The Case Against Punishment: Retribution, Crime Prevention, and the Law

The beauty of this book is the balance between emotional and rational intelligence inherent on Golash's argument. My review may be biased by my own beliefs, as I am against punishment.I found the discussion of anger to be particularly interesting. There is something meaningful here that can be applied to everyday transgressions within relationships-- a reconfiguring of the way we perceive and experience our lives.Having read this book for a class, I noticed that it did trip some people up-- they were confused by what Golash was saying exactly. Others clearly rejected her basic premise because doing away with punishment is a revolutionary (I would even argue evolutionary) idea. It scares people. You have to be really open minded/hearted to appreciate this book fully.

Professor Golash writes a sweeping challenge to one of the foundational beliefs of modern civilization--punishment. She writes that punishment "repeats the crime rather than annulling it" and argues that punishment causes greater harm to society than the offenses committed.With a broad command of the literature on the subject, she has us look at the reasons used throughout history to justify punishment--restitution, rehabilitation, and incapacitation--and finds punishment ineffective if not counter-productive. Most insidious is the belief that punishment is good for offenders and somehow improves their "moral goodness." Offenders are quite alienated from the state, and prison makes them more so.In an early chapter, Goulash notes that early Christians had the chance to do away with punishment, with all the injunctions of Jesus to "judge not," to leave revenge to God, to love all, and to forgive one's neighbor "seven times seventy." She notes, however, that 4th-century Christians "found new "uses for punishment" in the writings of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas..Golash calls frequent attention to the psychological role that punishment plays in venting our aggressive impulses. She states that punishment is a kind of a war that those in authority use to consolidate their power.She does not neglect to focus on the social causes of crime and especially poverty and inequality. These are to be expected, she notes, in a society that puts the highest value on competition and self-interest. Punishment makes no sense at all without aggressively addressing these divisive social conditions. She also points out how our current "one size fits all" system of correction fails to properly address the real needs of the victim, the offenders, or of the community. Modern prisons, she argues, only causes the prisoners to hat the state all the more instead of aligning with it.Her last chapters take up alternatives to punishment, which include not only economic justice, but the implementation of new forms of local organization that address the needs of the community that are created by crime. Most important is her commendation for "circles of support" that include families of both offenders and victims. They are successful in both making the offenders accountable for the offense and giving adequate support to both offenders and victims.Such a forward-looking and restorative strategy is stark contrast to the backward-looking and thoughtless damage of punishment.One has to question, however, Golash's need to have the offender take full responsibility for the crime. It is not as if she did not spend much of her work examining all the "mitigating circumstances" leading up to the crime. Insofar as social conditions contribute to the crime, how can we hold the offender "accountable" for all of those causes?James Thiel takes up just that issue in his recent work, "Radioactivity and the Falsehoods of Free Will and Merit." As he points out, studies indicate that we may not be accountable for any of our actions. Nobody deserves anything. That leas us to believe that we have to go back to square one and build civilization over again.