APOLOGIE DE LA PUNITION

Forbidden today in a world of systematic de-responsibilisation, isn't punishment nonetheless a prerequisite to true justice?

As though history had made a choice in favor of mildness rather than violence, punishment is now looked down upon and banished from family and school. It subsists in a marginal fashion in sports and in diplomacy, when it's a question of sanctioning rogue States. Today deemed anti-democratic, punishment is in fact a matter of those guilty of behavior that is judged to be non-democratic (the teacher who slaps his student, the father who gives his son a spanking and finds himself paying a bill for his actions). At the same time, on the pretext of humane treatment, we let inmates guilty of petty crimes rot in our crowded prisons (with a rate of recidivism of 60% and a suicide every three days) without offering them a real possibility to make up for their crimes to society by conforming to the strictures of some sort of punishment. Today punishment is hidden, taboo, no longer considered the best way of preventing vengeance when it is the first step towards pardon, a means of reparation, a way of stitching up the rent in the social fabric. It is time to rehabilitate punishment by truly rethinking it in order to offer a justice that is, at last, one of rehabilitation, founded on responsibility and forgiveness. Agrégé in philosophy, Emmanuel Jaffelin teaches philosophy. He is the author of Petit Éloge de la gentillesse (2011, over 10,000 copies sold) and of Petite philosophie de l'entreprise (2012) both published by François Bourin Éditeur. In 2012, he contributed to Plages philo à l'usage de tous (Taillandier) and was the subject of a chapter of André Guigot's anthology Qui pense quoi ? Inventaire subjectif des grands penseurs contemporains (Bayard). His latest work, On ira tous au paradis. Croire en Dieu rend-il crétin?, was published in Flammarion's «Antidote» collection in 2013.