Blame And Punishment

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration.

Blame and Punish examines the most serious subject our continued human existence has - that of crime, most specifically: murder. A 30-year plan is presented to eliminate murder (and all crime) from our planet so we have a chance for a future. The problem of crime is identified as stemming from children not being raised right. That being the case, parents must be Blamed and Punished along with their children for any crime they commit - regardless of the age of the child when they commit it. If the parents had not put that child on our planet - they could not have committed a crime. Period. That is factual and cannot be argued with. Period, again. Our society and crime are looked at from the beginning of civilization along with examples of crimes, our premise and its solutions, and help on how to raise children right.--Publisher.

This ground-breaking collection of research-based chapters addresses the themes of shame, blame and culpability in their historical perspective in the broad area of crime, violence and the modern state, drawing on less familiar territories such as Russia and Greece, not just on material from familiar locations in western Europe. Ranging from the early modern to the late twentieth century, the collection has implications for how we understand punishments imposed by states or the community today. Shame, blame and culpability is divided into three sections, with a crucial case study part complementing two theoretical parts on shame, and on blame and culpability; exploring the continuance of shaming strategies and examining their interaction with and challenge to 'modern' state-sponsored blaming mechanisms, including allocations of culpability. The collection includes chapters on the deviant body, capital punishment and, of particular interest, Russian case studies, which demonstrate the extent to which the Russian, like the Greek, experience need to be seen as part of a wider European whole when examining ideas and themes. The volume challenges ideas that shame strategies were largely eradicated in post-Enlightenment western states and societies; showing their survival into the twentieth century as a challenge to state dominance over identification of what constituted 'crime' and also over punishment practices. Shame, blame and culpability will be a key text for students and academics in the fields of criminology and crime, gender or European history.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration.

This book examines shared intuitive notions of justice among laypersons and compares the discovered principles to those instantiated in American criminal codes. It reports eighteen original studies on a wide range of issues that are central to criminal law formulation.

The world is constantly changing and we never know how tomorrow will be different from today. There are many things we can prepare for in life and some we can't. It’s the ones we can’t that make us understand how fragile we are as humans. Who would have thought, in our time of technology superiority and medical wonderment, we would shut down our world to deal with a virus from COVID-19? Why did we shut down our world? What were we afraid of? Getting a little sick? Getting a lot sick? Dying? AHA! DYING! IS IT DYING? ARE WE AFRAID OF DYING? SERIOUSLY? If our lives are so valuable to us, then why do we allow ourselves to be killed so easily? We can live one of two ways: We can lock ourselves in or let ourselves out. We may be able to protect ourselves more from dying if we lock ourselves in but if we let ourselves out, welcome to your world! In case you don’t recognize it, yours is the world where crime runs rampant, murder is an everyday thing, and there’s a pretty good chance you, a loved one, or a friend of yours is going to be hurt by another human being (who is someone’s child) and you will live with the pain of having been hurt by them for the rest of your life . . . and the persons responsible for your pain will never get punished! We need to stop our future from ending by going down the path it is. We need to stop building ourselves wrong! This book can help us start stopping! There are nearly 7.5 billion people on earth. It is estimated there are over 4,000 religions and it is believed people speak about 6,500 languages. Yet there is no religion anywhere in the civilized world saying a person cannot kill us or our children. There is no government saying the right person will be held responsible for stealing from us or our family. There is no law of any land saying that a person is not allowed to make a mockery of, tease, bother, insult, lie about, embarrass, or in any way destroy another human being! Each of us has the right – unrestricted – to do anything evil, hateful, harmful, and without justification to any other person on our planet without recourse! How is that? Because parents do something wrong if their children do something wrong! And that means if their children EVER do something wrong: ANY time, ANY place!! 1+1 should not equal 3 . . . unless the 3 is a good 3! Blame and Punish helps us understand what, and why, we need to begin believing . . . and fixing! For 300,000 years we've been doing this wrong! It's time to make sure we can live our lives without them ending prematurely so let's Blame and Punish right!

What is it to blame someone, and when are would-be blamers in a position to do so? What function does blame serve in our lives, and is it a valuable way of relating to one another? The essays in this volume explore answers to these and related questions.