Punishment is an event that takes place after a behavior. Punishments are designed to reduce that behavior in the future. If you are pulled over for a speeding ticket, that ticket is a punishment designed to reduce your behavior of speeding—or at least speeding when a police officer is nearby. Prison is designed to be a punishment for crimes, as is getting sent to the principal's office for breaking school rules.
While punishment can work in the short term, it does tend to have a negative effect on relationships between the punisher and the punished, especially if the person doing the punishment has made some kind of mistake. Children who are punished over and over again lose interest in school and tend to drop out.
When punishment is frequent, a person may believe nothing he or she does will be successful and may quit trying. This is known as learned helplessness and makes learning almost impossible.
Finally, some people become used to punishment, which means the consequence do not work as a deterrent to behavior. The child who knows the teacher will reliably yell under certain circumstances may actually deliberately commit undesirable behaviors with the purpose of making their teacher angry. The punishment, in this case, actually increases the problematic behavior.
There are always going to be cases where punishment is merited, such as when a behavior is dangerous or seriously egregious. A better way of dealing with relatively minor infractions, though, is to figure out why the person is doing these things and to help that person both understand why the behavior is problematic and voluntarily commit to doing something better.
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