Criminal Punishment and Human Rights: Convenient Morality
Criminal Punishment and Human Rights: Convenient Morality

Author: Adnan Sattar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0429861478

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This book examines the relationship between international human rights discourse and the justifi cations for criminal punishment. Using interdisciplinary discourse analysis, it exposes certain paradoxes that underpin the ‘International Bill of Human Rights’, academic commentaries on human rights law, and the global human rights monitoring regime in relation to the aims of punishment in domestic penal systems. It argues that human rights discourse, owing to its theoretical kinship with Kantian philosophy, embodies a paradoxical commitment to human dignity on the one hand, and retributive punishment on the other. Further, it sustains the split between criminal justice and social justice, which results in a sociologically ill-informed understanding of punishment. Human rights discourse plays a paradoxical role vis-à-vis the punitive power of the state as it seeks to counter criminalisation in some areas and backs the introduction of new criminal offences – and longer prison sentences – in others. The underlying priorities, it is argued, have been shaped by a number of historical circumstances. Drawing on archival material, the study demonstrates that the international penal discourse produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laid greater emphasis on offender rehabilitation and was more attentive to the social context of crime than is the case with the modern human rights discourse.

Punishment, Danger and Stigma
Punishment, Danger and Stigma

Author: Nigel Walker

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780389201298

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To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment

Author: Hyman Gross

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0191630195

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It is generally assumed that we are justified in punishing criminals because they have committed a morally wrongful act. Determining when criminal liability should be imposed calls for a moral assessment of the conduct in question, with criminal liability tracking as closely as possible the contours of morality. Versions of this view are frequently argued for in philosophical accounts of crime and punishment, and seem to be presumed by lawyers and policy makers working in the criminal justice system. Challenging such assumptions, this book considers the dominant justifications of punishment and subjects them to a piercing moral critique. It argues that none overcome the objection that people who are convicted of a serious crime and sent to prison have their basic human rights violated. The institution of criminal punishment is shown to be a regrettable necessity not deserving of the moral enthusiasm it enjoys among many politicians and the popular press. From a moral point of view, punishment is entitled at best to grudging toleration. In the course of developing the argument, the book introduces the principal issues of criminal law theory with the aim of presenting a morally enlightened perspective on crimes and why we punish them. Enforcement of the law by police, prosecutors, and courts is a matter of concern for political morality, and the principal practices of the criminal justice system are subjected to moral scrutiny. The book presents an original, engaging, and provocative approach to the philosophy of crime and punishment, challenging not only students, but a wide range of other readers to rethink the fascinating and troubling questions at the foundations of crime and punishment.

Honor and Revenge: A Theory of Punishment
Honor and Revenge: A Theory of Punishment

Author: Whitley R.P. Kaufman

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-08-28

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 9400748450

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This book addresses the problem of justifying the institution of criminal punishment. It examines the “paradox of retribution”: the fact that we cannot seem to reject the intuition that punishment is morally required, and yet we cannot (even after two thousand years of philosophical debate) find a morally legitimate basis for inflicting harm on wrongdoers. The book comes at a time when a new “abolitionist” movement has arisen, a movement that argues that we should give up the search for justification and accept that punishment is morally unjustifiable and should be discontinued immediately. This book, however, proposes a new approach to the retributive theory of punishment, arguing that it should be understood in its traditional formulation that has been long forgotten or dismissed: that punishment is essentially a defense of the honor of the victim. Properly understood, this can give us the possibility of a legitimate moral justification for the institution of punishment.​

Punishment, Communication, and Community
Punishment, Communication, and Community

Author: R. A. Duff

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-05-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0198026439

