About this topic
Summary Imprisonment is probably the most common form of punishment in contemporary societies. Yet, imprisonment has received little attention from moral philosophers, especially in comparison to other modes of punishment, such as capital punishment. This is surprising, especially since imprisonment gives rise to many philosophical and ethical questions. Should prisoners be allowed to work? Should prisoners retain their political rights? Does prisoners have moral rights to access certain forms recreation and entertainment? Do we owe special moral duties towards families and children to prison inmates? Should prisoners retain their right to privacy? Can extensive and prolonged solitary confinement be morally defensible at all? Nowadays, most notably in the U.S, the presence of private prisons raises further questions about the limits - if there are any - of markets.  The books listed in the below provide a good starting point for anyone who wishes to engage the ethics of imprisonment. Lippke's book is a monograph and develops and defends a retributivist account of imprisonment. He deals explicitly with such issues as prison work, prison visists, prisoners political rights, rights to entertainment and recreation, among other topics. The other three are recent edited volumes.
Key works

Introductions

[1] R. Lippke, Rethinking Imprisonment Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007 [2] A. Dzur, I. Loader and R. Sparks (eds), Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration’ Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016  

[3] C. Surprenant (ed.), Policing and Punishment: Philosophical Problems and Policy Solutions. Routledge, 2017

[4]. M. Garder and Weber M (eds) The Ethics of Policing and Imprisonment. Spring Verlag, 2018 

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127 found
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  1. Retributivism, Free Will, and the Public Health-Quarantine Model.Gregg D. Caruso - forthcoming - In Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Punishment. London, UK:
    This chapter outlines six distinct reasons for rejecting retributivism, not the least of which is that it’s unclear that agents possess the kind of free will and moral responsibility needed to justify it. It then sketches a novel non-retributive alternative called the public health-quarantine model. The core idea of the model is that the right to harm in self-defense and defense of others justifies incapacitating the criminally dangerous with the minimum harm required for adequate protection. The model also draws on (...)
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  2. Capital Punishment (or: Why Death is the 'Ultimate' Punishment).Michael Cholbi - forthcoming - In Jesper Ryberg (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Punishment.
    Both proponents and opponents of capital punishment largely agree that death is the most severe punishment that societies should consider imposing on offenders. This chapter considers how (if at all) this ‘Ultimate Thesis’ can be vindicated. Appeals to the irrevocability of death, the badness of being executed, the badness of death, or the harsh condemnation societies express by sentencing offenders to death do not succeed in vindicating this Thesis, and in particular, fail to show that capital punishment is more severe (...)
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  3. Not Justice: Prison as a Moral Failure.Luke Maring - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-20.
    Lisa Tessman (2016: 164) recounts the case of a Jewish mother, running from Nazis, who faced a terrible choice. She could (a) drown her infant, or (b) accept the virtual certainty that her baby’s cries would doom the refugee group she was fleeing with. Given those options, (b) is worse. If the whole group is discovered, many will die, including the infant. Still, preemptively drowning a baby—indeed one’s own baby—is a terrible act. To make sense of cases like this, Tessman (...)
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  4. Coercion and the Neurocorrective Offer.Jonathan Pugh - forthcoming - In David Rhys Birks & Thomas Douglas (eds.), reatment for Crime: Philosophical Essays on Neurointerventions in Criminal Justice. Oxford, UK:
    According to what Douglas calls ‘the consent requirement’, neuro-correctives can only permissibly be provided with the valid consent of the offender who will undergo the intervention. Some of those who endorse the consent requirement have claimed that even though the requirement prohibits the imposition of mandatory neurocorrectives on criminal offenders, it may yet be permissible to offer offenders the opportunity to consent to undergoing such an intervention, in return for a reduction to their penal sentence. I call this the neurocorrective (...)
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  5. The Erasure of Torture in America.Jessica Wolfendale - forthcoming - Case Western Journal of International Law.
