Failures of Punishment

• In Event: Shortcomings of Democracy and the Path Forward

Abstract

While mass incarceration has become widely recognized as a crisis, most criticisms focus on either the technologies of punishment, such as prisons, or processes of criminalization, such as the War on Drugs. In this paper, I move toward a more rooted critique of the basic forms of punishment itself. I map a gap between the core justifications for punishment and and specific applications of penal justice, ultimately arguing that the justification itself breaks down in the very moment of application. Retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation all enclose fundamental contradictions that predict their failure. Through immanent critique analyzing history, law, and public policy, the failure of these norms is shown not to be a failure of implementation, but instead is the consequences of ideological underpinnings internal to the norms themselves: assumptions grounded in forms of racial, class, and colonial domination. Through this analysis, I make a radical call for the abandonment of punishment itself.

Author

• Wendy Wright, William Paterson University