ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of criminological thinking on punishment, which can be simply defined as ‘a legally approved method designed to facilitate the task of crime control’ (Garland, 1990: 18). However, the fact that punishment causes pain, suffering and harm raises important ethical dilemmas. Consequently the punishment of offenders requires moral justification for, as Nicola Lacey (1988: 14) points out, the power to punish derives from the legal authority of the state to do things that would otherwise be ‘prima facie morally wrongful’ (see also Box 15.1). Moral philosophy is the contemporary branch of thinking that concerns itself with distinguishing between the age-old questions of identifying what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and establishing ‘good’ and ‘evil’ through defining what ought to be the proper goals of punishment. Such questions are explicitly normative in that they ask what aims and values a system of punishment must fulfil if it is to be morally acceptable.
