The flogging, branding, torturous style of punishment seen before the eighteenth century is a long way from the delivery of punishment that began to emerge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Methods of punishment underwent significant changes and penalties moved away from infliction of pain on the body of the person and imprisonment became the preferred way to punish.
This essay aims to identify the individual perspectives created in the minds of sociologists and compare each theorist's account of why prison became the preferred method of punishment. Each theorist has a different idea on why this was the case however shared in the same view that punishment had become less punitive in its measures.
The main theorists analysed in this essay are Durkheim, who focuses on the positive, solidarity enhancing functions of punishment. …
