Immorality of Punishment, The

It is hard to imagine a state functioning at all, let alone well, without having recourse to punishing those who break its laws. In The Immorality of Punishment, Michael Zimmerman argues not merely that our current practice of punishment is deplorable but that legal punishment itself is wrong, no matter its form. This astounding thesis is defended firstly by a sustained and compelling attack on the alternatives. Punishment is not justified by its role as a deterrent, because qua deterrent, we might just as well punish the innocent as well as the guilty. If, on the other hand, the state should punish people because they deserve to be punished, there must be good reason to think that there are such things as guilty persons. Zimmerman offers compelling reasons to believe that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reliably detect guilt. The Immorality of Punishment is written in an unusually accessible style, free from technical terminology and distracting annotation.