    As several scholars have argued, far from being antithetical to American values, the torture of nonwhite peoples has long been a method through which the United States has enforced (at home and abroad) a conception of what I will call “white moral citizenship." What is missing from this literature, however, is an exploration of the role that the erasure of torture, and the political and public narratives that are used to justify torture, plays in this function. -/- As I will (...)
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  6. Crime & Punishment: A Rethink.Ognjen Arandjelović - 2023 - Philosophies 8 (3):47.
    Incarceration remains the foremost form of sentence for serious crimes in Western democracies. At the same time, the management of prisons and of the prison population has become a major real-world challenge, with growing concerns about overcrowding, the offenders’ well-being, and the failure of achieving the distal desideratum of reduced criminality, all of which have a moral dimension. In no small part motivated by these practical problems, the focus of the present article is on the ethical framework that we use (...)
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  7. Who is Responsible for Remedying the Harm Caused to Children of Prisoners?William Bülow - 2023 - Ethics and Social Welfare 17 (3):256-274.
    It has been argued that the social circumstances of many children of prisoners goes against established principles of social justice. In this paper the proper allocation of responsibility for remedying this social injustice is discussed. Through a discussion of four principles for allocating remedial responsibility, it is argued that the responsibility for children of incarcerated parents is shared among several actors, including the incarcerated parent, remaining caregivers, prison officials, social work professionals, and, to some extent, members of the wider community. (...)
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  8. Revue du livre : Diangitukwa et Siadous, Les prisons sont-elles utiles? [REVIEW]Ignace Haaz - 2023 - Journal of Ethics in Higher Education (2):169–189.
    Le contexte des prisons africaines offre amplement matière à revisiter l’idée classique de l’inutilité de certaines criminalisations. Dans un monde plus que jamais dominé par le spectacle des châtiments et des modèles de justice expéditives, il est bienvenu de replacer le rôle de l’éducation dans la prison, puisque tout détenu emprisonné, aussi démuni et à plaindre soit-il, est riche de son temps, et capable de résilience et de perfectionnement. Encore faut-il, sous peine de paraître très idéaliste, dessiner de manière convaincante (...)
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  9. Let's Not Do Responsibility Skepticism.Ken M. Levy - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (3):458-73.
    I argue for three conclusions. First, responsibility skeptics are committed to the position that the criminal justice system should adopt a universal nonresponsibility excuse. Second, a universal nonresponsibility excuse would diminish some of our most deeply held values, further dehumanize criminals, exacerbate mass incarceration, and cause an even greater number of innocent people (nonwrongdoers) to be punished. Third, while Saul Smilansky's ‘illusionist’ response to responsibility skeptics – that even if responsibility skepticism is correct, society should maintain a responsibility‐realist/retributivist criminal justice (...)
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  10. What Does it Mean to Say “The Criminal Justice System is Racist”?Amelia M. Wirts - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4):341-354.
    This paper considers three possible ways of understanding the claim that the American criminal justice system is racist: individualist, “patterns”-based, and ideology-based theories of institutional racism. It rejects an individualist explanation of institutional racism because such an explanation fails to explain the widespread prevalence of anti-black racism in this system or indeed in the United States. It considers a “patterns” account of institutional racism, where consistent patterns of disparate racial effect mimic the structure of intentional projects of racial subjugation like (...)
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  11. Lowering the Boom: A Brief for Penal Leniency.Benjamin S. Yost - 2023 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 17 (2):251-270.
    This paper advocates for a general policy of penal leniency: judges should often sentence offenders to a punishment less severe than initially preferred. The argument’s keystone is the relatively uncontroversial Minimal Invasion Principle (MIP). MIP says that when more than one course of action satisfies a state’s legitimate aim, only the least invasive is permissibly pursued. I contend that MIP applies in two common sentencing situations. In the first, all sentences within a statutorily specified range are equally proportionate. Here MIP (...)
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  12. Precis of Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice.Gregg D. Caruso - 2022 - Journal of Legal Philosophy 2 (46):120-125.
