ABSTRACT
This chapter considers several factors that might be appealed to in limiting the hardness of the hard treatment of imprisonment, claiming in particular that imprisonment must be neither inhumane nor degrading. It suggests some positive, restorative directions that should be pursued when imposing hard treatment. Unless there has been some conscious and conscientious trading off or balancing of suffering against some other essential and significant end to be achieved at the cost of the deprivation or imposition, the charge of cruelty will be hard to defeat. Hard treatment may be onerous, tiring, difficult, vigorous, austere, and rigorous without being inhumane. If hard treatment ought to be bounded on the one side by negative constraints such as inhumaneness and degradingness, it ought also to be shaped on the other side by certain positive ends. Recidivism is not just a failure of those who lapse again into crime; it also represents some kind of failure for the criminal justice system.
