Vaughan, Barry. "The Punitive Consequences of Consumer Culture". Punishment and Society, Vol.4, No.2 (2002): 195-211.

Vaughan, Barry. "The Punitive Consequences of Consumer Culture". Punishment and Society, Vol.4, No.2 (2002): 195-211.

• In 1895, the Gladstone Committee on prisons wrote that the high rates of incarceration in Britain despite increases in education and wealth were a moral condemnation of the contemporary British government (195).
• The recommendations of this body were then followed up by prison reform and an increased political perception that prison should be used only in cases of last resort. The public also demonstrated broad support for safeguarding the rights of prisoners (195-196).
• "The public mood today regarding offenders [...] favours a ‘new punitiveness’ which has given up on any pretence of benevolence towards offenders and favours demonstrably harsh punishments" (196).
• "Criminologists have largely agreed that public support for punitive policies cannot simply be a reflection of crime rates. Fear of crime needs to be situated among broader and more intractable concerns" (196).
• The common explanation for the increased punitiveness of Western criminal justice systems is that the retreat of the welfare state has marginalized the lower classes and created a sense of anxiety and insecurity as a result. Citizens both fear improper use of the increased freedoms that come with a declining welfare state. Simultaneously, society becomes increasingly atomized resulting in less empathy for criminals (196).
• The author argues that while these broad trends are true, there are also important cognitive factors unexplored. In particular, the decline of Fordist modes of production has resulted in a change in cognition that leaves populations more inclined towards punitive policies (196).
• The author draws from the ideas of René Girard, a French literary critic, who proposes two central theses. First, he proposes mimetic desire, meaning that peoples' desires arise from what other rather than existing internally. Secondly, the scapegoat mechanism, in which people blame others for their competition for the same resources, and thus resolve the conflict (196).
• In capitalist societies, the social restrictions on what items individuals can conceivably hope to possess weaken, create a more intense competition over desired items. During this stage, the competition for the object becomes so intense that the object becomes less important than the competition itself (197).
• The solution to the intense conflict created by general competition over the same object is a scapegoat, an arbitrary victim against which the entire community can direct their anger. The victim is necessarily arbitrary because the cause of conflict is general and w/o specific source. The scapegoat has to be w/o agency, however, so that blaming that group will not start another round of conflict (198).
• After the destruction of the scapegoat, the community collectively assigns blame for the conflict on the scapegoat for having somehow instigated violence, and returns to its previous routine until another point when conflict becomes unbearably intense and another scapegoat is selected (198).
• Girard divides the phenomenon of mimetic desire into historical periods, with pre-capitalist societies putting class-based restraints on desires (197). In modern, capitalist societies, the behavior of individuals, esp. related to consumption is no longer limited. Modern societies are also better at managing conflicts from mimetic desire, allowing people to internalize their conflicts within non-violent competition to an enormous degree (198).
• One of the major problems with Mr. Girard's thesis is that it would have predicted increased consumerism under capitalism to have resulted in rising conflict over goods, whereas instead 18th and 19th Century British society saw a decreased punitiveness and a desire to expand the market to include more people (196).
• This historical perspective raises a major question for not only Girard's thesis, but also those who blame increased punitiveness entirely on capitalism: what makes the period of capitalism in the 1970s onward, where punitive action was increased, different than previous periods, where the opposite trend is observed? (197).
• The work of René Girard can be better understood in the context of observations by Mary Douglas, an anthropologist. Dame Douglas posited that society react to perceived danger in three different ways: hierarchically, sectarianism, and individualist (198). 
• Dame Douglas argued that a hierarchical society, in which conduct and routine is highly regulated, moral failings are conceptualized as dangerous sins against the community which threaten order. It uses danger to bind individuals more tightly into the society. Girard would have expected this society to emerge after successful scapegoating (199).
• A sectarian society features strong group affiliation, but few restrictions on the behavior of individuals within those groups. People operate in terms of unchanging identities. Sectarian societies face a dilemma b/c they have such little internal agreement, and so target criminal groups or outsiders as a method of maintaining internal coherence. Danger is used as a way to make up for social disunity in other areas and will only intensify with lose of social capital (199).
