Crimes and Punishments

Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?     

Terror salience and punishment: Does terror salience induce threat to social order?

In recent times, international terrorism has become one of the most serious concerns of the modern Western world. As a consequence, the risk and fear of terrorism is more salient in people’s minds (i.e. terror salience), which is supposed to affect behavioral responses in our society. The present research suggests that increased punishment of violations of criminal laws is one societal reaction to increased terror salience. It was consistently shown that increased terror salience, induced by either varying the temporal distance from the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005 (Study 1), by vignettes in the form of newspaper articles manipulating the expected terror risk (Study 2), or by pictures of recent terrorist attacks (Studies 3 and 4), significantly increased the punishment assigned to a violation of criminal laws that was completely unrelated to terror (i.e. car theft and rape). Finally, Study 4 revealed that (a) the effect of terror salience on punishment is indeed due to increased perception of threat to social order and (b) that this effect cannot be explained by the general negative nature of the stimulus material employed in this study.     

Communication,Punishment, and Virtue

This essay suggests that while Antony Duff's model of criminal punishment as secular penance is pregnant with possibilities for theological reception and reflection, it proceeds by way of a number of separations that are brought into question by the penitential traditions of Christianity. The first three of these—between justice and mercy, censure and invitation, and state and victim, constrain the true communicative character of his account of punishment. The second set of oppositions, between sacrament and virtue, interior character and external action, and formal and moral reconciliation, subject the model of state punishment as secular penance to problematic liberal and libertarian constraints. A postsecular analogy, outlining a theology of the invitational nature of divine judgment, and drawing on Thomas Aquinas's account of penance as both sacrament and virtue, is proposed.     

Hegelian restorative justice

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claims that crime is a negation of right and punishment is the “negation of the negation.” Punishment, for Hegel, “annuls” the criminal act. Many take it that Hegel endorses a form of retributivism—the theory that criminal offenders should be subject to harsh treatment in response and in proportion to their wrongdoing. Here I argue that restorative criminal justice is consistent with Hegel's remarks on punishment and his overall philosophical system. This is true, in part, because restorative justice integrates Hegel's instructive discussion of confession and forgiveness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel claims that true moral relationships allow space for persons to confess their moral shortcomings and forgive the shortcomings of others. Restorative criminal justice brings the perpetrators and victims of crime together to offer confessions and forgiveness and to work to heal the various wounds caused by crime. I do not claim that Hegel must be read as advocating restorative justice. While Hegel tells us what punishment does, he does not commit himself to any form of punishment. What I offer here is a rational, progressive reconstruction and extension of Hegel's conception of crime and punishment.     

Legal Punishment and the Public Identification of Offenders

In the United States, the identities of criminal offenders are matters of public record, accessible to prospective employers, the press, and ordinary citizens. In European countries, the identities of offenders are routinely kept hidden, with some exceptions. The question addressed in this discussion concerns whether the public disclosure of the identities of offenders is part and parcel of their legal punishment. My contentions are that public disclosure is not conceptually part of legal punishment, necessary to serve substantive penal aims, or likely to enhance penal aims. At times, it will conflict with defensible aims of legal punishment. Other values might support or require the public identification of criminal offenders, but the aims of legal punishment do not appear to do so.     

Punishing hypocrisy: The roles of hypocrisy and moral emotions in deciding culpability and punishment of criminal and civil moral transgressors

Three experiments explored how hypocrisy affects attributions of criminal guilt and the desire to punish hypocritical criminals. Study 1 established that via perceived hypocrisy, a hypocritical criminal was seen as more culpable and was punished more than a non-hypocritical criminal who committed an identical crime. Study 2 expanded on this, showing that negative moral emotions (anger and disgust) mediated the relationships between perceived hypocrisy, criminal guilt, and punishment. Study 3 replicated the emotion finding from Study 2 using new scenarios where group agents were clearly aware of the hypocrisy of their actions, yet acted anyway. Again, perceived hypocrisy worked through moral emotions to affect criminal guilt and punishment. The current studies provide empirical support for theories relating hypocrisy and moral transgressions to moral emotions, also informing the literature on the role of moral emotions in moral reasoning and legal decision making.     

The Effects of Physical Attractiveness,Race, Socioeconomic Status,and Gender of Defendants and Victims on Judgments of Mock Jurors: A Meta-Analysis1

A meta-analysis of experimental research on mock juror judgments was conducted to assess the effects of physical attractiveness, race, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender of both defendants and victims to test the theory that jurors use characteristics that are correlated with criminal behavior as cues to infer guilt and to recommend punishment. In general, it was advantageous for defendants to be physically attractive, female, and of high SES, although these advantages were nil for some crimes. There were no overall effects of race on mock jurors' judgments, but the effect of defendant race on punishment was strongly moderated by type of crime. Effects of victim characteristics on jurors' judgments were generally inconsequential, although defendants were at a disadvantage when the victim was female.     

