Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment

“Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment,” Criminal Law & Philosophy 2015, DOI 10.1007/s11572-015-9378-x

23 Pages Posted: 16 Apr 2016

See all articles by Vincent Chiao

Vincent Chiao

University of Toronto - Faculty of Law

Date Written: July 19, 2015

Abstract

An influential strain in the literature on state punishment analyzes the permissibility of punishment in exclusively deontological terms, whether in terms of an individual's rights, the state's obligation to vindicate the law, or both. I argue that we should reject a deontological theory of punishment because it cannot explain what is unjust about mass incarceration, although mass incarceration is widely considered — including by proponents of deontological theories — to be unjust. The failure of deontological theories suggests a minimum criterion of adequacy for a theory of punishment: it must take aggregation seriously such that it returns plausible results when scaled up from individual cases to large public institutions. In this vein, I briefly sketch a prioritarian metric for evaluating the use of custodial sanctions in creating and allocating social advantage.

Keywords: punishment, mass incarceration, aggregation, deontology

Suggested Citation

Chiao, Vincent, Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment (July 19, 2015). “Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment,” Criminal Law & Philosophy 2015, DOI 10.1007/s11572-015-9378-x, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2765109

Vincent Chiao (Contact Author)

University of Toronto - Faculty of Law ( email )

78 and 84 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5
Canada

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
270
Abstract Views
1,476
Rank
233,305
PlumX Metrics