“Torture and Imprisonment” by Owen Schaefer

In most legal regimes, imprisonment is the primary means of criminal sanction, while punitive torture is prohibited.  However, I argue that the same moral reasons that ground prohibitions on torture are also reasons to oppose punitive imprisonment.  Prison, especially long sentences, can involve as much or more suffering as torture. Moreover, both involve intentional degradation, dehumanization and a cruel use of the threat of suffering to induce compliance.  Some have used this line of reasoning to argue for the permissibility of mild forms of torture (i.e., corporal punishment) in the criminal justice system.  I propose that we should instead accept the arguments against torture as sound; punitive imprisonment is, like torture, inhumane and therefore impermissible.  This implies the need for significant reforms to criminal justice systems, and we need to urgently investigate alternatives to imprisonment such as reconciliation models of justice.  Some non-punitive use of imprisonment (such as sequestration of acutely dangerous individuals, where inducement of suffering is not intended) may still be justifiable, but still prisons would have to be significantly reformed – perhaps along the public health model of quarantine.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 25 August 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Owen Schaefer
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Owen Schaefer is a Research Fellow at NUS’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics under the MOH-funded initiative, Clinical Ethics Network + Research Ethics Support (CENTRES).  He first began working in applied ethics as a ‘pre-doctoral’ fellow at the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the US.  He received his DPhil degree in philosophy at Oxford in 2014, writing a dissertation on moral enhancement.  Immediately prior to joining CBmE, he spent a year as a post-doc at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics researching the implications of various novel biotechnologies.  His research interests cover a wide array of topics in applied ethics, including research ethics, enhancement, punishment, neuroethics, stem cell studies, synthetic meat, and assisted reproduction.

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