Justification of Punishment

It is one thing to describe the different theories of punishment; it is another to actually decide, when a court sentences a real offender, which justification is doing the work. This topic pulls Kant, Bentham and the other objectives together into the single question every sentence has to answer: why this punishment, for this offence, now?

In two minutes

Justifying punishment means giving a defensible reason — desert, deterrence, prevention, reform, or some combination — for the State's deliberate infliction of harm, and a satisfactory justification must also explain why the punishment fits the particular offence and offender.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – II: Foundations of Political Obligation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.