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Justifying Punishment In Chapter 1 we argued that the most crucial factor in the current malaise in the penal system is the 'crisis of legitimacy'. A social institution is 'legitimate' if it is perceived as morally justified; the problem with the penal system is that this perception is lacking and many people inside and outside the system believe that it is morally indefensible, or at least defective. We need to investigate whether such moral perceptions are accurate, if only to know what should be done about them. If they are inaccurate, then the obvious strategy would be to try to rectify the perceptions, by persuading people that the system is not unjust after all. But if the perceived injustices are real, then it is those injustices which should be rectified. This chapter accordingly deals with the moral philosophy of punishment and attempts to relate the philosophical issues to the reality of...

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