  13. Retributivism, Free Will Skepticism, and the Public Health-Quarantine Model: Replies to Kennedy, Walen, Corrado, Sifferd, Pereboom, and Shaw.Gregg D. Caruso - 2022 - Journal of Legal Philosophy 2 (46):161-216.
  14. Learning to Discriminate: The Perfect Proxy Problem in Artificially Intelligent Criminal Sentencing.Benjamin Davies & Thomas Douglas - 2022 - In Jesper Ryberg & Julian V. Roberts (eds.), Sentencing and Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...)
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  15. The Inherent Problem with Mass Incarceration.Raff Donelson - 2022 - Oklahoma Law Review 75 (1):51-67.
    For more than a decade, activists, scholars, journalists, and politicians of various stripes have been discussing and decrying mass incarceration. This collection of voices has mostly focused on contingent features of the phenomenon. Critics mention racial disparities, poor prison conditions, and spiraling costs. Some critics have alleged broader problems: they have called for an end to all incarceration, even all punishment. Lost in this conversation is a focus on what is inherently wrong with mass incarceration specifically. This essay fills that (...)
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  16. Language shapes children’s attitudes: Consequences of internal, behavioral, and societal information in punitive and nonpunitive contexts.James P. Dunlea & Larisa Heiphetz - 2022 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 151 (6):1233-1251.
    Research has probed the consequences of providing people with different types of information regarding why a person possesses a certain characteristic. However, this work has largely examined the consequences of different information subsets (e.g., information focusing on internal versus societal causes). Less work has compared several types of information within the same paradigm. Using the legal system as an example domain, we provided children (N=198 6- to 8-year-olds) with several types of information—including information highlighting internal moral character, internal biological factors, (...)
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  17. Farber’s Reimagined Mad Pride: Strategies for Messianic Utopian Leadership.Joshua M. Hall - 2022 - Journal of Medical Humanities 43 (4):585–600.
    In this article, I explore Seth Farber’s critique in _The Spiritual Gift of Madness_ that the leaders of the Mad Pride movement are failing to realize his vision of the mad as spiritual vanguard of sociopolitical transformation. First, I show how, contra Farber’s polemic, several postmodern theorists are well suited for this leadership (especially the Argentinian post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau). Second, I reinterpret the first book by the Icarus Project, _Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness_, by reimagining its central (...)
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  18. Standing to Punish the Disadvantaged.Benjamin S. Yost - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy (3):1-23.
    Many philosophers and legal theorists worry about punishing the socially disadvantaged as severely as their advantaged counterparts. One philosophically popular explanation of this concern is couched in terms of moral standing: seriously unjust states are said to lack standing to condemn disadvantaged offenders. If this is the case, institutional condemnation of disadvantaged offenders (especially via hard treatment) will often be unjust. I describe two problems with canonical versions of this view. First, its proponents groundlessly claim that disadvantaged offenders may be (...)
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  19. Paternalism as Punishment.David Birks - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (1):35-52.
    In this article, I argue that even if we hold that at least some paternalistic behaviour is impermissible when directed towards innocent persons, in certain cases, the same behaviour is permissible when directed towards criminal offenders. I also defend the claim that in some cases it is morally preferable to behave paternalistically towards offenders as an alternative to traditional methods of punishment. I propose that the reason paternalistic behaviour is sometimes permissible towards an offender is the same reason that inflicting (...)
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  20. Punishment: A Critical Introduction (2nd edition).Thom Brooks - 2021 - London: Routledge.
    Punishment is a topic of increasing importance for citizens and policymakers. Why should we punish criminals? Which theory of punishment is most compelling? Is the death penalty ever justified? These questions and many more are examined in this highly engaging and accessible guide. Punishment (2nd edition) is a critical introduction to the philosophy of punishment, offering a new and refreshing approach that will benefit readers of all backgrounds and interests. The first comprehensive critical guide to examine all leading contemporary theories (...)
