Professor Leo Zaibert, the Andreas Von Hirsch Professor of Penal Theory and Ethics, together with Professor Alison Liebling and Professor Ben Crewe, hosted a workshop on 2-3 October 2025 titled ‘Punishment Theory Meets Punishment Practice’. The workshop centred around the contributions to a forthcoming volume with Hart, edited by Zaibert, Liebling, and Crewe.
Faculty members from a variety of universities attended this workshop, alongside practitioners and students. The participants approached aspects of punishment from diverse perspectives. Some focused on more theoretical considerations, and others on more practical matters. Importantly, the workshop offered an opportunity to link theory and practice, with an eye to nurturing more meaningful conversations between these general ways of approaching punishment.
“It is not that we are inventing a connection between theory and practice,” Zaibert explains. “The connection has of course existed for as long as one can think about these matters. But sometimes the connection appears to unwittingly recede to the background. In this project we are reemphasizing the importance of a rigorous interplay between theory and practice.
“We hope that these reflections might be of use to practitioners, policymakers, judges and probation officers,” Zaibert says.
Stakeholders in the criminal justice system stand to benefit from a better appreciation of the purely theoretical realities of punishment. And penal theorists stand to benefit from a more thorough appreciation of the exact nature of the punishments that we inflict in practice.
“There are disagreements between the authors,” Zaibert explains, “and that is a very good thing, because the reader is exposed to different perspectives. Neither the workshop nor the forthcoming volume is a mere collection of people who think exactly alike in every respect. Some contributors agree on some things and disagree on others. And this diversity of points of view strengthens the appeal of the project”. The ultimate aim is to inspire more discussion about how punishment theory can inform punishment practice, and vice versa.
In no small measure, the idea for the workshop gained momentum as a result of a Radzinowicz symposium held in the Institute of Criminology in 2024 on the subject ‘Do we punish too much?’ Several of the speakers at that symposium were then participants in the workshop and will also be writing chapters for the forthcoming volume.
Zaibert was pleased with the response to the workshop thus far, which he describes as “an energising event”. As a result of the workshop, he has had at least three preliminary conversations with attendees about future collaboration. Some of these involve further publications, and others involve prolonged visits to Cambridge by colleagues from other universities, affiliated to either the Centre for Penal theory and Ethics, or the Prisons Research Centre.