ABSTRACT
The chapter represents a distinctively denunciatory version of an expressive approach to the idea of limits on incarceration. Insofar as arguments for those limits stem from a conception of an offender as a member of a political community, they are likely to be capable of being endorsed by someone who understands the expressive dimension of punishment along communicative, rather than denunciatory, grounds. The denunciatory theory of punishment is supposed to explain how some forms of punishment could be legitimate. An account which appeals to external constraints on the ways in which we can treat people in order to explain why certain forms of apparently excessive punishment are not legitimate might not meet this constraint. Pure expressivism also seems to run into trouble when confronted with features of our expressive practice which seem essential to the operation of legal punishment but which is unrelated to pure expression.
