ABSTRACT
Technologies and cultural change There is by now a well-established link between cultural change and penal developments. Changing cultural patterns and mentalities leave their mark upon patterns of punishment. As Garland suggests: ‘[T]he frameworks of meaning through which we generally lead our lives are likely to guide the ways in which we design our penal institutions’ (1990: 200). Penal practices derive ‘their sense and credibility from their ability to resonate with established ways of thinking and understanding’ (1990: 210). Changes in cultural patterns thus have a resonance in the ways in which penal systems think about offenders’ identities: what it means to be a delinquent, a man, a woman, a juvenile offender, etc. Cultural perceptions of offenders have changed from the time when they were, according to theology, viewed as sinners, to the view of offenders as rational, calculating individuals and, further, to views of offenders as abnormal human beings shaped by genetic, psychological and social factors (Garland 1990: 207, 208). Since the 1970s, with the fall of rehabilitation and the rise of competing paradigms, new images of offenders have been created in contemporary penal systems.
