By John Tillson and Winston C. Thompson.

In this chapter we analyze general views on punishment in order to consider what behavioural requirements schools may establish for students and which (if any) they may enforce through punishment, during compulsory education. Punishment, as we use the word, is the intentional imposition of burdensome treatment on someone – usually on the rule breaker – for having broken a rule, partly because the treatment is burdensome. By carefully analyzing various aspects of punishment, we aim to identify principles that should guide and constrain which behaviours schools punish, and how and why they punish them. In brief, we develop the following principles regarding legitimate requirements that can be made of students and the ways punishment may be used to enforce them. Before children are autonomous, schools may establish both paternalistic, and other-regarding requirements, but not requirements imposed from within comprehensive conceptions of the good. 2 They may punish children in order to ensure a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of social arrangements. Schools may punish children for paternalistic reasons, including developmental reasons, but not for reasons of general deterrence. When children become autonomous, compulsory schooling may establish only other-regarding requirements of student conduct. 3 They may punish to ensure a fair distribution of the burdens or benefits of social arrangements; this includes punishing for reasons of general deterrence, due to children’s responsible choices enhancing their liability, as well as for other-regarding developmental reasons.

Pedagogies of Punishment: The Ethics of Discipline in Education.. Bloomsbury Academic. 2023. pp. 35-62

By Emily Widra

More than 1 in 10 people admitted to state prisons every year have committed no new crime, but have simply broken one or more of the many conditions, or rules, of their probation. All of this unnecessary incarceration is the predictable result of widely-adopted probation conditions that are so vaguely defined, so burdensome, and so rigidly applied that they actually broaden the scope of what counts as “recidivism.” Through these conditions, courts and probation authorities create punishable offenses that go far beyond criminal law, setting people up to fail. And because the vast majority of people under correctional control are on probation — 2.9 million people, 1 far surpassing the 1.9 million people incarcerated — these trap-like conditions make probation a major driver of mass incarceration, not the “alternative” it’s supposed to be. Shrinking the massive probation system — and the number of people incarcerated from community supervision — is central to ending mass incarceration. Doing so requires challenging existing “standard conditions” that (a) are often in conflict with one another, (b) exacerbate the challenges people on probation are already facing, and (c) empower probation officers — rather than courts — to make subjective decisions that can lead to revocation and incarceration. Examining these conditions clarifies why probation often functions as an on ramp to incarceration instead of an alternative, and can help advocates and policymakers reorient probation systems away from incarceration. Unfortunately, standard probation conditions are often difficult to locate and parse, vary between jurisdictions, and use complicated and unclear language, so to aid in this effort, we collected and analyzed the standard conditions for 76 jurisdictions across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., creating one of the most comprehensive compilations of these rules to date. 

Northampton, MA: Prion Policy Initiative, 2024.