About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about Émile Durkheim’s sociological approach to punishment, focusing in particular on: (i) Durkheim’s understanding of punishment as a means of maintaining moral boundaries and upholding social cohesion; (ii) his notion of crime and deviance as social constructions, and his argument that deviance is necessary to achieve social change; (iii) his interest in the relationship between social change and penal change, through his work on the forms of punishment which predominate in primitive and advanced societies; (iv) the similarities and differences between Durkheim and the abolitionist thinker Peter Kropotkin.

About the lecturer

Dr David Scott works at the Open University. He researches and teaches on prisons, penal abolitionism and the sociology and philosophy of punishment. His publications include For Abolition: Essays on Prisons and Socialist Ethics (2020), Against Imprisonment: An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays (2018), and, with Nick Flynn, Prisons and Punishment: The Essentials (2014).