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  21. From rehabilitation to penal communication: The role of furlough and visitation within a retributivist framework.William Bülow & Netanel Dagan - 2021 - Punishment and Society 23 (3):376-393.
    Retributivism is one of the most prevalent theories in contemporary penal theory. However, despite its popularity it is frequently argued that too little attention has been paid to the implications of retributivism for prison management and prison life, including prison visits and furlough. More so, it has been questioned both whether the various forms of retributivism found in the philosophical literature on criminal punishment have anything to say about what prison life ought to be like and whether they are able (...)
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  22. Is It Morally Legitimate to Punish the Late Stage Demented for Their Past Crimes?Oliver Hallich - 2021 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (3):361-383.
    Are we justified in keeping the demented in prison for crimes they committed when they were still healthy? The answer to this question is an issue of considerable practical importance. The problem arises in cases where very aged criminals exhibit symptoms of dementia while serving their sentence. In these cases, one may wonder whether lodging these criminals in penal institutions rather than in normal caretaking facilities is justifiable. In this paper, I argue that there are justificatory reasons for punishing the (...)
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  23. Would Nonconsensual Criminal Neurorehabilitation Express a more Degrading Attitude Towards Offenders than Consensual Criminal Neurorehabilitation?Jukka Varelius - 2020 - Neuroethics 14 (2):291-302.
    It has been proposed that reoffending could be reduced by manipulating the neural underpinnings of offenders’ criminogenic mental features with what have been called neurocorrectives. The legitimacy of such use of neurotechnology – criminal neurorehabilitation, as the use is called – is usually seen to presuppose valid consent by the offenders subjected to it. According to a central criticism of nonconsensual criminal neurorehabilitation, nonconsensual use of neurocorrectives would express a degrading attitude towards offenders. In this article, I consider this criticism (...)
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  24. Retributivism and the Use of Imprisonment as the Ultimate Back-up Sanction.William Bülow - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 32 (2):285-303.
    Imprisonment is often said to be the ultimate back-up sanction for offenders who do not abide by their non-custodial sentence. From a standard consequentialist perspective this is morally justified, if it is a cost-effective means to crime prevention. In contrast, the use of imprisonment as a back-up is much harder to justify from retributivist perspectives, with their emphasis on just desert or deserved censure. The crux is this: if the reason for a non-custodial sentence is that a prison sentence risks (...)
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  25. Is Preventive Detention Morally Worse than Quarantine?Thomas Douglas - 2019 - In Jan W. De Keijser, Julian Roberts & Jesper Ryberg (eds.), Predictive Sentencing: Normative and Empirical Perspectives. London: Hart Publishing.
    In some jurisdictions, the institutions of criminal justice may subject individuals who have committed crimes to preventive detention. By this, I mean detention of criminal offenders (i) who have already been punished to (or beyond) the point that no further punishment can be justified on general deterrent, retributive, restitutory, communicative or other backwardlooking grounds, (ii) for preventive purposes—that is, for the purposes of preventing the detained individual from engaging in further criminal or otherwise socially costly conduct. Preventive detention, thus understood, (...)
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  26. The Case against Forced Methadone Detox in the US Prisons.Daniel D’Hotman, Jonathan Pugh & Thomas Douglas - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (1):89-93.
    Methadone maintenance therapy is a cost-effective, evidence-based treatment for heroin dependence. In the USA, a majority of heroin-dependent offenders are forced to detox from methadone when incarcerated. Recent research published in The Lancet has demonstrated the negative health and economic outcomes associated with such policies. Methadone Continuation Versus Forced Withdrawal on Incarceration in a Combined US Prison and Jail: A Randomised, Open Label Trial. The Lancet, 386, 350–359). This novel evidence raises questions as to the justification for current policies of (...)
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  27. Routledge International Handbook of Restorative Justice.Theo Gavrielides (ed.) - 2019 - London: Routledge.
