Pierron, Jean-Philippe <br/><br/>
The “right” meaning of punishment 

 -  2023.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 36 
<br/><br/> It is too quickly said from outside, from a distance, from above, that punishment has meaning. For if there is meaning, it lies in the balance that always needs to be found. It is never a once-and-for-all meaning in spite of what one might too quickly infer from a procedural reading of an instrumental rationality of the world, from a growing bureaucratisation of what goes on and is experienced in prison. The balance between different priorities - punishing, containing, rehabilitating - has to be invented. Between the short-term purpose of the sentence as punishment and the longer-term aim of the sentence to amend, pacify and potentially rehabilitate the person, is there not a pathway to be invented: from the probable to the probative side of probation? Is that not why, rather than juxtaposing punishment, amoral restraint and rehabilitation, there is a need to find a way of articulating them that would be the core of the work done in prison: focusing on the relationship between staff and prisoners and seeing past the procedural risk?