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"Punishment as Suffering"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this notable new articleon SSRN from David Gray. The piece jumps into a very important and interesting on-going discussion and debate about subjective experiences of punishment, and all punishment theorists will want to check out the full piece. Here is the abstract: In a series of recent high-profile articles, a group of contemporary scholars argue that the criminal law is a grand machine for the administration of suffering. The machine requires calibration, of course. The main standard we use for ours is objective proportionality. We generally punish more serious crimes more severely and aim to inflict the same punishment on similarly situated offenders who commit similar crimes. In the views of these authors, this focus on objective proportionality makes ours a rather crude machine...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).