    This up-to-date resource on restorative justice theory and practice is the literature’s most comprehensive and authoritative review of original research in new and contested areas. -/- Bringing together contributors from across a range of jurisdictions, disciplines and legal traditions, this edited collection provides a concise, but critical review of existing theory and practice in restorative justice. Authors identify key developments, theoretical arguments and new empirical evidence, evaluating their merits and demerits, before turning the reader’s attention to further concerns informing and (...)
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  28. Reconciliation as the Aim of a Criminal Trial: Ubuntu’s Implications for Sentencing.Thaddeus Metz - 2019 - Constitutional Court Review 9:113-134.
    In this article, I seek to answer the following cluster of questions: What would a characteristically African, and specifically relational, conception of a criminal trial’s final end look like? What would the Afro-relational approach prescribe for sentencing? Would its implications for this matter forcefully rival the kinds of penalties that judges in South Africa and similar jurisdictions typically mete out? After pointing out how the southern African ethic of ubuntu is well understood as a relational ethic, I draw out of (...)
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  29. (Mis)treating Substance Use Disorder With Prison.Kaitlin Puccio - 2019 - Voices in Bioethics 5.
    It is largely unethical to sentence individuals who are addicted to drugs to prison. While substance use can be a crime, it must be treated differently from other crimes because addiction is a psychiatric disorder. Prisons are penal institutions. Legitimate goals of penal sanctions include retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.[i] Most of these goals do not speak to those with substance use disorder, and incarceration may be counterproductive given the wide availability of drugs and feeble rehabilitation efforts in prison. Further, (...)
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  30. Justifying Prison Breaks as Civil Disobedience.Isaac Shur - 2019 - Aporia 19 (2):14-26.
    I argue that given the persistent injustice present within the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, many incarcerated individuals would be justified in attempting to escape and that these prison breaks may qualify as acts of civil disobedience. After an introduction in section one, section two offers a critique of the classical liberal conception of civil disobedience envisioned by John Rawls. Contrary to Rawls, I argue that acts of civil disobedience can involve both violence and evasion of punishment, both (...)
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  31. Policing and Punishment for Profit.Chris W. Surprenant - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 159 (1):119-131.
    This paper examines ethical considerations relating to the current role of financial incentives in policing and punishment in the USA, focusing on the two methods of punishment most popular in the USA: fines and forfeitures and incarceration. It examines how financial incentives motivate much of our penal system, including how and when laws are enforced; discusses relevant ethical considerations and concerns connected with our current practices; proposes a theoretical solution for addressing these problems that involves realigning existing incentives to better (...)
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  32. Beyond restorative justice: Social justice as a new objective for criminal justice.Gavrielides Theo & Nestor Kourakis - 2019 - London: Routledge.
    The author considers that the Penal Sciences face a wide range of human pathogenic issues, ranging from terrorism and human trafficking to corruption and the use of substances and are, thus, the ideal discipline for investigating the various scientific issues and the implementation of the scientific findings arising from such investigations. He also believes that the Penal Sciences, being inextricably linked to human values and constitutional rights, are, by their nature, beneficial towards the promotion and consolidation of values, such as (...)
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  33. Seriously Bored: Schopenhauer on Solitary Confinement.David Woods - 2019 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (5):959-978.
    Primary textual evidence confirms that Schopenhauer was aware of the widespread adoption of solitary confinement in the American penitentiary system, and some of its harmful effects. He understands its harmfulness in terms of boredom, a phenomenon which he is known to have given extensive thought and analysis. In this paper I interpret Schopenhauer’s account of boredom and its relation to solitary confinement. I defend Schopenhauer against the objection that cases of confinement only serve to illustrate the general inadequacy of his (...)
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  34. Deserved Delayed Release? The Communicative Theory of Punishment and Indeterminate Prison Sentences.William Bülow - 2018 - Criminal Justice Ethics 37 (2):164-181.
    Indeterminate sentencing is a sentencing practice where offenders are sentenced to a range of potential imprisonment terms and where the actual release date is determined later, typically by a parole board. Although indeterminate sentencing is often considered morally problematic from a retributivist perspective, Michael O’Hear has provided an interesting attempt to reconcile indeterminate sentencing with the communicative version of retributivism developed by Antony Duff. O’Hear’s core argument is that delayed release, within the parameters of the indeterminate sentence, can be seen (...)
