Standing and the Distribution of Punishment

Given that unjust inequalities are almost certainly criminogenic, and most societies enact policies that result in such unjust inequalities, considerations of standing, if they are morally convincing, threaten to undermine the justification of punishment in the real world in most societies. States that create such inequalities, and then punish victims of those inequalities, seem either hypocritical or complicit in the crimes they punish. And these are standard ways of undermining standing. But there is an immediate doubt about that conclusion. States have a duty to protect their citizens. And punishment is essential to that task. Complicity and hypocrisy do not plausibly vitiate the duty on states to protect their citizens by punishing wrongdoers. I will show that although this idea counts decisively against the view that unjust states lose the permission to punish offenders, standing has more modest implications for the justification of punishment. It has distributive implications, determining who should be punished, and how rehabilitative resources should be allocated. I first outline the sceptical view about standing in more detail. I then show how a scalar approach to standing defended by Kartik Upadhyaya provides resources for an approach to standing to punish that affects how punishment is distributed between offenders rather than negating the right to punish altogether. And I will defend the distributive view – that standing has strong implications for who the state should punish, and weaker implications for the distribution of rehabilitation.