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The Right to Be Punished: Autonomy and Its Demise in Modern Penal Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Extract

The Enlightenment was the age of empathy and abstract identity. The common man no longer was to be pitied for his unfortunate plight. Instead, enlightened gentlemen and reformers strove to empathize with the ordinary person—identify with him—precisely because he was identical to them in some fundamental sense. That sense differed from Enlightenment theory to theory, but the identity remained central. So Bentham insisted that every member of the utility community was like any other because every member's pain and joy equally affected the utilitarian calculus and thus the common good. Contractarians like Beccaria or Fichte portrayed all citizens as identical insofar as they were all signatories to the social contract, a contract grounded in the shared rationality of its signatories who surrendered some of their external freedom to pursue their life plans protected from the chaos of the law of nature. And Kant and Hegel stressed the common capacity for rational deliberation shared by all humans as rational beings.

Type
Forum: On Enlightened Punishment
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1998

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References

1. See Bentham, Jeremy, Principles of Penal Law (Rationale of Punishment), in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John (New York, 1962; 1830), vol. 1, 365, 398Google Scholar. Grotius's theory of punishment had already stressed the identity of humans in contrast to omniscient and omnipotent God. Grotius, Hugo, De Jure Belli ac Pads, bk. 2, chap. 20, sect. 4 (Amsterdam, 1625)Google Scholar. See also Pufendorf, Samuel, De Jure Naturae et Gentium, bk. 8, chap. 3, sect. 8 (London, 1672)Google Scholar; Thomasius, Christian, Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae, 7th ed. (Halle, 1730; 1687), bk. 3, chap. 7, sect. 36Google Scholar; Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (New York, 1978), 5556CrossRefGoogle Scholar (discussing John Howard). At least since Hobbes, intracommunal punishment was distinguished from extracommunal war. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, chap. 28 (London, 1651)Google Scholar; Locke, John, Of Civil Government, chap. 2, sect. 9 and chap. 7, sect. 88 (London, 1689).Google Scholar

2. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Medicus, Fritz (Hamburg, 1967; 1796)Google Scholar (hereinafter Naturrechi), sect. 20, 254.

3. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (A ed. Riga, 1785; B ed. Riga, 1786), AB 70-71; Hegel, G. W. F., Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Berlin, 1821), sects. 36 (persons), 100Google Scholar. Hegel's work moves beyond the Enlightenment's universalist focus on abstract identity. For example, the Philosophy of Right captures the Hegelian transition from the universalist Enlightenment conception of punishment to more substantive conceptions of punishment in civil society and, eventually, the modern state. See Dubber, Markus Dirk, “Rediscovering Hegel's Theory of Crime and Punishment,” Michigan Law Review 92 (1994): 1601–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Masters, Roger D., trans. Judith R. Masters (New York, 1978; 1762), bk. 2, chap. 6, 67Google Scholar; see also ibid., chap. 7, 69; Kant, Immanuel, Metaphysik der Sitten (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre) (ed. Königsberg, A, 1797; ed. B Königsberg, 1798)Google Scholar (hereinafter Rechtslehre), vol. 1, sect. 49, A 170-72, B 201-2; see also Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile or On Education, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York, 1979; 1762), 233, 473Google Scholar.

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6. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AB 70-71.

7. See, e.g., Moore, Kathleen Dean, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (Oxford, 1989), 4649Google Scholar.

8. Kant, Rechtslehre, A 195, B 225.

9. Fichte, Naturrecht, 253-56.

10. Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, Grundlage des Naturrechts, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1890; 1803)Google Scholar and Das System der Rechtsphilosophie (Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie), ed. Roder, K. D. A. (Leipzig, 1874), 317Google Scholar.

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12. Dubber, Markus Dirk, “Recidivist Statutes as Arational Punishment,” Buffalo Law Review 43 (1995): 718–19Google Scholar.

13. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

14. See below, 137-38.

15. Hegel pursued the idea of autonomy more consistently than had Kant. At one point, Kant suggested that the commission of a felony renders the offender incapable of being a citizen of the state (Rechtslehre, A 195, B 225). At another, he argued that the offender, strictly speaking, cannot punish himself because, given the separation of powers, he could not both originate the laws and be punished under them. It was the homo noumenon who legislated and the homo phaenomenon who was punished (ibid., A 202-3, B 232).

16. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, sects. 90-104.

17. See, e.g., Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AB 17-88, and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), 51-59. For an early application of Kant's categorical imperative to state punishment, see Stübel, Christoph Carl, System des allgemeinen peinlichen Rechts (Einleitung in die peinliche Rechtswissenschaft) (Leipzig, 1795), vol. 1, sect. 6.Google Scholar

18. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AB 70-71.

19. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, sect. 35; see Schwarzenbach, Sibyl A., “Rawls, Hegel, and Communitarianism,” Political Theory 19 (1991): 551CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. See generally Dubber, “Rediscovering Hegel's Theory of Crime and Punishment,” 1601-21.

21. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, sect. 100.

22. Ibid., sect. 97 Addition.

23. Ibid., sect. 100.

24. Mabbott, J. D., “Freewill and Punishment,” in Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements, ed. Aaron, Richard I. and Lewis, Hywel David (London, 1956), 303Google Scholar; Allen, Francis A., The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose (New Haven, 1981), 15.Google Scholar

25. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, sect. 227 Addition.

26. See Beccaria, Cesare, Dei delitti e delle pene, vol. 7 of Raccolta dei classici criminalisti (Milan, 1823; 1764), sect. 3, 48Google Scholar; Kant, Rechtslehre, sect. 49, A 170-72, B 201-2; Huber, Ernst Rudolf, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 2, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1960), 378Google Scholar; see also Das Offenburger Programm der südwestdeutschen Demokraten vom 10. September 1847, in Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 1, ed. Huber, Ernst Rudolf (Stuttgart, 1961), 262Google Scholar; Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches vom 28. März 1849, para. 179, in Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 1, 322. For the United States, cf. Amar, Vikram David, “Jury Service as Political Participation Akin to Voting,” Cornell Law Review 80 (1995): 218–21Google Scholar; Amar, Akhil Reed, “Reinventing Juries: Ten Suggested Reforms,” University of California at Davis Law Review 28 (1995): 1169, 1172, 1177Google Scholar.

27. Fichte, Naturrecht, sect. 20, 253-56.

28. Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, sect. 2, 43-44. For earlier versions of the consent argument, see Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pads, bk. 2, chap. 20; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 28; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Du contrat social (Paris, 1966; 1762), bk. 2, chap. 5, 7172Google Scholar; see also Schmidt, Eberhard, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspflege, 3d ed. (Göttingen, 1965), 164Google Scholar; Köstlin, Christian Reinhold, Neue Revision der Grundbegrijfe des Kriminalrechts (Tubingen, 1845), 794Google Scholar. For later exponents, see, e.g., Globig, Hans Ernst von and Huster, Johann Georg, Abhandlung von der Criminal-Gesetzgebung (Zurich, 1783), 3738Google Scholar; Filangieri, Gaetano, La scienza della legislazione (2d ed., Venice, 1796), bk. 3, pt. 2, chap. 25, at 3-12Google Scholar; Feuerbach, Paul Johann Anselm, Revision der Grundsätze des positiven peinlichen Rechts (Chemnitz, 1799), vol. 1, 5354Google Scholar, and Über die Strafe als Sicherungsmittel vor künftigen Beleidigungen des Verbrechers (Chemnitz, 1800), 9597Google Scholar; Schopenhauer, Arthur, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Zurich, 1977; 1818), vol. 1, sect. 62, 433.Google Scholar

29. Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, 140-42,152. For contrary views, see. e.g., Rousseau, Du contrat social, bk. 2, chap. 5, 72; Globig and Huster, Abhandlung von der Criminal-Gesetzgebung, 64-72; Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, bk. 3, pt. 2, chap. 29, at 24-25, 40-43.

