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DRussellKraftFirstPaper 19 - 22 Mar 2010 - Main.JessicaHallett
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Just Punishment? | | |
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Derek- I was glad to see that you chose to write about punishment. It was something that I was thinking about in earlier stages of my own paper (which ended up going in a different direction). I wanted to suggest a couple of ideas that may or may not be helpful in achieving a more argumentative/persuasive paper, but realize now that they are a bit late in coming and so maybe they’ll just be some food for thought.
I wanted to talk about justifications for punishment, and particularly why two of those justifications can’t really been seen as legitimate, given the reality of how we punish.
Just desert
Argument: Some argue that the only justification that is morally acceptable for punishment is retribution or just desert in line with the degree of culpability of the crime. And yet, we punish A, who has served time for X crime, more than we normally would for Y crime, because of his history- so we are either punishing him for who he is (punishing a person for being ‘bad’- and isn’t this transcending the law to a realm of morality) or we are punishing him above his just desert (either adding punishment on to X crime of the past, or enlarging punishment for Y crime more than Y crime actually merits). So it doesn’t seem that we can justify the way we punish on this theory alone.
Incapacitation
Argument: Some claim that incapacitation and prevention of further crime justifies punishment by imprisonment. But many crimes are not extremely violent. Further, we re-release prisoners, at which point they are influenced by the system and perhaps more likely to be violent- or at least not necessarily any less likely to be. If we followed this to its logical extreme, we would lock people away for life and actually prevent any recidivism.
The theory of punishment as a way of upholding the legitimacy of the law and keeping it in check with a general moral fabric of society seems to be the true representation of why we punish. If it were not for this, a lot of the punishment we do carry out would be useless. We use punishment to teach a lesson- and I (maybe like you) find this to be pretty problematic.
-- JessicaHallett - 22 Mar 2010 | | |
- Actually, Eben's comments about how Arnold would point out that we might have no conscious clue what we're doing made me think harder about that today...which gets to my first comment on my own paper - I might actually be removing those parts in an edit. Sorry for the cop-out, but I'm not sure I'm willing to stand behind those lines. -- DRussellKraft - 03 Mar 2010
- Hi, Derek-- here are two thoughts: (1) I would've liked to hear more about the significance of us being part of the aristocratic class and having control over the system; (2) You seem to assume in your conclusion that people in the aristocratic class are long-run oriented: the aristocratic class is motivated to make x and y changes to the justice system, because in doing so they increase their future wealth. I thought greed kept the aristocratic class thinking short-run, though... Wouldn't they want to maintain the status quo? -- KalliopeKefallinos - 03 Mar 2010
- I'm playing off your second definition, and thinking about how a community, implicated in the wrong/sinful acts of one of its members, might seek to absolve itself of guilt and thereby make itself righteous before God -- and how such absolution might obtain in a secularized world. This article gets at the basic idea: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713065?seq=4 -- GloverWright - 02 Mar 2010
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