Distributive Injustice and the Right to Punish

Many theorists argue that the state’s right to punish is undermined by its tolerating or endorsing distributive injustice, at least with regard to the citizens who counts as victims of such injustice. It follows from this view, for example, that the state may not punish poor offenders whose crimes move the distribution of wealth and income in a direction mandated by distributive justice. But this view misses that punishment may not stand in any direct relationship with the distribution of wealth and income since it belongs to the domain of corrective justice, not distributive justice. Corrective justice can be understood in two ways: one focusing on the patterns in outcomes of advantage and the other focusing on the mechanisms through which changes in those patterns are produced. This paper argues that, at least on the mechanism-focused understanding, crimes may count as wrongs even though they move the distribution of wealth and income closer to distributive justice. This is because crimes may breach behavioral rules that are justified independently of their distributive effects. If this is the case, the victim has a right to correction; and as long as the state is at least minimally just, it has a permission to enforce that right.