30. Fichte, Naturrecht, sect. 20, 254.

31. Fichte uses the terms vogelfrei, exlex, hors de la loi (ibid.). See also F. C. Th. Hepp, Darstellung und Beurtheilung der deutschen Strafrechts-Systeme, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und der Strafgesetzgebungs-Wissenschaft, pt. 1, no. 1 (Die Vertrags- und die Abschreckungstheorieen) (2d ed., Heidelberg, 1844), 39Google Scholar; Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pads, bk. 2, chap. 20, sect. 3 (offenders, through their criminal act, have excluded themselves from the community of humans and entered the community of beasts). For a classification of offenders according to their degree of “wildness” and an explicit analogy between offenders and wild animals, both inspired by Fichte, see Grolman, Karl von, Ueber die Begründung des Strafrechts und der Strafgesetzgebung nebst einer Entwicklung der Lehre von dem Maasstabe der Strafen und der juridischen Imputation (Gießen, 1799), 128, 129Google Scholar.

32. Rousseau, Du contrat social, bk. 2, chap. 5, at 72.

33. Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. Halls, W. D. (London, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, trans. Halls, W. D., ed. Lukes, Steven (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Mead, George Herbert, “The Psychology of Punitive Justice,” American Journal of Sociology 23 (1918): 577CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Fichte, Naturrecht, sect. 20, 255.

35. Ibid., sect. 20, 266. Fichte even proposed permitting the inmate to set the projected date of his expiation and thus of his release (269-70).

36. Published two years after the opening of Philadelphia's Penitentiary House in 1794, Fichte's prescribed methods of expiatory imprisonment resembled those recommended by the early American prison reformers in several respects, including reformation through work—already familiar from the English and Dutch “houses of correction” of the mid-sixteenth century—and the all-important segregation of prisoners from the outside population. Ibid., 268-69; Rüping, Hinrich, Grundriß der Strafrechtsgeschichte, 2d ed. (Munich, 1991), 74Google Scholar.

37. See below, 139-41.

38. Hepp, Darstellung und Beurtheilung der deutschen Strafrechts-Systeme (punishment as “Rechtswohlthat”), 43.

39. See below, 138.

40. See, e.g., Schmidt, Einführung, 308 (citing Herbert Dannenberg, Liberalismus und Strafrecht im 19. Jahrhundert unter Zugrundelegung der Lehren Karl Georg v. Waechtlers. Abhandlungen des Kriminalistischen Instituts der Universität Berlin, 4th ser., no. 1 [1925]).

41. See, e.g., Rush, Benjamin, An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals, and Upon Society (Philadelphia, 1787), 1011.Google Scholar

42. Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, sect. 16, 146.

43. See also Fichte, Naturrecht, 270.

44. Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1823), 175–76.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 195.

46. Ibid., 170.

47. The early prison reformers’ use of pain for reformative purposes was not limited to the psychological realm. Whippings were seen as conducive to rehabilitative efforts and continued in American penitentiaries long after they had been transformed into institutions of rehabilitation. Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 3, 52. As Simone Weil put it over a century later, it was through the infliction of pain that the offender's conscience was awakened in the first place, thus enabling him to regard the punishment as an honor and a “supplementary form of education.” According to Weil, punishment was but “a method for getting justice into the soul of the criminal by bodily suffering.” Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (London, 1952), 21Google Scholar. In 1793, William Bradford reported with approval the Danish practice of sentencing infanticides to lifelong incarceration in a workhouse, interrupted only by annual whippings “on the day when, and the spot where, the crime was committed.” Bradford, William, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death Is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1793), 40Google Scholar. This Danish practice could have been taken straight out of Bentham's infamous schedule of analogous punishments based on considerations of specific deterrence. Bentham, Principles of Penal Law (Rationale of Punishment), 365, 407-9. According to Bentham's illustrative schedule, the arsonist was to be burnt, the poisoner poisoned, and the forger to have his hand “transfixed by an iron instrument fashioned like a pen; and in this condition he may be exhibited to the public, previously to undergoing the punishment of imprisonment.” Ibid., 408.

