ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the fifth part of this book. The fifth part of the book addresses criminological thinking on punishment and security – two distinct sub-fields in the discipline – although it is only really since the beginning of the twenty-first century that the latter has come to the fore. Modern philosophical thinking treats punishment as a crucial dynamic in the classic liberal problem of how the individual should relate to the state. Sociological perspectives on punishment, on the other hand, focus on the wider aspects of social control to reveal the underlying structures of penal systems. Although there is a tendency to evade complex normative issues, this approach does raise fundamental questions over how to understand punishment as a social phenomenon, which generates webs of cultural meaning and is determined by political forces that would otherwise remain hidden.
