Punishing from a Sense of Innocence: An Essay on Guilt, Innocence, and Punishment in America

This essay explores the connections between, on the one hand, how Americans conceive of their society’s moral culpability for historical transgressions like slavery and Jim Crow segregation and, on the other hand, the hyper-punitive policies and practices which have come to define the American criminal justice system over the past four decades. The essay offers two arguments. First, it submits that, beginning in the late 1960s, the politics and everyday rituals of punishment functioned to reaffirm a “sense of innocence” about American society in the wake of what arguably was and still remains the society’s most self-critical moment. Second, the essay contends that this sense of collective innocence, once reestablished, has functioned as a firm ideological foundation for hyper-punitive criminal justice policies. In essence, the society that imagines itself as innocent may punish offenders with impunity, since neither it nor the criminal justice machinery that operates on its behalf has to trouble itself with guilty second-guessing.