Public Guest Seminar - Professor Ekow N. Yankah

A generation of justified criticism of the American criminal punishment system has culminated in the unprecedented political and academic rise of the penal abolitionist movement. The abolitionist critique fundamentally indicts prisons as an instrument of national (and perhaps global) racial, class and capitalist domination—one that ought not merely be curtailed but eliminated. In its strongest form, abolitionism is skeptical of punishment as such. But more powerful than any individual argument, abolitionism is unified by an ethos that views state punishment as always regrettable, shameful or tragic.

Despite the force of these arguments, this piece contends that the strongest abolitionist claim—that we are never justified in imposing incarceration—overlooks important positive reasons we have to punish. Under reasonably just conditions, punishment expresses a collective response to certain kinds of wrongdoing—public wrongdoing—that undermines our ability to live as civic equals. Incarceration should always be recognized as grave; its moral weight should never be dismissed. But there are times when we should punish, with regret but without shame. Punishment is a way we forcibly reject certain wrongful acts through socially understood expressive sanctions. Sufficiently serious wrongs are appropriately met with correspondingly serious sanctions for the offender. Serious punishment, including incarceration, is one of the ways we make clear to victims and the public that we take the wrong done to them seriously. Criminal punishment, then, serves a distinctively political justification: it secures, counterintuitively, equality in our civic lives.

Ekow N. Yankah is the Thomas M. Cooley Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. His work focuses on political philosophy and criminal theory, particularly, questions of political obligation and justifications of punishment. 

His work has appeared in law review articles, peer-reviewed legal theory journals, books and medical journals. He has been a distinguished visiting faculty member at the University of Toronto School of Law and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, among others. He maintains a public presence writing for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post among others.

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