Punishment, Law, and Desegregation

What are the differences in the ways different societies conceptualize punishment? What are the differences in the ways they enact it? And what can be learned by looking at other systems of punishment about the contingency and potential for transformation of our own system? Ancient Athens has often served as a model for certain of the modern world’s deepest aspirations in democratic government and philosophical rationality. At least since Nietzsche, it has also sometimes been approached as an extremely foreign land, whose values and practices, in their strangeness, can at the same time show just how strange our own are. How, now, does Athens look when we turn our attention to its conceptualization and enactment of punishment?

Cabinet Magazine interviews political theorist, Danielle S. Allen, on the relationship between justice, punishment, and citizenship.

Tags: art, brown v. board, cabinet magazine, citizenship, justice, law, punishment