Abstract

This book is the joint work of a moralist, a sociologist and a psychologist arguing, as the sub-title indicates, for the abolition of capital punishment. Fr Tidmarsh’s essay provides the ‘Theoretical Framework’ of the discussion. He examines the notion of punishment as retributive, reformative and deterrent. He refuses to be drawn into the kind of detailed discussion that finds its place in the two essays that follow; but what he says is clarifying and indispensable. He points the difficulty of formulating a ‘pure’ retributive theory of punishment; and the fact that ‘considerations of retribution may yield negative criteria—they may prevent our punishing the innocent and they may prevent our allowing considerations of expediency from too easily outweighing the general rule that the guilty are to be punished—but they have little, if any, positive contribution to make to the assessment of just punishments’. He remarks the different meanings given to reformation; does it mean the actual betterment of the offender’s frame of mind, or merely the fact that he refrains from crime in the future? And how, in fact, does punishment operate reform? And there is the paradox of the deterrent view of punishment—‘those crimes ought to be the more heavily punished that are the more difficult to refrain from committing, since it needs a greater motive for fear to restrain those tempted to them than is needed from those temptations more easily resisted. Passion, provocation, inadvertence, become not extenuating but exacerbating circumstances... ‘.