Erin Kelly is an Associate Professor at Tufts University.
Abstract: According to a familiar moral philosophy, incarceration and other punitive practices could be justified if and only if they are individually deserved. The foundational role of judgments of individual desert in criminal justice appears to set criminal justice apart from distributive justice. The most popular accounts of the distributive shares accord a marginal, if any, role to judgments of desert as the basis of distributive shares (of rights, liberties, opportunities, income and wealth). This paper rejects the notion that distributive justice and criminal justice are separate and unrelated spheres of justice. A defensible account of criminal justice must reckon with the collective nature of its aims and priorities, their relation to broader issues of social justice, and the limits of collective moral authority under conditions of social injustice. We should reject the view that punishment should be allocated in proportion to the culpable wrongdoing of individual offenders.
