| As a strong contributor to the conversation about proportionality within the criminal justice system, Adam Kolber makes a compelling argument in his paper, The Comparative Nature of Punishment, to dismiss the common belief that the same prison sentence punishes offenders of the same crime by equal severities. He suggests that an offender with a high baseline, a level to designate one's quality of life, would be punished more severely if he were brought down to the same prison conditions as someone who started with a lower baseline. Baselines must be considered in order to ensure we are harming offenders proportionately. As Kolber concedes, however, odd results will follow when applying this theory in practice. If a millionaire and a homeless person committed the same crime, we would have to punish the millionaire by moving him from his penthouse loft and imprisoning him in a small condo on the sixth floor while punishing the homeless person by moving him from the street's back alley and imprisoning him in a roach-infested cell in a basement. Punishers should not be forced to abide by these strange guidelines in order to reach proportionality as Kolber's argument suggests. In this paper, I present three opposing views to Kolber's argument: (1) Punishing offenders by only regarding their baseline does not account for other factors involved within the calculation of criminal punishment, (2) the additional harm suffered by higher baseline offenders is justified within the current punishment model, and (3) this additional harm may not even be present within current practices. A critical discussion of proportionality issues in criminal punishment follows. |
