International Penology Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

International Penology - Term Paper Example In China, death penalty is reserved for human trafficking and serious cases of corruption. According to the Shot at Dawn Pardons Campaign (2006), world courts-martial have imposed death sentences for offenses such as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny. Since time immemorial capital punishments such as decapitation, electrocution, firing squad, gas chamber, hanging, lethal injection, shooting and stoning have been widely used. Decapitation super cedes all other form of penal practice and this practice has been proved to be fatal, as brain death occurs within seconds to minutes without the support of the organism's body. Decapitation was a common practice in the Asian continent. Countries such as China, India, Japan, Thailand and European, American, and African counterparts also greatly used reserved this practice to punish criminals. However, these types of capital punishment methods has been widely debated, where opponents of the death penalty often feel that there is the possibility of innocent or wrong execution, the lack of deterrence of violent crime; and religious grounds for opposition to the death penalty. Supporters of capital punishments often feel this to put an end to violent crime, closure to the families and friends o f the victim and term of prison sentence is not an ideal way to punish. These debates across countries and among philosophers have gradually changed the style of handling criminals and punishing criminal activities. Foucauldian Perspectives Foucault brought forth the idea of the social permeation of power relationships inherently linked to resistance (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). Foucault gives two senses to the word "subject": One is at once under the control of power and one is acting as one's own agent of power, but never is one outside of power (Foucault, 1972) According to Foucault (2005) "The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every crime grew out of the development of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries". He greatly looks are the development of highly refined forms of discipline, of discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's body. He strongly believed that discipline develops a new economy and politics for bodies and those modern institutions required that bodies must be based on their tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. His prime argument is that discipline could mould a whole new form of individuality for bodies, which enabled them to carry out their duty within the new forms of economic, political, and military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today. Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists. Hence Foucault's theory of "gentle" punishment made created a way for practice of more generalized and controlled means of punishment better compared to excessive force of the sovereign. In his lecture titled Governmentality, Foucault defines governmentality as "1.The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means