A thesis submitted to the Law Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

This thesis, inquiring into the permissibility of long-term incarceration, maintains
that two sets of reasons determine the moral limits of punishment.
First, the reasons that justify the infliction of penal harm will only license “proportionate”
or “parsimonious” means of realizing our penal aims. Part I, searching for
these reasons, conceives of the criminal law as a system of protections, upon which
all citizens rely for their assured liberty. An offender weakens this system by contributing
to the threat of “criminality.” The state is thereby entitled, and only
entitled, to harm him as a means of “erasing” his criminality contributions, generally
by deterring would-be future offenders. This precludes long-term incarceration in
most, but not all cases, given the tenuous relationship between penal severity and
deterrence.
The second set of reasons opposes degrading punishments. Is long-term incarceration
impermissibly degrading, irrespective of its proportionality or usefulness
otherwise? Part II gains traction by considering torture, the exemplar of degrading
treatment. I define torture as the intentional infliction of a suffusive panic. I argue that it
is egregiously “disrespectful” of the human capacity to realize value. It converts a
diachronic being capable of building a good life through time into a synchronic being
whose awareness is restricted to a maximally terrible present. Meanwhile, a prison
sentence is “long-term,” I argue, if it severely risks ruining an inmate’s life, just in
virtue of the amount of time that he is separated from society and thereby deprived
of certain associational goods (e.g. a family and career). Long-term incarceration
for reasons of retribution or deterrence intentionally inflicts this life-ruining harm. It
is thus impermissibly disrespectful of a person’s value-generating capacities, I conclude,
akin to penal torture. Long-term incarceration for the reason of
incapacitation, however, whereby the state is not motivated to harm the offender,
can be legitimate.