Research one of the following topics and report your findings:

1. Profiting from punishment: When it comes to the value of private prisons, economic calculations, or any utilitarian position that presumes the criteria for measuring utility, cannot decide the issue. What are the actual or potential human and social costs (i.e. the ethical issues) of justifying prisons purely because they make (or save) money?

2. Restorative Justice: Who has the right to punish? Does restorative justice facilitate this right, or is it a true alternative to punishment? What are the criticisms of its capacity to fulfill the requirements of justice?

3. The punishment of women: How much should a person’s disadvantageous circumstances affect judgments on the appropriateness of punishing them? Analyse the tension between the demands of justice (with its traditional preoccupation with individual responsibility) and the injustice of responsibilisation’, the assigning of individual responsibility for social problems to those who are least able to bear it. Are there good arguments for ‘justice reinvestment’ or does this run the risk of rewarding, or inadequately dissuading, undesirable behaviour?

4. The ‘new punitiveness’: Are we moving away from the ‘civilising processes’ of modernism towards a ‘decivilising’ (Pratt 1998; 2000) punitive sentiment that characterises contemporary retributive practices in criminal justice? Explore with regard to the paradox of using (more) punishment where punishment has already failed, and analyse the implications of a sort of order achieved only on fear/terror of coercive force.

5. Comparative penal regimes: By comparing two regimes that show contrasting punitive practices, explain why coercive punishment is apparently more prevalent in some societal contexts than others. You may focus on specific aspects of cultural, political, religious or economic dynamics that might shed light on the question of whether some approaches to wrongdoing and punishment are better than others. What attitudes and ideas might preclude a culture’s recourse to violent ‘solutions’?

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