Conventionally, sanctions are divid

Conventionally, sanctions are divided into two large divisions, rewards and punishment, that is positive and negative sanctions. The idea is that people subject to law will choose one and avoid another. Lawmakers assume that the sanctions labeled as punishment rewards actually pleasant, so that the
are actually painful and the
desired behavioral consequences will follow more or less automatically.

The common forms of punishment in criminal law are fines and imprisonment. Corporal or other physical punishment was, in the past, often used in the law. Whipping was a normal mean of social control on colonial America, especially for servants and slaves and especially for sexual transaressions. Servants and slaves had no money to pay fines and to put them in jail would rob their masters of their labor. The death penalty is rare today but has been frequently used in past gher punishments include reprimands, demotions in rank, and losses of privileges, forfeiture of right to vote or to drive a car.


Each punishment has its own social meaning. Since the power of a sanction
depends on how people perceive it, it may make a difference whether "death" comes from hanging or shooting or electric chair, and three years in prison" may mean different things to different classes of people. It may also depend in part on the kind of jail. History records may extinct and obsolete deterrents: exile, the whipping post, castration. Ideal about the morality of punishment change ; these ideas increase or reduce the option open
to the legal system. There seems to be a general trend in the modern world toward leniency. The Eighth Amendment of United States Constituton prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The clause forbids torture and probably all but a narrow band of conventional deterrents, such as fines and imprisonment. Corporal punishment has declined, officially, at least, and jail sentences have become shorter over years. Punishments,however, are hard to compare - is whipping worse or better than a month in jail? and their effect may vary with culture and time.

The civil side has a rich arm
of penaities too. The most familiar is Money damages: another is forfeiture of privileges. A corporation can lose its charter, the party "at fault" in divorce case lose marriage, not to mention his car, children and house. Civil courts can impose injuncions which bind a party to act as the court directs. If the party steps over the bounds of the order, he may go to jail. Every court order, injunction or not, is restriction of freedom. laying the subject open to further penalty (usually money) if he fails to obey,