The question "What can justify criminal punishment
?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own,
of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only
about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of
punishment, but about the very legitimacy of the whole
penal system. Recent theorizing about punishment offers
a variety of answers to that question-answers that try
to make plausible sense of the idea that punishment is
justified as being deserved for past crimes; answers
that try to identify some beneficial consequences in
terms of which punishment might be justified; as well as
abolitionist answers telling us that we should seek to
abolish, rather than to justify, criminal punishment.
This book begins with a critical survey of recent
trends in penal theory, but goes on to develop an
original account (based on Duff's earlier Trials and
Punishments) of criminal punishment as a mode of
moral communication, aimed at inducing repentance,
reform, and reconciliation through reparation-an account
that undercuts the traditional controversies between
consequentialist and retributivist penal theories, and
that shows how abolitionist concerns can properly be met
by a system of communicative punishments. In developing
this account, Duff articulates the "liberal
communitarian" conception of political society (and of
the role of the criminal law) on which it depends; he
discusses the meaning and role of different modes of
punishment, showing how they can constitute appropriate
modes of moral communication between political community
and its citizens; and he identifies the essential
preconditions for the justice of punishment as thus
conceived-preconditions whose non-satisfaction makes our
own system of criminal punishment morally problematic.
Punishment, Communication, and Community
offers no easy answers, but provides a rich and
ambitious ideal of what criminal punishment could be-an
ideal of what criminal punishment cold be-and ideal that
challenges existing penal theories as well as our
existing penal theories as well as our existing penal
practices.
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