ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that almost the entire corpus of human rights scholarship is virtually silent on the idea of offender rehabilitation and alternatives to prison-based retributive justice. Human rights discourse signifies an implicit approval of the central tenets of modern retributivism, individual criminal responsibility, retribution, and proportionality as the basis of sentencing, and the fragmentation of criminal justice and social justice. Some of the brilliant critics of retributivism and the expanding reach of the criminal justice dragnet manage to skirt around the relationship. Michel Foucault’s complex and multi-layered text supplied intellectual ammunition to the campaigners for prisoners’ rights as well as those who were already growing dissatisfied with the ‘rehabilitative ideal’. The exclusionary intent of the criminal penalty meant that the prisoner carried a stigma upon release and ‘had limited choices in readjusting to civil society’. With desert and deterrence being the predominant justifications for punishment and sentencing rationales in the contemporary world, the report acquires added genealogical significance.
