Just Punishment?

Others appear to have productively responded to this essay on substantive points; I'm not in agreement with all the suggestions offered, but they do seem to me at least to get at questions about how your position is defended. My primary response to the writing is more about the writing. It seems to me too schematic, geometric, as though all that mattered were getting the right-shaped pieces to fit together. But a reader not already convinced of the futility of punishment will find nothing in the style of this argument that will facilitate the opening of her mind. Support for large-scale incarceration and other punishments, whatever the jargon employed by elite proponents, is based on fear. Treatment of the subject on an emotionless basis is unpersuasive, precisely because it does not address what's really going on. In my view, the route to a powerful revision is to carve away at the windup, which is much more than necessary, and find the way to put the central argument to the gut of the reader, rather than to which part of him attends public policy seminars. Whatever part that is has already made up its mind.