Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility

Erin Kelly's book "The Limits of Blame" challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our societys commitment to mass incarceration. She argues that our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly and represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 12 November 2018
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The American criminal justice system has been dominated by a belief in the power and righteousness of retribution. Erin Kelly, in her book "The Limits of Blame," challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and questions our society's commitment to mass incarceration. Kelly argues that the criminal justice system aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness, leading to many incarcerated people who do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes.

Kelly emphasizes 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. By refocusing 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.

Weight: 512g
Dimension: 238 x 164 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780674980778