Source: (2003) Punishment & Society. 5(3): 295–312
The thought that religious ideas could have any place in a normative theory of criminal
punishment will be anathema to many liberals. I argue, however, that we can understand
criminal punishment as a species of secular penance, as part of a communicative
enterprise in which the polity seeks to involve its citizens. After explaining what a
penance amounts to in this context, I meet the liberal objection that punishment as
thus conceived would be an oppressive and illegitimate intrusion into the realm of moral
character and conscience which is not the state’s, or the law’s, business. Finally, I raise
(without offering any confident answer to) the question of whether there are any kinds
of crime that are so destructive of the very possibility of political community that
punishment as communicative penance is no longer morally possible, and focus in
particular on the version of this question that is raised by terrorist crimes.
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