16 - Retributive Justive: Its Socical Context

Summary

As for the social character of [penal] reaction, it comes from the social nature of the offended sentiments. Because they are found in all consciences, the infraction committed arouses in those who have evidence of it or who learn of its existence the same indignation. Everybody is attacked; consequently, everybody opposes the attack. Not only is the reaction general, but it is collective, which is not the same thing. It is not produced isolatedly in each one, but with a totality and a unity, nevertheless variable, according to the case.

Emile Durkheim, 1893/1964, p. 102

Emile Durkheim, George Herbert Mead (1918), Thomas and Znaniecki (1945), and, in more recent times, Harold Garfinkel (1956) and Kai Erikson (1966) have commented extensively on the fact that deviant acts evoke group responses. In Erikson's summary phrasing:

The deviant act, then, creates a sense of mutuality among the people of a community by supplying a focus for group feeling. Like a war, a flood, or some other emergency, deviance makes people more alert to the interests they share in common and draws attention to those values which constitute the “collective conscience” of the community. (1966, p. 4)

Until relatively recently, social psychologists have given less attention to retributive justice than to other forms of justice, such as distributive and procedural justice (see Vidmar, 2000a).