Why Punish? How Much?: A Reader on Punishment

Punishment, like all complex human institutions, tends to change as ways of thinking go in and out of fashion. Normative, political, social, psychological, and legal ideas concerning punishment have changed drastically over time, and especially in recent decades. Why Punish? How Much? collects essays from classical philosophers and contemporary theorists to examine these shifts. Michael Tonry has gathered a comprehensive set of readings ranging from Kant, Hegel, and Bentham to recent writings on developments in the behavioral and medical sciences. Together they cover foundations of punishment theory such as consequentialism, retributivism, and functionalism, new approaches like restorative, communitarian, and therapeutic justice, and mixed approaches that attempt to link theory and policy. This volume includes an accessible introduction that chronicles the development of punishment systems and theorizing over the course of the last two centuries. Why Punish? How Much? provides a
fresh and comprehensive approach to thinking about punishment and sentencing for a broad range of law, sociology, philosophy, and criminology courses.

"Law students, especially, will value this historically informed, multi-disciplinary, and yet cutting-edge anthology on two of the perennial though most problematic questions of criminal law."--John Kleinig, Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics and Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Michael Tonry is Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Senior Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Free University Amsterdam.