Law Ideology And Punishment And Punishment

This book is about 'Kantianism' in both a narrow and a broad sense. In the former, it is about the tracing of the development of the retributive philosophy of punishment into and beyond its classical phase in the work of a number of philosophers, one of the most prominent of whom is Kant. In the latter, it is an exploration of the many instantiations of the 'Kantian' ideas of individual guilt, responsibility and justice within the substantive criminal law . On their face, such discussions may owe more or less explicitly to Kant, but, in their basic intellectual structure, they share a recognisably common commitment to certain ideas emerging from the liberal Enlightenment and embodied within a theory of criminal justice and punishment which is in this broader sense 'Kantian'. The work has its roots in the emergence in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States and Britain of the 'justice model' of penal reform, a development that was as interesting in terms of the sociology of philosophical knowledge as it was in its own right. Only a few years earlier, I had been taught in undergraduate criminology (which appeared at the time to be the only discipline to have anything interesting to say about crime and punishment) that 'classical criminology' (that is, Beccaria and the other Enlightenment reformers, who had been colonised as a 'school' within criminology) had died a major death in the 19th century, from which there was no hope of resuscitation.

The Labour government has embarked upon a root-and-branch remaking of the criminal justice system in England and Wales, with a mass of new legislation and constant high profile for criminal justice issues. This text explores the origins and wider implications of these policy developments.

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 sets out a new understanding of the penal law of a liberal legal order. The prevalent view today is that the penal law is best understood from the standpoint of a moral theory concerning when it is fair to blame and censure an individual character for engaging in proscribed conduct. By contrast, this book argues that the penal law is best understood by a political and constitutional theory about when it is permissible for the state to restrain and confine a free agent. The book's thesis is that penal action by public officials is permissible force rather than wrongful violence only if it could be accepted by the agent as being consistent with its freedom. There are, however, different conceptions of freedom, and each informs a theoretical paradigm of penal justice generating distinctive constraints on state coercion. Although this plurality of paradigms creates an appearance of fragmentation and contradiction in the law, the author argues that the penal law forms a complex whole uniting the constraints on punishment flowing from each paradigm.