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  35. The Ethics of Policing and Imprisonment.Molly Gardner & Michael Weber (eds.) - 2018 - Cham: Springer Verlag.
    This volume considers the ethics of policing and imprisonment, focusing particularly on mass incarceration and police shootings in the United States. The contributors consider the ways in which non-ideal features of the criminal justice system―features such as the prevalence of guns in America, political pressures, considerations of race and gender, and the lived experiences of people in jails and prisons―impinge upon conclusions drawn from more idealized models of punishment and law enforcement. There are a number of common themes running throughout (...)
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  36. Imprisonment and the Right to Freedom of Movement.Robert C. Hughes - 2018 - In Chris W. Surprenant (ed.), Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 89-104.
    Government’s use of imprisonment raises distinctive moral issues. Even if government has broad authority to make and to enforce law, government may not be entitled to use imprisonment as a punishment for all the criminal laws it is entitled to make. Indeed, there may be some serious crimes that it is wrong to punish with imprisonment, even if the conditions of imprisonment are humane and even if no adequate alternative punishments are available.
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  37. Towards transitional justice? Black reparations and the end of mass incarceration.Jennifer Page & Desmond King - 2018 - Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (4):739-758.
    There are many commonalities between the goals of transitional justice and domestic redress movements. We look at the movement for reparations for enslavement and Jim Crow in the United States as an example of a domestic reparations movement, and argue for the usefulness of the concept of transitional justice. We are particularly interested in showing that a future democratic transition – the end of mass incarceration – could animate a renewed push for reparations and a formal investigation into America’s legacy (...)
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  38. Gender-Based Administrative Violence as Colonial Strategy.Elena Ruíz & Nora Berenstain - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (2):209-227.
    There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...)
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  39. The Wrong of Mass Punishment.Hamish Stewart - 2018 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 12 (1):45-57.
    The increase in incarceration of offenders in the United States over the last 40 years has created a system of mass incarceration or mass punishment. While consequentialist theories of punishment may generate considerable doubts about the value of this system, it seems that retributive theories of punishment lack the resources to criticize mass punishment. Because of their focus on individual desert, it seems that they can say nothing about punishment in the aggregate. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for a certain (...)
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  40. Mandatory Minimums and the War on Drugs.Daniel Wodak - 2018 - In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave. pp. 51-62.
    Mandatory minimum sentencing provisions have been a feature of the U.S. justice system since 1790. But they have expanded considerably under the war on drugs, and their use has expanded considerably under the Trump Administration; some states are also poised to expand drug-related mandatory minimums further in efforts to fight the current opioid epidemic. In this paper I outline and evaluate three prominent arguments for and against the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs—they appeal, respectively, to proportionality, (...)
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  41. Consequences Matter More: In Defense of Instrumentalism on Private Versus Public Prisons.Jason Brennan - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (4):801-815.
    Alon Harel wants to show that punishment is a kind of symbolic expression that, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, can only be performed by governmental agents. Contrary to Harel, I argue private agents can in fact realize those features he argues only public agents can realize. I also argue that, even if he were right that only public guards and wardens can punish, it’s unclear why we would have an all-things-considered rather than merely a pro tanto/prima facie duty to (...)
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  42. Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment.Vincent Chiao - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (3):431-452.
    An influential strain in the literature on state punishment analyzes the permissibility of punishment in exclusively deontological terms, whether in terms of an individual’s rights, the state’s obligation to vindicate the law, or both. I argue that we should reject a deontological theory of punishment because it cannot explain what is unjust about mass incarceration, although mass incarceration is widely considered—including by proponents of deontological theories—to be unjust. The failure of deontological theories suggests a minimum criterion of adequacy for a (...)
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  43. Prison on Appeal: The Idea of Communicative Incarceration.Alasdair Cochrane - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (2):295-312.
