Retributivism

Punishment is the social practice of inflicting evil (pain or harm) as a response to wrongdoing. To be punished is to have an evil inflicted on you by a duly constituted authority simply because it is an evil and because that authority ostensibly believes you have done something wrong. It is still punishment – unjust punishment – if the authority's belief is false, or even shammed. It is not punishment at all to inflict evil on a person who is not even alleged to have done wrong. Nor do you punish a person when your reason for inflicting the evil is that it is a means to or a by-product of some good (as in a painful medical treatment or annoying educational process). You have to choose it as an evil, and your reason for inflicting it has to be that the person has supposedly done something wrong.

In that sense, the very conception of punishment is retributive. Borrowing Rawls's terminology, we could say that it is essential to punishment as an institution that particular acts of punishment should be justified by reference to the general practice of punishment; and the general practice is conceived in an essentially retributive way.