Punishment, Reintegration, and Atypical Victims.

Source: (2004) Criminal Justice Ethics. Winter/Spring: 25-38.

According to Christopher Ciocchetti, any account of punishment must recognize the role of punishment in maintaining a sense of community. In this perspective, punishment affirms a set of behaviors which define a community, and as such it implies that the offender is or could be part of the community. A community punishes a person because he or she is implicitly a member of the community – perhaps temporarily estranged from the community due to unacceptable behavior, but ultimately included in the community, especially if the behavior is modified or repudiated. Ciocchetti claims that Anthony Duff and Sandra Duff argue along these lines in Duff’s communicative theory of punishment and in their article on criminalization and shared wrongs. In response, Ciocchetti argues that their conceptualization of the nature of crime, punishment, and reintegration errs in significant ways. To make his argument, Ciocchetti looks at the interpretation of wrongdoing in relation to punishment, reintegration in relation to punishment, and atypical victims in a community and their interpretation of community values and wrongdoing.