ABSTRACT
Punishment is among the most Janus-faced of our social practices. I n some of its aspects punishment appears primordial and unchanging. I t appeals to passions and intuitions in us that reach back into the remote past-the yearning for justice, the desire for retribution, the fear of chaos and disorder. I n other respects punishment seems entirely contemporary. I t is a quite technical matter, administered by professional people in settings (offices, hostels, day-centers, busy courthouses) that seem resolutely mundane, and whose activities are governed by volumes-frequently revised-of statutes, standing orders, circular instructions, rules for reporting, requisitioning and accounting, and so on that are essentially similar to those of almost any other administrative body. Lately, these institutions have in many cases increasingly adopted certain vocabularies and practices that are also current in other organizations both public and private. They begin to feature the language of auditing, operations research, and risk management. Certain of their functions and activities have in some countries, notably in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, been del-
egated or "contracted out" to private sector businesses. In some placesmost drastically and obviously in the case of the prison population in the United States, but not just in that respect and not just there-the scale of their operations would seem to have increased, sometimes abruptly so. But are these shifts primarily owing to a reawakening of the antique will to punish, or does their explanation rather lie mainly within the logics or "rationalities" of the contemporary institutions themselves?
