What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?

TLDR

American jurisdictions resist fines and community service because the public expects punishment to deter crime, impose deserved suffering, and signal condemnation, and imprisonment—through liberty deprivation—best fulfills these expressive expectations. The article argues that fines and community service are expressively inferior to imprisonment and seeks to explain public resistance to corporal punishment and growing acceptance of shaming sanctions. The authors employ expressive theory to analyze why the public rejects corporal punishment and increasingly accepts shaming punishments. The article poses the question “Why?” regarding alternative sanctions.

Abstract

American jurisdictions have traditionally resisted fines and community service as alternatives to imprisonment, notwithstanding strong support for these sanctions among academics and reformers. Why? The answer, this article contends, is that these forms of punishment are expressively inferior to incarceration. The public expects punishment not only to deter crime and to impose deserved suffering, but also to make accurate statements about what the community values. Imprisonment has been and continues to be Americans' punishment of choice for serious offenses because of the resonance of liberty deprivation as a symbol of condemnation in our culture. Fines and community service either don't express condemnation as unambiguously as imprisonment, or express other valuations that Americans reject as false. The article also uses expressive theory to explain why the American public has consistently rejected proposals to restore corporal punishment, a form of discipline that offends egalitarian moral sensibilities; and why the public is now growing increasingly receptive to shaming punishments, which unlike conventional alternative sanctions signal condemnation unambiguously.