David Hayes Criminal Law Books sku-774368135 Hardcover

David Hayes Criminal Law Books sku-774368135 includes the hardcover monograph Confronting Penal Excess: Retribution and the Politics of Penal Minimalism. It examines the relative success of retributive penal policies in English-speaking liberal democracies since the 1970s alongside evidence of growing reliance on the penal state.

Hayes argues that increasingly excessive conditions in England and Wales over the last three decades show a failure of retributive theory, while penal minimalism still needs retributive proportionality as a limit on punishment compared with rehabilitation, restorative justice and penal abolitionism.

He proposes 'late retributivism' as a theory of punishment and minimalist political action in a democratic society. The book treats criminal punishment as both a political act and a policy choice, arguing that penal theorists should account for contemporary politics.

Its main focus is England and Wales, though its models of retributivism and academic involvement in democratic penal policymaking also apply to other jurisdictions.