Pragmatism and Punishment

Donelson argues that pragmatism is a valuable tool in our thinking about three issues surrounding punishment. The first is how punishment should be defined; he argues in favor of understanding punishment in terms of practical criteria, e.g., ensuring that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is interpreted in a just fashion. The second issue concerns debates about policing and prisons; Donelson argues that pragmatism, and in particular James’s pragmatic method, can help reframe those debates. He describes the respective positions of reformers and abolitionists and suggests, from a Jamesian deflationary perspective, that the reform-versus-abolitionist debate should be approached as a debate over how we should think and speak about policing and imprisonment. The third issue is how best to understand “mass” incarceration. Donelson’s view is that the concept of mass incarceration is normative and that natural facts alone cannot settle the question of what levels of incarceration count as mass and what levels count as unproblematic; on his view, we cannot understand whether a given level counts as mass incarceration without assuming some normative criterion.