A Democratic Theory of Imprisonment

Abstract

The chapter provides a sketch of a democratic theory of imprisonment. It explains the failure of the liberal idea of proportionality to provide adequate limits on the severity of punishment. It argues that imprisonment entails a suspension of a citizen’s political equality and a suspension of a citizen’s status as a ruler. It adapts Alan Brudner’s Hegelian penal theory to specify the conditions in which a democracy can suspend a citizen’s political equality consistently with her status as a ruler. It demonstrates the inherent decremental tendency of this democratic retributivism, and argues that recent rising rates of imprisonment in the United States and the United Kingdom are explained by the contemporaneous retreat of political equality. It concludes by considering the punishment of noncitizens under democratic retributivism, the persistent social injustice of democratic state punishment, and the potential of political equality to abolish both the prison and criminal justice.

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