Abstract
I suggest that we should take the currently pervasive political rhetoric of `community' seriously, and ask whether criminal punishment can be consistent with community - can it treat those who are punished as full members of the political community? To give that question bite, I sketch a conception of a political community structured by the liberal values of autonomy, individual freedom and privacy: a community in which the criminal law will have an important but limited role in defining a range of `public' wrongs and providing for a formal response to such wrongs. A deterrent system of punishment is not, I argue, fully consistent with the values of such a community: but a communicative system of penitential punishment, which aims to persuade wrongdoers to repent and to reform themselves, is consistent with those values; and it can be defended against the liberal charge that it violates offenders' autonomy and privacy.
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