ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the moral problem presented in jurisdictions in which the death penalty is unavailable and other forms of punishment are prohibited under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It argues that to understand 'whole life' imprisonment in this way as a mere portion of the full punishment lays down a challenge to the way we understand the symbolic meaning of punishing. Modern liberal retributivists retain the sense of desert in the moral relationship between crime and punishment inherited from Kant. In In the Penal Colony, the officer's explanations of the torture/execution machine never stray from the topic of its power to communicate the prisoner's sentence. Like Kafka's ingenious execution machine, such punishments inscribe law's power into the body of the offender, which is reduced, emptied of his living vitality, for the community itself to see and interpret.
