Abstract
This paper considers whether publicizing criminal labels is justified as a form of punishment. It begins by arguing that making criminal labels public is inevitably stigmatizing and that stigmatization is not, as is often implied, a defining aspect of censure, but needs independent justification. It argues that justifying grounds for public criminal labelling cannot be found in either the communicative account of punishment or deterrence theory. Rather, public criminal labelling should be understood as undermining of both the communicative and the deterrent functions of punishment. Recent empirical work is drawn upon to support the claims about public criminal labelling and deterrence.
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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Hadjimatheou, K. Criminal Labelling, Publicity, and Punishment. Law and Philos 35, 567–593 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-016-9274-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-016-9274-0