Sex stereotypes and responses to juvenile delinquency

On the basis of our current knowledge of sex stereotypes and their influence on judgments about women and men, two conflicting hypotheses about reactions to delinquent behavior by men and women, or by boys and girls, can be put forward. First, because crime is mainly masculine, responsibility for criminal behavior will be more strongly attributed to a boy's nature than to a girl's, thereby leading to more severe punishment for boys. Second, deviations from a stereotype lead to negative evaluations, and thus should lead to harsher punishment for girls. The first study described, based on a field experiment with 709 adolescent and 403 adult subjects, was conducted to determine whether different sanctions were applied to boys and girls who engaged in identical delinquent behavior. The results show that for boys, more severe punishment was preferred for aggressive behavior, and for girls, more punishment for noncriminal delinquent behavior. In a second study (N=43), it was hypothesized that these differences in sanctioning corresponded with the degree of perceived masculinity of the delinquent behavior. This hypothesis was confirmed. A model shows how sex stereotypes about delinquent behavior lead to sex-related difference in attributions, which in turn lead to differences in punishment.     

Demons are everywhere: The effects of belief in pure evil,demonization, and retribution on punishing criminal perpetrators

Do preconceived beliefs about evil influence perceptions and punishments of those who harm others? We examined the effects of belief in pure evil (BPE), demonization, and belief in retribution on punishment of a stereotypically (vs. non-stereotypically) evil criminal. Participants punished the stereotypically evil perpetrator more (i.e., greater recommended jail time, opposition to parole, and support for his execution) because of increases in demonization (i.e., greater perceptions of the criminal as wicked, evil, and threatening), but not increases in retributive feelings. However, regardless of the criminal’s exhibited stereotypically evil traits, greater BPE predicted harsher punishment of the perpetrator; both greater demonization and stronger retributive feelings mediated the relationship between BPE and severe punishments. Further, effect sizes indicated BPE (vs. the evilness manipulation) more strongly predicted demonization and punishment. Thus, some individuals naturally see perpetrators as demons, and retributively punish them, whether or not there is more explicit stereotypic evidence of their evil dispositions.     

Criminal Quarantine and the Burden of Proof

In the recent literature a number of free will skeptics, skeptics who believe (as I do) that punishment is justified only if deserved, have argued for these two points: first, that the free will realist who would justify punishment has the burden of establishing to a high level of certainty - perhaps beyond a reasonable doubt, but certainly at least by clear and convincing evidence - that any person to be punished acted freely in breaking the law; and, second, that that level of evidence is simply not there. In this paper I make two parallel points against a quarantine theory of criminal justice. First, the free will skeptic who would justify universal criminal quarantine is also faced with a burden of proof, the burden to establish to a similarly high level that no human being ever acts freely. Second, there is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion either. I believe that the quandary that this creates for criminal justice can be resolved by distinguishing the methods associated with a particular approach from the approach itself: if our choice is between the methods of punishment and the methods of quarantine, the methods that constitute punishment are, I would argue, morally preferable to those that constitute quarantine.

     

The restorative logic of punishment: another argument in favor of weak selection

Strong reciprocity theorists claim that punishment has evolved to promote the good of the group and to deter cheating. By contrast, weak reciprocity suggests that punishment aims to restore justice (i.e., reciprocity) between the criminal and his victim. Experimental evidences as well as field observations suggest that humans punish criminals to restore fairness rather than to support group cooperation.     

Retributive Parsimony

Retributive approaches to the justification of legal punishment are often thought to place exacting and unattractive demands on state officials, requiring them to expend scarce public resources on apprehending and punishing all offenders strictly in accordance with their criminal ill deserts. Against this caricature of the theory, I argue that retributivists can urge parsimony in the use of punishment. After clarifying what parsimony consists in, I show how retributivists can urge reductions in the use of punishment in order to conserve scarce resources for other valuable social purposes, minimize the foreseeable and adverse effects of legal punishment on the innocent, and accommodate the fact that existing societies fail in numerous ways to satisfy the conditions that make retributive punishment fully justified.     

