PRISON, College, and the Paradox of Punishment

Published date15 December 2005
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37012-8
Date15 December 2005
Pages305-331
AuthorDaniel Karpowitz
PRISON, COLLEGE, AND THE
PARADOX OF PUNISHMENT
Daniel Karpowitz
ABSTRACT
Many attempts have been made to justify punishment by invoking the
moral autonomy and dignity of those who are subject to it. Yet the most
refined of these attempts have been informed by an awareness of paradox.
For the practice of punishment, so closely linked to concepts of individual
freedom, tends to degrade those subjected to it. And as a form of state
action predicated on claims of moral or social solidarity, it often prevents
inquiry into the ways that individual culpability coexists within broader
political forms of responsibility. This essay explores the ways in which
college in prison programs like the Bard Prison Initiative may intervene in
this paradox of punishment.
INTRODUCTION
Certain issues recur whenever we scrutinize what we do when we punish.
1
Many attempts have been made to justify punishment by reference to the
concept of the moral autonomy and human dignity of those who are pun-
ished. These attempts are inspired by the impression that there may be some-
thing inherently degrading in the experience of punishment, a degradation
Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities
Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 37, 305–331
Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37012-8
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which befalls both the agents and objects of punishment. The most interesting
of those who defend punishment respond to this feeling at its root, arguing
that the actual purposes of punishment must be found in our respect for the
moral autonomy and dignity of those who are punished. Indeed, Herbert
Morris (1970) has arguedthat we might go so far as to speak of a human right
to be punished that is deeply consonant with our identity as morally auton-
omous agents. Freedom, dignity, and punishment, in Morris’s eye, constitute
each other.
Herbert Morris, however, was not at all insensitive to the great com-
plexity of this issue. In particular, he was keenly aware of the problems that
arise from the radical insistence on individualized moral agency that one
finds embedded within our jurisprudence and its regimes of punishment.
From within his own strong defense of the concept of an integrated and free
human subject, and its corollary of a moral imperative to punish, Morris
(1987) also tried to complicate our conceptions of guilt and moral agency.
Controversially, he explored theories of what he called shared or non-moral
guilt. Using such terms he discussed various forms of guilt that complicated
the clear-cut boundaries of agency and identity traditionally associated with
the inquiry into individualized culpability. Such liminal or destabilizing
forms of guilt, Morris suggested, might arise from our complicity in the
conditions that exacerbate crime, from our envy and resentment toward
those who have indulged in the forbidden, or from the legally legitimized
pleasures of indulging rage, fear, anger, or contempt against the condemned.
Following Karl Jaspers, Morris was also interested in what the philosopher
had called ‘‘metaphysical guilt’’ – a form of non-moral guilt that might
justifiably arise from the very fact of bearing witness, rooted in a collective
identification shared by victims, perpetrators, and witnesses in a body politic
or a broader human community (Morris, 1974).
It has also been argued that punishment is inevitably bound up with the
construction of, and a commitment to, a sense of autonomous individuals,
and is thus tangled in some of the ugliest and most repressive aspects of the
formation and disciplining of identity. William Connolly (1995) has con-
vincingly portrayed some of these repressions involved in contemporary
representations of crime and practices punishment. He situates a critique of
punishment in a field he defines as the micropolitics of identity, difference,
and pluralization. While Morris remains deeply committed to the link be-
tween personhood and punishment, Connolly is far more radical in his
critique of how the dynamics of punishment yield rigid categories of human
personhood and identity that conceal the politically charged ways in which
identity is governed and social responsibility avoided. Connolly traces these
DANIEL KARPOWITZ306

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