Why do we have a criminal justice system? What could possibly justify the state punishing its citizens? Philosophers, scholars of law, politicians and others have proposed different justifications, one of them being retributivism: the view that we ought to give offenders the suffering that they deserve for harming others. However, intentionally harming other people and making them suffer is serious business. If we are to do this in the name of what’s right and good, we better be very certain that what we do really is right and good. The so-called Epistemic Argument Against Retributivism calls this certainty into question.

Different criminal justice theories

In the criminal justice ethics literature, a large number of theories of justification have been proposed. It’s impossible to do full justice (pun intended) to this literature in a blog post, but below I list some well-known and influential ideas.

1. Deterrence. When the criminal has paid their fines or gotten out of prison, they won’t dare do what they did again from fear of consequences. Other people will look at what happens to criminals and be deterred from committing crimes in the first place.

2. Rehabilitation. Here too, the criminal justice system is considered justified insofar as it manages to bring down crime rates. But instead of focusing on scaring people away from crime, rehabilitative approaches focus on giving prisoners the tools to stay away from crime when they get out again. Inside prison, they have access to therapy, education, real job training, and so on.

3. Expressivism: By punishing people who commit certain acts, the state expresses its judgment that these acts are wrong and must not be done: it sends a message of moral values to its citizens.

4. Retributivism: When people commit bad acts, they deserve to have something bad happen to them in return. The criminal justice system’s job is to deal out just deserts.

5. Restorative justice. This is sometimes conceived of as a version of criminal justice, sometimes as an alternative to it. The main idea is that crime tears a community apart, and real justice restores community again. Restorative justice proponents often argue for having criminals meet with their victims (in case of economic crime, someone who, e.g., cheated on his taxes, might be made to confront the realities of public health care and how they struggle with scant resources). There’s an emphasis on first making the criminal ashamed of themselves and how they have let their community/family/colleagues/others in their life down, and then offer them a path for reintegration, often through community service somehow connected to the crime. …

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)