Privatized punishment—in which nonstate actors carry out state‐mandated criminal punishments—has developed into a common practice since its rise in the 1980s. Many disciplines, including criminology, political science, public administration, and economics, have examined its use over the past four decades. However, privatized punishment has not garnered much attention in sociology. This is surprising, as privatized punishment touches on the key themes in sociology, and in the political sociology in particular. In this paper, we attempt to insert privatized punishment into classic and contemporary discussions in political sociology. Below, we offer an overview of privatized punishment and provide a high‐level review of how other social scientific disciplines have studied the phenomenon. Then we argue that political sociology provides a useful, if underutilized, lens for studying privatized punishment. In particular, we highlight three political sociological themes—contestation, state structures, and stratification—that can be fruitfully applied to the study of privatized punishment, and we sketch multiple lines of future research informed by these themes.

中文翻译：

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走向私有化惩罚的政治社会学：竞赛，国家结构和分层

自1980年代兴起以来，私有化惩罚已成为一种普遍做法，在这种私有化惩罚中，非国家行为者会执行国家规定的刑事惩罚。犯罪学，政治学，公共管理和经济学等许多学科都在过去的40年中研究了其用法。但是，私有化的惩罚在社会学上并未引起足够的重视。这是令人惊讶的，因为私有化的惩罚触及了社会学尤其是政治社会学的关键主题。在本文中，我们试图将私有化的惩罚纳入政治社会学的经典和当代讨论中。下面，我们概述了私有化的惩罚，并对其他社会科学学科如何研究这种现象进行了高级别的回顾。然后，我们认为政治社会学提供了有用的，如果未充分利用，则是研究私有化惩罚的镜头。特别是，我们重点介绍了三个政治社会学主题：竞争，国家结构和分层-可以有效地应用于私有化惩罚的研究，并且我们根据这些主题勾勒出了未来的研究思路。