For penal moderation: Notes towards a public philosophy of punishment. Theoretical Criminology 14(3

The 2008 financial crash, and the lessons it teaches us about the costs of unregulated excess, offers an opportunity to think anew about, and seek to temper, the enthusiasm for excessive punishment that has swept across several western societies in recent years. Taking this as my point of departure, I make the case in this article for a public philosophy of punishment that can speak to the times we now inhabit—what I call penal moderation. I begin by describing the value and role of a public philosophy of punishment and setting out the constitutive elements of penal moderation as a candidate for such a philosophy. These elements are restraint, parsimony and dignity. I then indicate how penal moderation might be put to work as an intervention in contemporary cultures and practices of punishment— by naming excess, drawing lessons from ‘moderate ’ times and places, emphasizing that punishment is a social and political choice, and reconfiguring the relation between penal practice and ‘public ’ opinion. I conclude by assessing two contrasting—if not mutually exclusive— styles of penal moderation that I term moderation-by-stealth and moderation-as-politics. My claim is that while the former offers a route to short-term reform, the latter is ultimately more consistent with penal moderation’s aspiration to serve as a public philosophy. Key Words moderation • penal culture • penal politics • public philosophy • sociology of punishmen