ABSTRACT
Banishment appears to offer a humane, cost-effective alternative to incarceration. This chapter evaluates that intuition from a comparative perspective, considering the cases in which formal banishment policy has been employed recently in various societies and analyzing whether the features of those policies that accommodated exile are consistent with the norms, capacities, and commitments of mass liberal democracies. In the Maldives, banishment was a special kind of penalty—one linked to crimes threatening to destabilize or undermine that public consensus. The chapter addresses Singapore's preservation of its Banishment Act, as its employment has often been nakedly political rather than penal. In the case of the Maldives, American Indian communities employ exile as a response to particular conditions—relatively small and cohesive populations, legal access to the territory outside of the communities' own lands, and thick cultural and moral identities. The conditions that make banishment a good "fit" for American Indian communities raise doubts that similar models could be adopted by pluralistic mass democracies.
