Philosophy and Policy

Abstract

Punishment theories and policies have marched in different directions in the United States for nearly 50 years. Philosophers and others who try to understand what justice requires, policymakers who create the rules for dispensing it, and practitioners who try to achieve it don’t communicate with each other very well, or at all. They lack a common vocabulary. More importantly, they lack a shared understanding of what punishment is and does, and what it should aspire to be and to do. This is unusual. Shared understandings exist in most countries and did in the United States through the 1960s. The costs have been high. They include mass imprisonment, extraordinary injustice, assembly-line case processing, and moral impoverishment.