48. Bradford, Enquiry, 32.

49. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 294.

50. The new penitentiaries, particularly those based on the Philadelphia model, so well reflected the role of pain in early “correctional” science that reports about inmates who had been driven mad by extended periods of solitary confinement were quite common (Gehorsamster Bericht der Gefängniß-Commission, den Bau eines allgemeinen Gefängnisgebäudes betreffend [Frankfurt, 1840], 31Google Scholar) and remain common today. See, e.g., Maitland Zane, “Psychiatrist Criticizes Pelican Bay Prison,” San Francisco Chronicle, 13 October 1993, at A17; Jim Doyle, “Criticism of Pelican Bay in Court,” San Francisco Chronicle, 30 September 1993, C8; Claire Cooper, “Pelican Bay State Prison Isolation Inmates Traumatized,” Sacramento Bee, 30 September 1993, A4; Justin Zimmerman, “Prison Official Defends Pelican Bay,” UPI, 21 September 1993; “Pelican Bay,” 60 Minutes, CBS, 12 September 1993 (transcript on file with author). As early as 1789, John Howard had warned that a system of continuous solitary confinement “is more than human nature can bear, without the hazard of distraction or despair.” Bradford, Enquiry, 71, n. 13 (quoting Howard, John, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe [London, 1789], 169)Google Scholar. Occasional warnings of the devastating psychological effect of solitary confinement were duly noted, but generally ignored. Gehorsamster Bericht der Gefängniß-Commission, 31. The Auburn system, in which inmates were housed in single cells but worked and ate together, later came to be preferred over the Philadelphia system of complete solitary confinement not because it proved less painful to inmates but because it was cheaper to maintain and could even turn a profit by forcing inmates to work in large prison factories instead of having them cobble shoes in their lonely cells. Simon, Jonathan, Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990 (Chicago, 1993), 26Google Scholar; Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 55. At any rate, the communal treadwheels of Auburn prisons proved no less hazardous to the inmates’ physical health than solitary confinement did to their psychological well-being. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, 177.

51. See below, 133-35.

52. Lewis, C. S., “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” Res Judicatae 6 (1953): 224, 227.Google Scholar

53. The most extensive discussion of Krause's and Röder's work on punishment is Landau, Peter, “Die rechtsphilosophische Begründung der Besserungsstrafe,” in Strafgerechtigkeit: Festschrift für Arthur Kaufmann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Haft, Fritjof, Hassemer, Winfried, Neumann, Ulfrid, Schild, Wolfgang, and Schroth, Ulrich (Heidelberg, 1993), 473Google Scholar. For a brief English language discussion of Roder, see Lithner, Klas, “Pioneers in Criminology: Karl Roeder—A Forgotten Prison Reformer,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 59 (1968): 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. Röder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 10-11.

55. Ibid., 9-10.

56. Ibid., 13.

57. Ibid., 13-14.

58. Ibid., 14.

59. Ibid., 34.

60. The rehabilitationists were not the first to characterize punishment as treatment beneficial to the offender. Already Plato had argued that punishment treated the offender's moral disease revealed through his crime. See, generally, Mackenzie, Mary Margaret, Plato on Punishment (Berkeley, 1981), chap. 11Google Scholar. In Plato, one also already finds the distinction between curables and incurables and their respective treatments, rehabilitation and incapacitation. Ibid., 186-89, 198-99. Plato's account even foreshadows the rehabilitationists’ classification of criminal punishment as a matter of public hygiene (Laws 735). Unlike the rehabilitationists, however, Plato nowhere denied the painful nature of punishment. For later analogies between crime and disease, and punishment and medical treatment, see, e.g., Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pads, bk. 2, chap. 20, sect. 6 (citing Plutarch's definition of punishment as medicine for the soul); Benedict Carpzov, Practica nova rerum criminalium imperialis Saxonica (1635), pt. 3, qu. 101, nn. 1, 13, 14; Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae et Gentium, bk. 8, chap. 3, sect. 9 (quoting Plato, Gorgias); Thomasius, Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae, bk. 3, chap. 7, sects. 100-30; Globig and Huster, Abhandlung von der Criminal-Gesetzgebung, 10.

