Society Without Punishment Analysis

I would write a story about a society without punishment. The narrator would find himself in an alternate world in which punitive measures are not used to respond to deviant and criminal activities. In fact, in this imaginary world, punitive responses would not even be considered as a response to social problems. Prisons, for example, would not exist in this society, and neither would criminal courts, detention centers, or any instantiation of a retributive model of justice. The absence of punishment in the story would not be similar to contemporary oppositions to private prisons, imprisonment of nonviolent offenders, or racially disparate imprisonment. Those objections take issue with the form or distribution of punishment and prisons …show more content…
My story would set the stage for such a shift by forcing the reader to encounter a society simultaneously the same and totally different from his or her own. I would describe the society as, for the most part, the same as the one we know now. The level of technological progress, for example, would be basically the same as it is in 2015. This would allow the reader to feel somewhat at home in the story’s setting. The reader’s ability to understand and identify with the society described in the story is, ironically, necessary for the reader to be estranged from the setting. In reading my story, the reader would experience cognitive estrangement because he or she would need to mentally work to make sense of a different world. If the world is too different from the reader’s, then the reader might not understand the story’s social critique of the present, and if it is too far in the future, the reader might interpret the fictional society as an inevitable progression of the present one and not as an achievable alternate reality. The story would be set in a world at once familiar and …show more content…
Demonstrating that it is possible to relate to crime and deviancy without recourse to vengeance and retribution would compel the reader to think critically about his or her own attitude towards punishment. This would, hopefully, bring formerly unconsidered justifications for punishment to the fore by denaturalizing punishment as an obvious and natural response to criminality and deviancy and instead showing it to be historically and culturally