Punishment — Objectives, Justification and Deviation

A court can send one person to prison for years and let another walk free with a warning for what looks, on the surface, like a similar wrong. Every legal system needs a theory of why it punishes at all, and this topic is the overview of that theory before the module works through each philosophical school in detail.

In two minutes

The modern State's power to punish needs a justification beyond simple revenge; the major objectives offered are retribution, deterrence, prevention and reform, and 'deviation' refers to the ways punishment in practice can fail these objectives — through bias, disproportion or social inequality in how it is actually applied.

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.