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The question "What can justify criminal punishment ?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own, of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of punishment, but about the very legitimacy of the whole penal system. Recent theorizing about punishment offers a variety of answers to that question-answers that try to make plausible sense of the idea that punishment is justified as being deserved for past crimes; answers that try to identify some beneficial consequences in terms of which punishment might be justified; as well as abolitionist answers telling us that we should seek to abolish, rather than to justify, criminal punishment. This book begins with a critical survey of recent trends in penal theory, but goes on to develop an original account (based on Duff's earlier Trials and Punishments) of criminal punishment as a mode of moral communication, aimed at inducing repentance, reform, and reconciliation through reparation-an account that undercuts the traditional controversies between consequentialist and retributivist penal theories, and that shows how abolitionist concerns can properly be met by a system of communicative punishments. In developing this account, Duff articulates the "liberal communitarian" conception of political society (and of the role of the criminal law) on which it depends; he discusses the meaning and role of different modes of punishment, showing how they can constitute appropriate modes of moral communication between political community and its citizens; and he identifies the essential preconditions for the justice of punishment as thus conceived-preconditions whose non-satisfaction makes our own system of criminal punishment morally problematic. Punishment, Communication, and Community offers no easy answers, but provides a rich and ambitious ideal of what criminal punishment could be-an ideal of what criminal punishment cold be-and ideal that challenges existing penal theories as well as our existing penal theories as well as our existing penal practices.

Punishment and Ethics
Punishment and Ethics

Author: J. Ryberg

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-10-20

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0230290620

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A collection of original contributions by philosophers working in the ethics of punishment, gathering new perspectives on various challenging topics including punishment and forgiveness, dignity, discrimination, public opinion, torture, rehabilitation, and restitution.

Punishment in International Society
Punishment in International Society

Author: Wolfgang Wagner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0197693482

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Punishment in International Society examines the penal philosophies and practices in international society, arguing for the added value of a punitive lens to international politics. Bringing together an international roster of scholars from the social sciences, law, and humanities, the contributions demonstrate that punitive practices have been more prevalent than commonly acknowledged as they have often been masked as (self-)defence, reparations, or coercive diplomacy. By approaching international punishment from various disciplines, this volume sheds new light on different dimensions of the punitive practices across the globe.

Punishment and Culture
Punishment and Culture

Author: María José Falcón y Tella

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2006-05-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9047418026

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This volume critically explores the basis and the goal of punishment from the standpoint of the right to punish. Studies and works dedicated to punishment are scarce compared to those dedicated to Crime Theory or some aspect thereof. The book reviews the main doctrines that have dealt with the theme of punishment from Antiquity to the present, not limiting itself to the legal-philosophical sphere but also analyzing the contributions from other social sciences. It then explores how these are reflected in the sphere of Positive Law. Moving from the most abstract and general to the most concrete and specific, various themes relating to the concept of punishment are distinguished. These themes are not exactly equivalent but are, nevertheless, often confused with one another. They are: Punishment; Punitive Practice; Sentence and Penalty. Of these the third – Sentence, which is almost the least generic concept dealt with, having to do with that area of law which basically constitutes Criminal Law – forms the central part of the work. In this section, via a dual structure, the distinction is made between punishments and deterrents, as the prime types of punitive practice, with a distinct historical tradition, diverse bases and functions, around which different sorts of theories and schools have developed. The book ends with a series of critical conclusions as to what, in the opinion of the authors, should be a correct conception of punishment.

Rights Forfeiture and Punishment
Rights Forfeiture and Punishment

Author: Christopher Heath Wellman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190274778

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Given that persons typically have a right not to be subjected to the hard treatment of punishment, it would seem natural to conclude that the permissibility of punishment is centrally a question of rights. Despite this, the vast majority of theorists working on punishment focus instead on important aims, such as achieving retributive justice, deterring crime, restoring victims, or expressing society's core values. Wellman contends that these aims may well explain why we should want a properly constructed system of punishment, but none shows why it would be permissible to institute one. Only a rights-based analysis will suffice, because the type of justification we seek for punishment must demonstrate that punishment is permissible, and it would be permissible only if it violated no one's rights. On Wellman's view, punishment is permissible just in case the wrongdoer has forfeited her right against punishment by culpably violating (or at least attempting to violate) the rights of others. After defending rights forfeiture theory against the standard objections, Wellman explains this theory's implications for a number of core issues in criminal law, including the authority of the state, international criminal law, the proper scope of the criminal law and the tort/crime distinction, procedural rights, and the justification of mala prohibita.