The Liberal State and Criminal Sanction

Abstract

Abstract Current forms of incarceration in the U.S. and U.K. are morally problematic in ways that are antithetical to the values and principles of liberal democracy. While indicating those morally problematic features the book defends the basic political and legal culture of the U.S. and U.K. A significant remaking of the political order is not needed for the required reforms of incarceration to be made. Greater faithfulness to the values and principles of liberal democracy could be adequate for such reforms. It is crucial to make those reforms because of the ways prisoners are currently being harmed, rendering many of them incapable of reintegrating successfully into civil society. The liberal order makes a dynamic, pluralistic civil society possible, and participating in civil society gives people a reason to value the liberal order. That relation is weakened by penal practices that diminish the agential capacities of offenders and fail to respect them as members of society. The book explores the relation between criminal justice and justice more comprehensively understood, highlighting the distinctive elements of criminal justice. It explains the role of desert in criminal justice and why criminal justice needs to be distinguished from distributive justice. Criminal justice includes a retributivist conception of punishment, one in which desert, proportionality, and parsimony are centrally important. A retributivist conception of punishment most effectively respects the voluntariness and accountability of agents in ways well suited to a liberal political order. The account examines misinterpretations of retributivism and highlights weaknesses of consequentialist approaches to sanction.