Retributivist Justice and Dignity: Finding a Role for Economics in Criminal Justice

Mark D. White

Chapter Chapter 5 in Law and Social Economics, 2015, pp 77-96 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Mainstream economics has long struggled with crime, an intrinsically moralized area of law that resists attempts to reduce all goals and motivations within it to considerations of efficiency. Legal philosopher Jules Coleman, in response to an attempt to explain the category of crime in terms of transaction structures, wrote that “such a theory has no place for the moral sentiments and virtues appropriate to matters of crime and punishment: guilt, shame, remorse, forgiveness, and mercy, to name a few. A purely economic theory of crime can only impoverish rather than enrich our understanding of the nature of crime.”1 Without mentioning economics outright, legal scholar Herbert Morris bemoaned an approach to the law that “subordinates principle to the realization of social goals, a mode of thinking that focuses, not upon exculpation of the innocent and conviction of the guilty, that is, upon justice, but upon keeping social disruption at an acceptable level.”2

Keywords: Criminal Justice; Criminal Justice System; Human Dignity; Legal Scholar; Mainstream Economic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:pfschp:978-1-137-44376-2_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137443762

DOI: 10.1057/9781137443762_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Perspectives from Social Economics from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().