Understanding penal subjectivities: how practitioners and offenders construct penal aims

This thesis builds on the existing literature on punishment philosophies that seek to justify the burdens imposed on offenders by the State. Existing research has focused on theoretical constructions about how punishment ought to be; this thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by arguing that punishment should also be constructed considering how it is experienced by stakeholders in the penal process. Furthermore, it builds on penological approaches that propose broadening the fields of inquiry to the understanding of the contexts in which penalty practices are based and, in doing so, it explores penal subjectivities, developing knowledge about how penal philosophies are conceived by a sample of Chilean judges, supervisors and offenders.

Findings in this thesis suggest that theoretical models of punishment based on deterministic and single-based explanations are insufficient to give an account of the “aims of punishment” and even hybrid constructions may not be sufficient to illustrate the particularities of punishment in the case of prison and alternative sanctions. Overall, this study provides a unique insight into penal subjectivities, and argues that there are important elements in shaping punishment constructions that are usually absent from theoretical constructions: penal culture in which punishment practices are established and personal experiences with prison and of alternative sanctions. Thus, the theoretical challenge is to advance in the development of a comprehensive framework that overcomes the traditional discrepancy between theoretical punishment and reality.