Rethinking Criminal Justice

The punitive, moralizing conception of individual responsibility commonly associated with retributive justice exaggerates the moral meaning of criminal guilt. Criminal guilt does not imply moral desert, nor does it justify moral blame. Mental illness, intellectual disability, addiction, immaturity, poverty, and racial oppression are factors that mitigate our sense of a wrongdoer’s moral desert, though they are mostly not treated by the criminal justice system as relevant to criminal culpability. The retributive theory also distracts from shared responsibility for social injustice. Instead of highlighting the moral urgency of correcting conditions that help to explain the crime rate, a commitment to retribution diverts attention from the social conditions that engender crime. These conditions include an unequal distribution of social, economic, and political power, which poses a serious problem for the retributive theory. When disadvantaged members of society act in ways that violate the criminal law, they are less morally blameworthy, even when the laws they violate are justified. Judgments of blame and desert, in relation to criminal justice, vary in accordance with political status. The diminished political power of oppressed groups is at odds with a retributive justification of punishment. 1 The Stigma of Criminality In 1829, the Eastern State Penitentiary opened in the city of Philadelphia. Its corridors spread out like spokes from the prison’s dark center. They are lined with dozens of eight-by-twelve-foot individual cells, each with a small window where a shaft of light enters. Eastern State’s design was lauded by reformers, who proposed the individual prison cell as a progressive idea. The aim was, through isolation and silence, to awaken the conscience of the inmate and turn him into a better person. Prison was not intended as a place to spend your life. Most sentences were not longer than two years, and after doing their time, inmates were expected to resume normal life in society. Res Philosophica, Vol. 97, No. 2, April 2020, pp. 1–15 https://doi.org/10.11612/resphil.2020.97.2.0000 c © 2020 Erin I. Kelly • c © 2020 Res Philosophica