Erin I Kelly, The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility
| Author | Hend Hanafy |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915820 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews
Erin I Kelly, The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility,
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2018; 229 pp. (including
index): ISBN 9780674980778, £28.95 (hbk)
In the 1970s, retributivism gained attention as a critical project against the
indeterminate sentences led by the rehabilitative philosophy, and over the past
decades became the prevalent theory of punishment. Retributivism calls for
the respect of offenders as responsible moral agents who should get the
punishment they deserve in proportion to the severity of the crime and
the degree of culpability. Current retributive theories stress the importance of
punishment’s expression or communication of blame to the offender for the
wrong committed. However, unfortunately, as commentators have pointed out,
what started as a liberal call for fair sentencing was used by politicians for harsher
punishments. The increase in harsher punishments under the banner of giving
offenders what they deserve led to mass incarceration in the United States
as Kelly reminds us that “almost 2.3 million people currently sit in prison or
jail” (p. 16).
Kelly’s timely book contributes to an important discussion about the problem
of mass incarceration in the United States and calls for rethinking blame as a
justifiable aim of punishment. The book is structured in six chapters. In the first
three chapters, she dissects the idea of moral blameworthiness and argues for its
incompatibility with legal systems of punishment. In the first chapter, through a
discussion of criminal liability and excuses in the American legal system, she shows
how criminal liability does not entail moral culpability. Thus, the moral criteria
needed for considering offenders blameworthy or deserving blame are not met. In
the second chapter, Kelly discusses possible retributive proposals to amend the law
to reflect the moral competence of the offenders to have acted better so as to
deserve blame when they do not. However, Kelly argues that such proposals will
not work because “it is so hard to provide evidence that enables us to understand
how difficult it would have been for a person to have acted better than she did”
(p. 68). In the third chapter, Kelly argues for an understanding of moral excuses
that takes into account the context of hardships and obstacles that an agent face
and calls for shifting the focus from the moral blameworthiness of the offender to
the wrongful nature of his/her actions.
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(5) 751–755
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520915820
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