ABSTRACT
Punishment is necessarily something that is (or that we expect to be) experienced as a bad thing. The ‘pains of punishment’ literature explores the negative experiences of punishment, from imprisonment to non-custodial options. This chapter considers these accounts, as well as other similar theoretical frameworks for considering the experiences of punishment, such as Sexton’s ‘penal consciousness’. It also examines the wider harms of punishment – its negative consequences for society and for third parties to criminal justice processes. The pains of punishment literature is useful in its focus on individual experience, providing inductive and empirically led accounts of what punishment feels like from the perspective of its subjects. However, a corollary is the difficulty of effectively comparing these accounts, and accurately measuring their impact. This chapter therefore also considers these difficulties, and attempts to give dimensional clarity to the pains of punishment.
