Abstract
The quotations above illustrate a dramatic change in the regard in which courts and legislators hold the doctrine of retributivism. That doctrine, seemingly rejected by the Supreme Court a century ago, is today the official basis for penal policy in the nation's most populous state and an acceptable basis on which to send convicts to their deaths. This shift on the part of official legal sentiment parallels a shift in the views of philosophers and legal scholars. Fifty years ago a defender of retributivism acknowledged the general belief "that the retributive view is the only moral theory except perhaps psychological hedonism which has been definitely destroyed by criticism."1 Contemporary scholars assert, however, that retributivism is no longer "the poor relation in the family of theories of punishment" but "seems to be in the ascendant,"2 and in particular "has replaced rehabilitation as the conventional justification for the amount of punishment."3
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