Penn Calendar Penn A-Z School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania

Graduate Workshop - Violence and the Penal State

Wednesday, September 28, 2016 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

IN THIS MONTH’S WORKSHOP, “Violence and the Penal State,” we consider issues concerning the state’s employment and regulation of violence.

Anthony’s paper traces the influence of the “rehabilitative ideal,” a philosophy of punishment geared towards reforming criminal offenders, on American political development since the late 19th century. The paper argues that a justification for punitive politics has undergirded rehabilitative penology from its origins, and that the ideological structure of rehabilitation has repeatedly been exploited by coalitions with coercive and punitive objectives. This indicates that rehabilitative penology is fundamentally limited as a potential alternative to the politics that built the carceral state.

Pierce’s paper argues that gun owners impose morally significant costs on other members of society, and that a basic principle of equity supports the claim that they ought to pay for these costs. He discusses some ideal policy responses to this problem, including making gun owners civilly liable for the harms their weapons incur on others, and argues that the result of such a policy establishes a morally acceptable minimum of burdens that would be permissible to impose on gun owners.