61. Röder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 34-35.

62. Ibid., 31-33.

63. Ibid., 39.

64. Karl Marx, more famous than Roder for standing Hegel rightside up, praised Hegel's punishment theory for placing the offender's right at its core. Karl Marx, “Capital Punishment,” in Articles on Britain, 150-53 (quoted in Marx and Engels on Law, ed. Cain, Maureen and Hunt, Alan [London, 1979], 193–96, 195Google Scholar). Ultimately, Marx dismissed Hegel's theory as lex talionis in fancy metaphysical garb. Lekschas, John, “Der Mensch in der Hegelschen Strafrechtstheorie und im sozialistischen Strafrecht,” Staat und Recht 19.7(2) (1970): 1Google Scholar618; Flechtheim, Ossip K., Hegels Strafrechtstheorie (2d ed. West Berlin, 1975), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65. See, e.g., Liszt, Franz von, “Der Zweckgedanke im Strafrecht,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 3 (1883): 1, 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar (so-called “Marburger Programm”). This argument has lost much of its force in a world of medical malpractice suits and explicit consent requirements that protect surgeons against criminal liability for assault and battery. See, e.g., N.Y. Penal Law sect. 35.10(5).

66. Roder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 13-19.

67. Ibid., 2 (quoting F. v. Wick, Über Strafe und Besserung [1853], 1 ff.).

68. On the euphemism of modern rehabilitative treatment programs in the United States, see Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 51.

69. By the 1920s the word “punishment” was well on its way to becoming a taboo in American writing on punishment. Writers competed for the most hypocritical neologism. See Glueck, Sheldon, “Principles of a Rational Penal Code,Harvard Law Review 41 (1928): 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar (“peno-correctional treatment”); Harno, Albert J., “Rationale of a Criminal Code,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 85 (1937): 554Google Scholar (same); Wechsler, Herbert and Michael, Jerome, “A Rationale of the Law of Homicide,” Columbia Law Review 37 (1937): 701–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pt. 1), 1261-1325 (pt. 2) (“treatment” [731, 1262, 1295, 1305, 1311, 1313-17], “unpleasant treatment” [752], “punitive treatment” [753 n. 378], “incapacitative and reformative treatment” [758], “incapacitative and curative-reformative treatment” [759], “compulsory treatment” [1261], “painful treatment” [1264], “rigorous treatment” [1302], “punitive treatment” [1306]). In an influential 1936 article, Alfred Gausewitz not only called for “disabling and curative treatment” instead of punishment but also insisted that the Wisconsin criminal code “be amended by striking out the word ‘punishment’ and inserting in lieu thereof the word ‘restraint.’” Gausewitz, Alfred L., “Considerations Basic to a New Penal Code, Part I,” Wisconsin Law Review 11 (1936): 346, 364, 378.Google Scholar

70. For a similar distinction between “police regulations to prevent crime” and “ordinary criminal laws prohibiting and punishing an act or acts as a crime or crimes” in a New York case of the time, see In re Forbes, 11 Abb. Pr. 55, 19 How. Pr. 457 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1860) (second emphasis added).

71. Röder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 26.

72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16 (quoting Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, De la législation, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 9, 326 [1789]).

73. Röder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 20, 22-24; cf. Glueck, “Principles of a Rational Penal Code,” 453, 477 (calling for indeterminate sentences, “so that, if necessary, such treatment may be modified, much as the physician modifies treatment, in the light of progress”).