    In the classic abolitionist text, Prison on Trial, Thomas Mathieson argues that imprisonment cannot be justified by appeal to any standard punitive aim: rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation, or retribution. The aim of this paper is to give prison an ‘appeal hearing’: to examine whether it can be justified by a set of punitive aims not considered by Mathieson. In particular, it asks whether imprisonment can be justified by the ‘communicative’ theory of punishment proposed by Antony Duff. Duff sees imprisonment as having (...)
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  44. Risk assessment tools in criminal justice and forensic psychiatry: The need for better data.Thomas Douglas, Jonathan Pugh, Illina Singh, Julian Savulescu & Seena Fazel - 2017 - European Psychiatry 42:134-137.
    Violence risk assessment tools are increasingly used within criminal justice and forensic psychiatry, however there is little relevant, reliable and unbiased data regarding their predictive accuracy. We argue that such data are needed to (i) prevent excessive reliance on risk assessment scores, (ii) allow matching of different risk assessment tools to different contexts of application, (iii) protect against problematic forms of discrimination and stigmatisation, and (iv) ensure that contentious demographic variables are not prematurely removed from risk assessment tools.
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  45. Safety and Sacrifice.Ami Harbin - 2017 - Ethics and Social Welfare 11 (2):163-176.
  46. Punishment Drift: The Spread of Penal Harm and What We Should Do About It.Richard L. Lippke - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (4):645-659.
    It is well documented that the effects of legal punishment tend to drift to the family members, friends, and larger communities of convicted offenders. Instead of conceiving of punishment drift as incidental to legal punishment, or as merely foreseen but not intended by state authorities and thus permissible, I argue that efforts ought to be undertaken to limit or ameliorate it. Failure to confine punishment drift comes perilously close to punishment of the innocent and is at odds with other legal (...)
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  47. Neuro-interventions as Criminal Rehabilitation: An Ethical Review.Jonathan Pugh & Thomas Douglas - 2017 - In Jonathan D. Jacobs & Jonathan Jackson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics. London: Routledge.
    According to a number of influential views in penal theory, 1 one of the primary goals of the criminal justice system is to rehabilitate offenders. Rehabilitativemeasures are commonly included as a part of a criminal sentence. For example, in some jurisdictions judges may order violent offenders to attend anger management classes or to undergo cognitive behavioural therapy as a part of their sentences. In a limited number of cases, neurointerventions — interventions that exert a direct biological effect on the brain (...)
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  48. Punishment: A Costly Signal?Gregory Robson - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (4):208-219.
    In “Punishment as a Costly Signal of Reform,” Jim Staihar argues that prisons should provide inmates with opportunities to sacrifice in ways that signal their genuine reform to others. I first show why Staihar’s program would be valuable, but only in restricted contexts. I then argue that costly signaling programs will usually be either not sufficiently costly to be taken seriously by the signal’s receivers or not rational for inmates in harsh prison environments to complete. Next, I consider the worry (...)
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  49. Are There Expressive Limits on Incarceration?Bill Wringe - 2017 - In Chris Surprenant (ed.), Policing and Punishment: Philosophical Problems and Policy Solutions. Routledge.
    I shall argue that advocates of denunciatory forms of expressivism can make a good case for restricting the range of measures that can be an appropriate form of punishment. They can do so by focusing not on the conditions of uptake of the message conveyed by punishment, but by the content of that message. For it is plausible that part of that message should be that the offender is a responsible agent and a member of the political community. Forms of (...)
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  50. Penal Disenfranchisement.Christopher Bennett - 2016 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 10 (3):411-425.
    This paper considers the justifiability of removing the right to vote from those convicted of crimes. Firstly, I consider the claim that the removal of the right to vote from prisoners is necessary as a practical matter to protect the democratic process from those who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Secondly, I look at the claim that offenders have broken the social contract and forfeited rights to participate in making law. And thirdly, I look at the claim that the (...)
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