• Other scholars would agree with this assertion, arguing that increasingly punitive penalties can actually be a sympathetic gesture to make up for the lose of solidarity in civil society or government (199).
• An individualist society is one without strong group affiliation and few restrictions on what individuals can do; it also features an entrenched market. Since there is not a common set of morals, scapegoating cannot be moralistic. Instead success or failure is internalized and competition regulated through demands of constant self-improvement (199).
• A major tension between Girard and Douglas is that Girard predicts scapegoating to be prevalent in individualist societies, whereas Douglas finds it more common in sectarian societies (199). However, upon closer examination, the sectarian culture described by Douglas is the result of the decline of mass production and atomization of society in post-industrialism, making her 'sectarian culture' more similar to Girard's definition of individualism (200).
• A number of sociologists, including Werner Sombart and Karl Polanyi, argued that capitalism represented a fundamental break in human behavior, namely in a shift from consumption for subsistence towards consumption for its own sake. This has been allowed by a lack of societal regulation of markets in capitalism, allowing people to succeed on merit without reference to the social hierarchies that previously existed (200-201).
• Dr. Polanyi did allow for some variation in this trend, referring to a 'double mechanism' during capitalization, as political demands are made for the regulation of the negative effects of the market. This increased understanding of negative effects, especially among marginalized groups, is esp. common in early capitalist societies (201).
• Writings of 18th and 19th Britain make many of the same critiques of consumption and luxury as René Girard makes decades later, seemingly contradicting his thesis. The author explains the increased concerns for the plight of the lower class under this system as a reaction of the upper classes to the social ruptures caused by the collapse of aristocratic society, pressuring the upper and middle classes to demonstrate these values to make up for their absence under capitalism (202).
• One of the primary ways in which these elite values were reinforced was by manners and standards of politeness, imposed by the upper class to retain class distinctions vanishing in other areas (202). Since they could not always gain access to this world, the middle classes developed their own moral standards based on sensibility and virtue, and proved themselves through charitable projects, like prison reform (203).
• "The era that we call modernity was underlain by relatively stable structures of family, work and welfare. It is possible to analyse all three as protective measures against the self-regulating market" (203).
• Family values, Fordist modes of production, and the establishment of welfare states fed into the general capacity of modern society to control and regulate desire for consumer goods by defining the standard goods that men should seek through family models and regulating the availability of goods through Fordist production (203).
• "The shift from the stolid mass consumption and leisure of Fordism to the diversity of choice and a culture of individualism involving a stress on immediacy, hedonism and self-actualisation has profound effects on late modern sensibilities" (204).
• In a post-modern consumerist society, consumption is no longer constrained by any role models nor are reference points limited by the availability of goods, instead consumption is valorized on its own account. There are no longer any limits on consumption, both because goods are readily available and because there are no standards to mimic. Without a defined set of things to obtain, consumption is never ending and anxiety cannot be diminished (204-205).
• Only a small set of people will succeed in such a society, leaving the vast majority suffering under a system in which they cannot possibly obtain their desires. Fatalism and atomization are likely to spread in such a system as people give up hope, encouraging states to engage in scapegoating to restore lost societal unity (205).
• "It would seem that the scapegoating is not arbitrary, as Girard would have it, and is not simply a moment in the political order but a durable practice. It picks out the economically marginal rather than being directed at, for example, the economic system" (205).
• Scapegoating of criminals in a consumerist societies fulfills multiple social functions. Firstly, it allows individuals to blame their failed desires on distinct persons rather than the economic system as a whole. The knowledge of criminal presence also reaffirms the importance of possessions to the population, as the perceived threat reifies the value of the current situation, which might have been otherwise ignored in a quest for more consumption (205-206).
• Consumerist and post-modern societies are more vulnerable to the kind of scapegoating entailed in increased punitiveness because they feature more general anxiety, which makes the 'victim' model more broadly sympathetic and relatable that it previously was (206).