74. The “measures of security and rehabilitation” were not recognized in the German Penal Code until November of 1933. See Jescheck, Hans-Heinrich, Lehrbuch des Strafrechts: Allgemeiner Teil, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1988), 7475.Google Scholar But their origin can be traced directly to the efforts of the “modern” or “sociological” school of criminal law around Franz v. Liszt (1851-1919), which promoted the virtues of rehabilitative and incapacitative treatment against the “classical” retributive school represented most prominently by Karl Binding (1841-1920). Liszt and his followers, much like other early criminologists at the time, called for the indefinite incapacitation of incurable offenders regardless of their desert. The two-track system represented a compromise between the modern and classical schools by maintaining the proportionality limitation for most offenders while abandoning it in cases of exceptional dangerousness. On Liszt and his school, see below, 140.

75. German Penal Code, sect. 42a (a.R).

76. Ibid., sect. 61.

77. Jescheck, Lehrbuch des Strafrechts, 78; Kohlrausch, , “Sicherungshaft,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 44 (1924): 21, 33Google Scholar (“Etikettenschwindel”); see also below, note 123.

78. Wash. Rev. Code sect. 71.09.010.

79. In re Young, 857 P.2d 989 (Wash. 1993) (en bane) (“Sexually Violent Predator Statute” not punishment). Contra Young v. Weston, 898 F. Supp. 744 (W.D. Wash. 1995) (“Sexually Violent Predator Statute” constitutes punishment). Contrast In re Linehan, 544 N.W.2d 308 (Minn. App.), aff'd, 557 N.W.2d 171 (Minn. 1996) (“Sexually Dangerous Persons Statute” not punishment); State v. Carpenter, 541 N.W.2d 105 (Wis. 1995) (“Sexually Violent Person Commitments Statute” not punishment); State v. Post, 541 N.W.2d 115 (Wis. 1995) (same) with In re Hendricks, 912 P.2d 129 (Kan. 1996) (“Sexually Violent Predator Act” constitutes punishment), cert, granted, 116 S. Ct. 2522 (1996). Several other recent cases, including some involving civil in rem forfeitures in drug cases, have tested the courts' willingness to call a punishment a punishment. The results have been mixed. Contrast Snyder v. State, 912 P.2d 1127 (Wyo. 1996) (“Sex Offender Registration Act” not punishment); Artway v. Attorney General, 81 F.3d 1235 (3d Cir. 1996) (“Sex Offender Registration Act” not punishment); State v. Hickam, 668 A.2d 1321 (Conn. 1995) (license suspension not punishment), cert, denied, 116 S. Ct. 1851 (1996); State v. Cole, 906 P.2d 925 (Wash. 1995) (civil in rem forfeiture of drug proceeds not punishment); United States v. Idowu, 74 F.3d 387 (2d Cir.) (same), cert, denied, 116 S. Ct. 1888 (1996); Covelli v. Commissioner, 668 A.2d 699 (Conn. 1995) (drug tax not punishment), vacated, 116 S. Ct. 2577 (1996) with Taylor v. Department of Corrections, 908 F. Supp. 92 (D.R.I. 1995) (fee for probation services constitutes punishment), rev'd, 101 F.3d 780 (1st Cir. 1996); United States v. Perez, 70 F.3d 345 (5th Cir. 1995) (civil in rem forfeiture of drug proceeds constitutes punishment), vacated, 117 S. Ct. 478 (1996); United States v. 9844 South Titan Court, 75 F.3d 1470 (10th Cir. 1996) (same); Stratemeyer v. State, 668 A.2d 948 (Md. App. 1995) (same), rev'd, One 1984 Ford Truck, 681 A.2d 527 (Md. App. 1996); Bryant v. State, 660 N.E.2d 290 (Ind. 1995) (drug tax constitutes punishment), cert, denied, 117 S. Ct. 293 (1996); In re P.S., 661 N.E.2d 329 (111.) (civil in rem forfeiture of drug conveyance constitutes punishment), vacated, Illinois v. Kimery, 116 S. Ct. 2577 (1996).

