An influential strain in the literature on state punishment analyzes the permissibility
of punishment in exclusively deontological terms, whether in terms of an individual’s
rights, the state’s obligation to vindicate the law, or both. I argue that we should
reject a deontological theory of punishment because it cannot explain what is unjust about
mass incarceration, although mass incarceration is widely considered—including by proponents
of deontological theories—to be unjust. The failure of deontological theories suggests
a minimum criterion of adequacy for a theory of punishment: it must take aggregation
sufficiently seriously that it returns plausible results when scaled up from individual cases to
large public institutions. In this vein, I briefly sketch a prioritarian metric for evaluating the
use of custodial sanctions as a means of creating and allocating social advantage.

EB00000003998K			Available
EB00000003999K			Available

• Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment