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The expansion of punishment and the restriction of justice: loss of limits in the implementation of retributive policy.

Article Excerpt
PRIOR TO THE 1980s, INTELLECTUALS AND PERHAPS A MAJORITY OF corrections professionals in the United States would likely have been ridiculed for arguing for punishment as a primary objective of criminal justice intervention. Rehabilitation reigned as the dominant goal of intervention, with only a few voices challenging the "justice" of an apparent lack of limits and choice sometimes associated with treatment regimes and parole board decisionmaking (American Friends Service Committee, 1970). Though rehabilitation has never sufficed as a justice goal or primary rationale for intervention, as more significant critiques challenged the empirical basis of support for treatment (Martinson, 1977), punishment by the 1980s suddenly appeared to have achieved a new status of academic respectability. More important, the absence of any apparent alternative allowed retributive punishment to become the primary "currency" of justice in the United States, and a central focus of criminal justice policy dialogue.

There should be little doubt that a dominant goal of the academic just desserts movement in the United States has been to limit punishment and increase the uniformity of its application (von Hirsch, 1976). Having accepted the premise that punishment is a good--or at least necessary evil--much of the intellectual work in sentencing reform of the past three decades became focused on the establishment of guidelines and (ideally) restrictions on its use (Tonry, 1996; 1994). Outside the academic and policy discussion, however, the new legitimacy afforded to retributive punishment seemed to free legislators and advocacy groups to more openly advocate for expanded prison sentences with little if any concern for such limits. (1) Meanwhile, as the vacuum left by the decline of support for rehabilitation (Cullen and Gilbert, 1982; Cullen, Sundt, and Wozniak, 2001) was filled with a new rhetoric that enshrined "just punishment" as the currency of justice, uniformity became the metric for structuring its use. Aside from the issue of whether uniformity could ever be achieved in an unequal society, the tendency in academic and some policy discussions seemed surprisingly to conflate uniformity with justice itself. In doing so, this discourse appeared to minimize or ignored the role of now acknowledged procedural aspects of justice rituals--including the quality of input allowed, information provided, and the overall sense of fairness perceived by participants in these processes (Tyler, 1990).

SYMPTOMS OF A PUNISHMENT ADDICTION

Beyond this, public discourse appeared to shift to rhetoric that assumed that punishment was the equivalent of justice. On the one hand, if asked to define "justice," most Americans use words such as fairness, similar or equal treatment, lack of discrimination, due process, and equal opportunity. Yet, when asked what is meant when we hear that someone has been "brought to justice," we inevitably think first of punishment--often severe punishment. Unfortunately, much flows downward from this overarching logic of justice as the equivalent of deserved retribution to provide support for what much of the world must now recognize as an American addiction to punishment. Rightly, we may more accurately refer to a policymaker addiction to punishment: public opinion polls continue to suggest that citizens, when given alternatives in specific case scenarios, appear to be less punitive than politicians and the legislation they develop (Shiraldi and Soler, 1998; Pranis and Umbreit, 1992; Doble and...