BiblioVault - Books about Retribution

The Limits of Blame

Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility

Erin I. Kelly

Harvard University Press, 2018

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration.

The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment.

Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

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The Nature of Truth

Sergio Troncoso

Northwestern University Press, 2003

This convention-challenging suspense novel represents the next wave of Latino literature, eschewing the stereotypical story of poverty in the barrios or discrimination to explore the differences--and links--between righteousness and evil in the search for moral truth.

Helmut Sanchez is a young researcher in the employ of the renowned scholar Werner Hopfgartner. By chance Sanchez discovers a letter written in the 1950s by Hopfgartner mocking feelings of guilt over the Holocaust. Appalled, he digs into the scholar's life, determined to find the truth and finally uncovering the evidence of Hopfgartner's sordid past. Sure of his conclusions, Helmut decides that only one shocking act is morally correct. When he does, the consequences are immense, and the toll taken on his mind and conscience is amplified when one of his friends is wrongly accused of the crime-and is wrongly left to pay for it.

Intelligent and literate, The Nature of Truth breaks new ground in Latino literature, focusing on how a contemporary man of unique heritage--a Mexican-German who has come to America by way of Germany--navigates a complex moral universe and how his journey reflects the tension between justice and righteousness in American life.

Further information about the author can be found at his web site: <A HREF="http://sergiotroncoso.com">http://sergiotroncoso.com.</A>

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Pain and Retribution

A Short History of British Prisons 1066 to the Present

David Wilson

Reaktion Books, 2014

Today, the Tower of London is a tourist site, home only to the crown jewels, but not long ago the imposing structure held traitors, political prisoners, and more, often on their way to the chopping block. Even outside of this famous building, prisons have changed radically since the Norman Conquest in 1066. In the first book on the history of prisons in Britain, former prison governor and professor of criminology David Wilson offers unrivaled insight into the penal system in England, Scotland, and Wales, charting the rise and fall of forms of punishments that take place behind their walls.

Pain and Retribution explores prisons as an institution and examines how they are designed, organized, and managed. Wilson reveals that prisons have to satisfy the demands of three interested parties: the public, from politicians and media commentators to everyday citizens; the prison staff; and the prisoners themselves. He shows how prevailing concerns and issues of the times allow one faction or another to have more power at varying points in history, and he considers how prisons are unable to satisfy all three at the same time—leading to the system being seen as a failure, despite rising numbers of prisoners and growing funds invested in keeping them incarcerated. With intriguing comparisons between the prisons of New York City and Britain and searching questions about the purposes of the current penal system, Pain and Retribution provides unparalleled access to prison landings, staffs, and the people behind the locked doors.

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Sacred Men

Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam

Keith L. Camacho

Duke University Press, 2019

Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the Guantánamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.

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Thomas Aquinas and the Philosophy of Punishment

Peter Karl Koritansky

Catholic University of America Press, 2012

Thomas Aquinas and the Philosophy of Punishment explores how Aquinas's understandings of natural law and the common good apply to the contemporary philosophical discussion of punitive justice.

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Whistleblowing

Toward a New Theory

Kate Kenny

Harvard University Press, 2019

Society needs whistleblowers, yet to speak up and expose wrongdoing often results in professional and personal ruin. Kate Kenny draws on the stories of whistleblowers to explain why this is, and what must be done to protect those who have the courage to expose the truth.

Despite their substantial contribution to society, whistleblowers are considered martyrs more than heroes. When people expose serious wrongdoing in their organizations, they are often punished or ignored. Many end up isolated by colleagues, their professional careers destroyed. The financial industry, rife with scandals, is the focus of Kate Kenny’s penetrating global study. Introducing whistleblowers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Ireland working at companies like Wachovia, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Countrywide–Bank of America, Whistleblowing suggests practices that would make it less perilous to hold the powerful to account and would leave us all better off.

Kenny interviewed the men and women who reported unethical and illegal conduct at major corporations in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis. Many were compliance officers working in influential organizations that claimed to follow the rules. Using the concept of affective recognition to explain how the norms at work powerfully influence our understandings of right and wrong, she reframes whistleblowing as a collective phenomenon, not just a personal choice but a vital public service.

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