Guilt and Shame,Justice and Mercy

This essay argues that the criminal justice system in the United States is flawed because it focuses principally on punishment of illegal actions without considering offenders as persons in their entirety. It considers the role that constructive shame and mercy can play in addressing this flaw. The essay concludes by applying this argument to the case of shaming penalties within criminal justice.     

宋代理学家的犯罪心理学思想研究

以二程和朱熹为代表的理学家的犯罪心理学思想比较丰富,对后世的犯罪心理学思想的发展具有重要影响。这里,我们拟从人性与犯罪、人欲与犯罪、刑罚与教化等三个方面对宋代理学家的犯罪心理学思想作一些初步探讨。     

No skin off my back: retribution deficits in psychopathic motives for punishment

When deciding a criminal's punishment, people typically exhibit both retributive and consequentialist motives in their decision making, though retribution's role may be stronger. This study aimed to discern possible functions of retribution by examining a population predicted to be deficient in retributive drive. Participants who rated either high or low in psychopathic traits read stories about a homicide. These stories were designed to evoke both retribution and the consequentialist motive of behavior control by varying, respectively, criminal intent and likelihood of recidivism. The participants then recommended a length of confinement for the offender. Individuals high in psychopathic traits were uniquely insensitive to retributive cues, and they were particularly consequentialist in their punishment of criminal offenders. These results clarify aspects of psychopathic aggression and corroborate the hypothesis that retribution may stabilize cooperative behavior.     

Retribution and forgiveness: The healing effects of punishing for just deserts

Although punishment and forgiveness frequently are considered to be opposites, in the present paper we propose that victims who punish their offender are subsequently more likely to forgive. Notably, punishment means that victims get justice (i.e. just deserts), which facilitates forgiveness. Study 1 reveals that participants were more likely to forgive a friend's negligence after being primed with punishment than after being primed with inability to punish. In Study 2, participants were more forgiving towards a criminal offender if the offender was punished by a judge than if the offender escaped punishment, a finding that was mediated by the just deserts motive. Study 3 was in the context of actual recalled ongoing interpersonal relations and revealed that punishment predicted forgiveness indirectly via just deserts, not via victims' vengeful motivations. It is concluded that punishment facilitates forgiveness because of its capacity to restore a sense of justice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN WITHIN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: AN INQUIRY INTO THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE WOMEN'S RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Two studies considered the possible impact of the feminist movement upon criminal justice decisions relating to women. One body of data confirmed a trend away from indiscriminate leniency in the punishment of female criminals during the women's movement. Courtroom and parole board decisions determining length of imprisonment showed an improving alignment of punishment and criminal circumstances for women and men. The second set of data disclosed that an increased seriousness was accorded to the crime of rape as feminism became more influential. Rape, as a violation of the woman's right to bodily self-determination, was punished more harshly during the period of greater feminist influence, a fact that was not true of other male violent crimes. The women's movement appears to have brought about a more realistic balance of female and male responsibilities before the law as well as a greater respect for women's sexual rights.     

Less guilty by reason of adolescence: developmental immaturity, diminished responsibility, and the juvenile death penalty

The authors use a developmental perspective to examine questions about the criminal culpability of juveniles and the juvenile death penalty. Under principles of criminal law, culpability is mitigated when the actor's decision-making capacity is diminished, when the criminal act was coerced, or when the act was out of character. The authors argue that juveniles should not be held to the same standards of criminal responsibility as adults, because adolescents' decision-making capacity is diminished, they are less able to resist coercive influence, and their character is still undergoing change. The uniqueness of immaturity as a mitigating condition argues for a commitment to a legal environment under which most youths are dealt with in a separate justice system and none are eligible for capital punishment.     

Public attitudes about the culpability and punishment of young offenders

Opinions of 789 community adults were individually assessed, using a video-clip of an actual armed robbery and other measures, to determine whether attitudes toward the culpability and appropriate punishment of young offenders were linked to offenders' age, race, and physical appearance. Three major findings emerged: (1) community adults endorse the view that criminal choices of young offenders are influenced by their developmental immaturity and attribute more responsibility for the criminal act as the actor gets older; (2) the public has a relatively strong preference for differential treatment of juvenile and adult offenders; and (3) attitudes about culpability and punishment are not influenced by the culprit's race, physical maturity, or appearance of "toughness." Indications that punitive public opinion toward youth crime may be changing and implications for juvenile justice policy of the study's findings are discussed.     

Pacifism and Punishment

This article seeks to expose some of the implications of certain versions of pacifism for matters of criminal punishment, arguing that the plausibility of these versions of pacifism depend on the extent to which their implicit denials of certain central punishment-related concepts are themselves reasonable.