80. Rush, Enquiry, 10-11.

81. That isolation contrasted sharply with the gregarious, if not necessarily sanitary, conditions of some eighteenth-century prisons. Accounts of American and English prisons reveal that inmates were allowed to ply their trade, to receive frequent visits from family members, friends, and prostitutes, could gamble, keep pets, and occasionally were known to stage riots to protest the poor quality of the beer served by the tapster in the prison tap-room. See Innes, Joanna, “The King's Bench in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority and Order in a London Debtors' Prison,” in An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Brewer, John and Styles, John (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980), 251Google Scholar; Ignatieff, Michael, “State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment,” in Social Control and the State, ed. Cohen, Stanley and Scull, Andrew (New York, 1983), 75Google Scholar; Sheehan, W. J., “Finding Solace in Eighteenth-Century Newgate,” in Crime in England: 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (Princeton, 1977), 229Google Scholar; P. Linebaugh, “The Ordinary of Newgate and His Account,” in Crime in England, 246; Teeters, Negley K., The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, 1773–1835 (Philadelphia, 1955), 46Google Scholar; Rothman, David J., The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971), 5556Google Scholar; Bender, John, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1987), 218–28.Google Scholar

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84. No feature of prison life, however, was considered to be more disagreeable than the “coarse fare.” Bradford, Enquiry, 32. See Bentham, Principles of Penal Law (Rationale of Punishment), 365, 421 (ranking “Confinement to disagreeable diet” as first and “Total exclusion from society” as fourth on a list of seven “Accessory Evils, commonly attendant on the Condition of a Prisoner”).

85. Lownes, “Account,” 73, 76-77. The gangs of wheelbarrow men were the first off-spring of the punishment reform effort in late eighteenth-century Phildalphia. From 1786 until 1790, four years before the opening of the “Penitentiary House,” offenders convicted of noncapital felonies cleaned the streets of Philadelphia with “an iron collar around their necks and waist to which a long chain is fastened and at the end a heavy ball.” Meranze, Michael, “The Penitential Ideal in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (1984): 431–32Google Scholar (quoting “Diary of Ann Warder, March 30, 1787,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 18 [1894]: 60). Their heads shaved, the wheelbarrow men wore conspicuous clothes (“an infamous habit”) that indicated the nature of their crime. Lownes, “Account,” 73, 76.

86. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. 1, 1-5; Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 319, 371, 385. For an example of a similar contemporary account of empathic judgment, see Hoffman, Martin L., “Toward a Theory of Empathic Arousal and Development,” in The Development of Affect, ed. Lewis, Michael and Rosenblum, Leonard (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; see also Empathy and Its Development, ed. Eisenberg, Nancy and Strayer, Janet (Cambridge, 1987).Google Scholar

87. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 316-20, 359, 604; Dubber, “Rediscovering Hegel's Theory of Crime and Punishment,” 1612-14; see also McGowen, Randall, “Punishing Violence, Sentencing Crime,” in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard (London, 1989), 144, 146Google Scholar (role of empathy and identification in the criminal law reform movement in early nineteenth-century England); Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, 260 (discussing Burke's theory of rhetoric as producing identifications); Alexander, Franz and Staub, Hugo, The Criminal, the Judge, and the Public (Glencoe, Ill., 1956; 1929), 4Google Scholar; Rehbinder, Manfred, Rechtssoziologie, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1989), 172.Google Scholar

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89. Rousseau, Emile, 233; Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 476 (citing Kant); Habermas, Jürgen, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Lenhardt, Christian and Nicholsen, Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 116Google Scholar (discussing Kohlberg, Rawls, and G. H. Mead).

