Care appears prima facie antithetical to punishment. Since the overlaps between care and punishment are greater than we paradigmatically expect, care ethics offers a more accurate account of prisons: recognising and critiquing both dehumanising carceral violence, and the necessity, presence, and inadequacies of penal care, as well as unlocking ways of thinking differently about structural change without losing sight of individual issues. After introducing care ethics and evidencing the presence of caring practices in present prisons, the article considers how we punish, in terms of the amount, method, and manner. Treating people in punishment as moral equals is important for liberal deontological penal theories. Treatment as equals requires context. Context is intrinsic to care-ethics praxis, which provides methods of and standards for accessing and applying this information.

Many criminal offenders come from disadvantaged backgrounds, which punishment entrenches. Criminal culpability explains some disadvantageous treatment in state-offender interactions; yet offenders remain people, and 'some mother's child', in Eva Kittay's terms. Offending behaviour neither erases needs, nor fully excuses our responsibility for offenders' needs. Caring is demanded in principle, recognising the offender's personhood. Supporting offenders may amplify welfare resources: equipping offenders to provide self-care; to meet caring responsibilities; and enabling offenders' contribution to 2 shared social life, by providing support and furthering the choices of others seeking to engage with them. The desistance paradigm (viewing desistance from offending as a process, following from an offender's active choice in the context of stabilising social structures and personal circumstances), implies that a supportive environment may facilitate reduced recidivism. While decisions about criminal culpability need justice, we may use state resources most effectively by also including care ethics in our thinking about punishment.

Howard’s moral fortification theory of criminal punishment lends itself to justifying correction for children in schools that is supportive. There are good reasons to include other students in the learning opportunity occasioned by doing right in response to wrong, which need not exploit the wrongdoing student as a mere means. Care ethics can facilitate restorative and problem-solving approaches to correction. However, there are overriding reasons against doing so when this stigmatises the wrongdoing student, since this inhibits their learning. Responses that avoidably stigmatise students impermissibly undermine both the developmental ethos of education, and students’ recognition and respect for each other as equals.

This is an introduction to the Symposium on Nonparadigmatic Forms of Punishment. We explain what we mean by calling certain instances of punishment 'nonparadigmatic' and explain why nonparadigmatic punishments are of philosophical interest. We then introduce the contributions to the Special Issue and conclude by outlining directions that future research on nonparadigmatic punishment might take. We focus on three particular ways in which punishment might be nonparadigmatic: cases involving nonstandard punishing agents, those involving nonstandard subjects of punishment, and those involving nonstandard means of punishment.

This review article argues for a better acknowledgement by penal philosophers of the diversity of subjects, agents, and practices of punishment. Much current penal philosophy has an unhelpful hyper-focus on the criminal punishment of culpable adults, by states, often through imprisonment. This paradigmatic case is important, but other subjects, agents, and practices of punishment are not statistically insignificant side-issues, and a comprehensive account of punishment should address them. Our understanding of punishment as a whole can be enhanced by considering non-paradigmatic punishment, with implications for whether and when punishment is justified, how we should understand appropriate authority, and how we should understand and engage with abolitionist arguments. We explore non-paradigmatic penal practices (community punishments, suspended prison sentence, restorative justice, and alternative jurisprudence), non-paradigmatic punishing agents (International judicial bodies, schools, and religious communities; with practices such as boycotts, shaming and shunning) and non-paradigmatic subjects of punishment (collective agents, corporations and children).