PUNISHMENT, COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNITY

One theme in the “retributivist revival” of the last two decades has been that of punishment as a communicative practice. The central retributivist slogan is that punishment is justified as being deserved for the crime which is punished: the concept of desert is supposed to indicate the justificatory relationship between past crime and present punishment in virtue of which punishment is an intrinsically appropriate response to crime. For “negative” retributivists, who argue only that punishment must not be undeserved, criminal desert is supposed to provide a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for punishment; for “positive” retributivists, who argue that punishment is justified just insofar as it is deserved, criminal desert is supposed to provide a sufficient condition for punishment.1 For either kind of retributivist, however, the central task is to explain this idea of desert – this supposed justificatory relationship between past crime and present punishment: what does it mean to say that crime deserves punishment, or that the guilty deserve to suffer punishment: how does crime call for punishment, or make punishment appropriate?2 One kind of answer to such questions has portrayed punishment as a communicative process: what crime deserves or makes appropriate is a response which punishment communicates to the criminal.