Community Punishment Analysis

In the essay, Punishment, Communication and Community R.A. Duff seeks to find a way to reconcile criminal punishment in a liberal community. Duff argues the way to go about it is to make sure that punishment is inclusionary instead of exclusionary. Criminals should be treated as equal members of our political community and not as pariahs who need to be separated from the masses. Punishments that are currently in place are exclusionary. In the United States and the United Kingdom some localities take the right to vote away from those convicted of crimes and it is hard for many ex-convicts to be gainfully employed.
Punishments need to align with the beliefs and values of the community. In a liberal community, autonomy, and other things. Any
Duff states “ A purely deterrent law, however addresses those whom it seeks to deter, not in terms of the communal value that it aims to protect, but simply in the brute language of self-interest. It thus addresses them, not as members of the normative community of citizens, but as threatening outsiders against whom the community must protect itself.” (Duff 79) In other words, if punishment is used solely as a deterrence mechanism you do not treat those who commit crimes as full members of the community but as a threat to the community that needs to be extinguished. Duff notes that there can be some deterrent value to law just in a liberal community it can not be the only value criminal law has.
This may lead some to ask why do liberal communities need hard punishment or jail sentences. Duff uses the idea of penal desert, which means we should punish the guilty as much as they deserve, no more, no less. The guilty deserve censure and hard punishment adequately communicates that censure for more serious crimes. Hard punishment also should educate prisoners so that he can understand why his actions were morally incompatible with the values of the community and will allow him to be in a position to rehabilitate himself and