In Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through Time, the Dutch criminal justice historian, Pieter Spierenburg, examines the subjects of inter-personal violence and punishment from a sociological-historical perspective. Spierenburg hypothesizes that there has been an overall global reduction in inter-personal violence and a shift to less violent forms of punishment. He relates both of these tendencies to several other interdependent long-term processes, mainly an overall civilizing process of societies. Spierenburg claims that his work is one of the few that considers interdependent long-term trends and processes related to a decrease in violence and a transformation in punishment. His individual chapters draw heavily on evidence from Dutch and European sources, so that the work can be seen as a European history of crime and violence. Comparisons are limited to the North American continent with a brief nod to East Asian societies in Chapter Three.

The nine chapters of the book a ...