90. So Caleb Lownes in 1793 appealed to this shared characteristic in support of his reform proposals: “Some seem to forget that the prisoner is a rational being, of like feelings and passions with ourselves.” Lownes, “Account,” 82-83. For a less secular variation on the identification theme, consider the admonition by the influential British prison reformer John Howard in 1777 that “A felon is a man and by men should be treated as a man.” Howard, John, The State of Prisons in England and Wales (London, 1777), 12Google Scholar (quoted in Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, 56). Howard saw the relevant identity of persons not in their common rationality, but in their common temptation by sin and their common failure to resist that temptation. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, 55-56. Punishment in seventeenth-century England and New England similarly had proceeded from the assumption that judge and offender were both identical as potential sinners. The spectators at a seventeenth-century New England public execution were all sinners, potential and actual. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, 207; Faller, Lincoln, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth-and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987), 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 15-16; Masur, Louis P., Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York, 1989), 43.Google Scholar See also Hirsch, Adam Jay, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven, 1992), 3235.Google Scholar

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92. Meranze, “The Penitential Ideal in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” 442 (quoting Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 September 1787).

93. Cf. Meranze, Michael, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 60, 156, 176Google Scholar (class distinctions in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia).

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96. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 462-79; Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” 116.

97. Simon, Poor Discipline.

98. Dubber, “Recidivist Statutes as Arational Punishment,” 720-22. The empathic identification between antiwar protesters and prison inmates optimistically invoked by Francis Allen in his brilliant little book on rehabilitationism (The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 31, 63) unfortunately has proved as ephemeral and inconsequential as earlier instances of bourgeois identification with the bourgeois objects of criminal punishment, such as debtors and political prisoners. It ended as soon as the last antiwar protester was released from prison and the threat of punishment for his sympathizers had dissipated.

99. Röder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 34; see also Liszt, “Der Zweckgedanke,” 45; Glueck, “Principles of a Rational Penal Code,” 453, 461, 462, 469 (punishment to be used only “by trained scientists, and only where ‘indicated,’ as the physicians would say”; punishment “but one of numerous ‘medicines’ or devices that are more and more being put at the disposal of trained experts”; arguing against capital punishment on the ground that “it is short-sighted to destroy our ‘laboratory material’ without study”); Harno, “Rationale of a Criminal Code,” 549, 550, 555, 562 (comparing the criminal to “a man with a contagious disease” and criminality to “matters of sanitation and health”).

100. Röder, Besserungsstrafe und Besserungsanstalten, 12-14. Solitary confinement, for example, was recommended as the proper treatment for offenders because “‘isolation is the best means of acting on the moral nature of children…’” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 294 [quoting Edouard Ducpetiaux]). The reaction to rehabilitationism since the mid-1970s has reversed the inspirational flow, while retaining the analogy between juvenile and adult punishment. See Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 8.

101. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 297-302.

102. Ibid., 299.

103. Harno, “Rationale of a Criminal Code,” 549, 550.

104. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 296-97.

105. Ibid., 299.

106. Landau, “Die rechtsphilosophische Begründung der Besserungsstrafe,” 473, 481 (citing Krause, Das System der Rechtsphilosophie, 317).

107. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 296-97.

108. Glueck, “Principles of a Rational Penal Code,” 467.

109. See Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 200-202 (1797 proposal to assign offenders to four categories, “who shall neither lodge, eat, or associate together”).

110. See above, 135.

111. Meranze, “The Penitential Ideal in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” 442 (quoting Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 September 1787); see also Lownes, “Account,” 78.

112. Gehorsamster Bericht der Gefängniß-Commission, 9.

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116. Liszt, “Der Zweckgedanke.”

117. Wechsler and Michael, “A Rationale of the Law of Homicide (pt. 1),” 758.

118. Gausewitz, “Considerations Basic to a New Penal Code, Part I,” 374, 378, 382; see also Glueck, “Principles of a Rational Penal Code,” 461, 478.

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126. Schmidt, Einführung, 381-82, 397.

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