Penal Communications: Recent Work in the Philosophy of Punishment

Recent writing about punishment includes attempts to provide sophisticated consequentialist accounts of punishment, to develop plausible versions of retributivism that will explain the idea that criminals deserve punishment, and to develop "teleological" accounts that cannot be classified as either strictly consequentialist or purely retributivist. Consequentialist accounts, however sophisticated, remain open to some version of the general objection that they fail to respect the moral standing of those who are punished or threatened with punishment. Strict retributivist accounts still face serious problems in explaining the role of hard treatment in punishment. Accounts that portray punishment as communicative offer the most hopeful way forward. Hard treatment may then be portrayed as a prudential supplement, serving a limited deterrent role, or, more ambitiously, as itself part of a communicative process that aims to bring the criminal to repent his crime, reform himself, and thus reconcile himself with those he has wronged. The conflict between this ambitious account of punishment as penitential communication and the more modest account of punishment as censure plus supplementary deterrence is relevant to sentencing issues and reflects an underlying tension between liberal and communitarian conceptions of society.