Danda
Definition
The graded scheme of punishment set out in the Dharmashastra tradition, whose severity varied with the gravity of the offence and the caste of the offender and victim.
Related terms
- Corporal Punishment
- Punishment inflicted on the body, such as flogging, branding or mutilation, historically administered in public as a deterrent.
- Lex Talionis
- The principle of proportionate retaliation, an injury for an equivalent injury, codified in the Code of Hammurabi and the Hebrew Bible.
- Panopticon
- Jeremy Bentham's 1791 design for an institution built around a central observation tower, letting a single supervisor watch many inmates who cannot...
- Penitentiary Movement
- The early nineteenth-century reform movement that built prisons designed to induce penitence through labour, isolation and religious instruction rather than corporal pain.
- Beccaria
- Cesare Beccaria, author of the 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments, who argued punishment should be proportionate, certain and no crueller than...
- Bentham
- Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarian framework judged punishment by whether it prevents more harm than it inflicts, and who designed the panopticon.
- Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems
- The two competing early American penitentiary regimes: solitary confinement at Eastern State Penitentiary versus congregate, silent labour at Auburn Prison.
- Penology
- The branch of criminology concerned with the theory and practice of punishment and imprisonment. It examines the aims of punishment (retribution, deterrence,...