Abstract
This chapter first clarifies what it would mean to abolish punishment. Abolishing state punishment in both law and practice would mean doing away with one category of social control, as opposed to merely reforming punishment or limiting its application. After surveying some of the major historical trends in criminal punishment and its justification, we discover that the two main theories of punishment—deterrence and retribution—could not warrant doing away with punishment. Incapacitation is an incomplete alternative. Only reform theories are, strictly speaking, proposals for abolishing punishment. However, reform theories are inconsistent with historical practice and they cannot address all classes of crime. Therefore, abolishing punishment for all crimes cannot plausibly be justified.
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Notes
- 1.
A “harm” is a significant setback to a person’s or other entity’s interests. “Harm” includes death, pain, disability, shame, and confinement. A harm is a substantial (non-trivial) reason. If all else is equal, a harm is (or at least should be) decisive. I prefer “harm” (in this sense) to other terms commonly used in definitions of punishment—such as “evil,” “pain,” “rough treatment,” or “suffering”—because some punishments-strictly-so-called (such as a fine, probation, parole, or suspended sentence) do not seem to be pains, rough treatments, suffering, or the like.
- 2.
For a sustained critique of this definition, see McCloskey (1962), which denies, among other things, that the standard definition identifies a central “problem of punishment,” the solution to which is likely to be independent of the solution of any corresponding problem where “punishment” has one of its other senses; and also McPherson (1967), which denies, among other things, that “punishment” can usefully be defined except within a specific theory of punishment.
- 3.
I am inclined to count Duff’s (2003) “penance” as an early form of therapy (“a cure of souls”) rather than as a form of training or education. But nothing significant turns on which category we assign it to.
- 4.
See, for example, Morris’s (1968) classic critique of the therapy model of punishment.
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Davis, M. (2023). The Abolition of Punishment. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment. Palgrave Handbooks in the Philosophy of Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11874-6_26
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