absolute and relative terms, despite the announcement of large-scale campaigns for the wider use of alternative punishments and probation and the official recognition of the inability of prisons to serve as an instrument for achieving the proclaimed goals of punishment) still cannot be And – let us emphasise – they continue to sing them quite cynically.
Perhaps it cannot be otherwise. Great subjects, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, require that they be ‘silent or spoken of with majesty: majesty, that is, cynically and with integrity’[1]. What, if not an array of knowledge about the goals of punishment and the ‘means of achieving them’ can speak of itself with such majesty?
However, this stability, which, frankly speaking, is more like stagnation, does not notice or consider the political pessimism that has engulfed knowledge about punishment and other instruments of social control. The stability and conservatism of traditional classical theories of punishment, which have always been beyond doubt, and the corresponding punitive practices, as a result of the influence of political pessimism of the Postmodern period, have been toppled from the pedestal of political stability.
The pessimism of scientific knowledge about the established theories of social control and methods of implementing the relevant social control and surveillance practices is now extremely acute. It is accompanied by many vivid, but at the same time sad examples, which are more or less connected with the political collapse (not even the decline) of the rehabilitation paradigm.
As a result of this collapse, there is a vacuum in the justification of penitentiary policy that would correspond to the existing social control practices of the Postmodern.
[1] Nietzsche, F. (2014). The will to power. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, Azbuka-Atticus. 448 с. С.23.
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