A Reason For Retribution

In a city hardened by cynicism and repression, comes Jake Santos. A hard edged veteran NYC Detective, who must come face to face with the day he never wished would ever come. Julie Ann Micheals, a young innocent woman in search of a new journey; she sets forth to the bright lights of the big city, looking for a new lease on life. Eusebio Santana, an individual so cold and relentless, to stare at him, is to gaze into the very fabric of death itself. Plagued by his years of wrongful incarceration, Eusebio orchestrates his release with the aid of an outside contractor whose own thirst for bloodshed overshadows his own; they set forth to reclaim the very streets which made him a feared man. With the entire city as their playground, the lives of Jake, Julie and Eusebio become intertwined game pieces as vindication and love become the trajectory for tragedy and triumph, for all three players. As the fall of a city becomes evident, so does the efforts of one man who must choose for the love of his city, the demise of his eluding enemy or for the love of a woman he has barely come to know........

Discussions of punishment typically assume that punishment is criminal punishment carried out by the State. Punishment is, however, a richer phenomenon and it occurs in many contexts. This book contains a general account of punishment which overcomes the difficulties of competing accounts. Recognizing punishment's manifoldness is valuable not merely in contributing to conceptual clarity, but in that this recognition sheds light on the complicated problem of punishment's justification. Insofar as they narrowly presuppose that punishment is criminal punishment, most apparent solutions to the tension between consequentialism and retributivism are rather unenlightening if we attempt to apply them in other contexts. Moreover, this presupposition has given rise to an unwieldy variety of accounts of retributivism which are less helpful in contexts other than criminal punishment. Treating punishment comprehensibly helps us to better understand how it differs from similar phenomena, and to carry on the discussion of its justification fruitfully.

This classic collection of essays, first published in 1968, has had an enduring impact on academic and public debates about criminal responsibility and criminal punishment. Forty years on, its arguments are as powerful as ever. H.L.A. Hart offers an alternative to retributive thinking about criminal punishment that nevertheless preserves the central distinction between guilt and innocence. He also provides an account of criminal responsibility that links the distinction between guilt and innocence closely to the ideal of the rule of law, and thereby attempts to by-pass unnerving debates about free will and determinism. Always engaged with live issues of law and public policy, Hart makes difficult philosophical puzzles accessible and immediate to a wide range of readers. For this new edition, otherwise a reproduction of the original, John Gardner adds an introduction engaging critically with Hart's arguments, and explaining the continuing importance of Hart's ideas in spite of the intervening revival of retributive thinking in both academic and policy circles. Unavailable for ten years, the new edition of Punishment and Responsibility makes available again the central text in the field for a new generation of academics, students and professionals engaged in criminal justice and penal policy.

This book argues for a mixed theory of legal punishment that treats both crime reduction and retribution as important aims of the state. A central question in the philosophy of law is why the state’s punishment of its own citizens is justified. Traditionally, two theories of punishment have dominated the field: consequentialism and retributivism. According to consequentialism, punishment is justified when it maximizes positive outcomes. According to retributivism, criminals should be punished because they deserve it. This book recognizes the strength of both positions. According to the two-tiered model, the institution of punishment and statutory penalties, as set by the legislature, are justified based on their costs and benefits, in terms of deterrence and rehabilitation. The law exists to preserve the public order. Criminal courts, by contrast, determine who is punished and how much based on what offenders deserve. The courts express the community’s collective sense of resentment at being wronged. This book supports the two-tiered model by showing that it accords with our moral intuitions, commonly held (compatibilist) theories of freedom, and assumptions about how the extent of our knowledge affects our obligations. It engages classic and contemporary work in the philosophy of law and explains the theory’s advantages over competing approaches from retributivists and other mixed theorists. The book also defends consequentialism against a longstanding objection that the social sciences give us little guidance regarding which policies to adopt. Drawing on recent criminological research, the two-tiered model can help us to address some of our most pressing social issues, including the death penalty, drug policy, and mass incarceration. This book will be of interest to philosophers, legal scholars, policymakers, and social scientists, especially criminologists, economists, and political scientists.

One might legitimately ask what reasons other than vanity could prompt an author to issue a collection of his previously published essays. The best reason, I think, is the belief that the essays hang together in such a way that, as a book, they produce a whole which is in a sense greater than the sum of its parts. When this happens, as I hope it does in the present case, it is because the essays pursue related themes in such a way that, together, they at least form a start toward the development of a systematic theory on the common foundations supporting the particular claims in the particular articles. With respect to this collection, the essays can all be read as particular ways of pursuing the following general pattern of thought: that a commitment to justice and a respect for rights (and not social utility) must be the foundation of any morally acceptable legal order; that a social contractarian model is the best way to illuminate this foundation; that a retributive theory of punish ment is the only theory of punishment resting on such a foundation and thus is the only morally acceptable theory of punishment; that the twentieth century's faddish movement toward a "scientific" or therapeutic response to crime runs grave risks of undermining the foundations of justice and rights on which the legal order ought to rest; and, finally, that the legitimate worry about the tendency of the behavioral sciences to undermine the values of

This book addresses the problem of justifying the institution of criminal punishment. It examines the “paradox of retribution”: the fact that we cannot seem to reject the intuition that punishment is morally required, and yet we cannot (even after two thousand years of philosophical debate) find a morally legitimate basis for inflicting harm on wrongdoers. The book comes at a time when a new “abolitionist” movement has arisen, a movement that argues that we should give up the search for justification and accept that punishment is morally unjustifiable and should be discontinued immediately. This book, however, proposes a new approach to the retributive theory of punishment, arguing that it should be understood in its traditional formulation that has been long forgotten or dismissed: that punishment is essentially a defense of the honor of the victim. Properly understood, this can give us the possibility of a legitimate moral justification for the institution of punishment.​

This revised and updated second edition is an overview of capital punishment. It offers an examination of the death penalty, supported by statistics and Supreme Court cases, and followed by pro and con discussions. The book addresses every major issue relating to the death penalty including deterrence, racial impact, arbitrariness, its use on special populations, and methods of execution. This text challenges students to evaluate their beliefs and assumptions on each of the various issues surrounding this controversial subject. Each chapter begins with a primer of the issue to be discussed, followed by the data and critical documents necessary to make an educated assessment, and concludes with essays that offer differing viewpoints by some of the best minds in the country. New material added to the second edition includes: updated data on deterrence ; new data and articles on brutalization and cost ; new cases and articles on the death penalty for juveniles ; new case and articles on the death penalty for raping a child ; and a new chapter on methods of execution.