This composition is about prison sentence. The purpose with this study is to
investigate how the concept of prison sentence as a punishment is constructed
in media, analyses and reports, from a social constructivist point of view. The
composition has an issue that follows like this: “How do people in the society
speak, think and write about the concept of prison sentence?” To get a
background as to how the concept is used today, a understanding about how it
was used through time is needed. It was under the 17th century that changes
started to happen that gave the physical punishment a compliment, the
imprisonment of people. The methodological starting point in this report is
hermeneutical and the qualitative emphasis the report is to stand on before the
discourse analysis, is the main method of the composition. The material for
this discourse analysis has been picked out with the help of a specification of
the problem and the purpose. Articles, reports/analyses and a TV-show were
picked out as material and were analysed along the discourses on prison
sentences that were found. The result can been divided into four different
discourse groups. The first is “Discourse about an alternative to the
institutional prison sentence” where there has been a replacement of the pure
prison sentence, the second group is “Discourse about prison sentence and
society” where the society reflects upon the punishment, the third is
“Discourse about prison sentence and rehabilitation” which is talked about a
lot, but maybe not with so much action according to some and the fourth
discourse group is “Discourse about the prison sentence nobody escapes from”
that is about a punishment that one should not be able to escape from and a
tougher control. The social constructivism, which is the main theory of this
report, says that a concept only survives as long as people use it and that is
used to show how we have gone from calling prisons houses of correction to ...
