Abstract: This article examines the role that repentance, both individual and communal, plays and should play in our modern society. Gone, it seems, are the days in which we could comfortably refer to prisons as places to which we would send responsible wrongdoers in order to encourage their remorseful acceptance of responsibility for their wrongful actions. Plato permitted a role for repentance. This article concludes that there is a role for repentance within a retributive philosophy of punishment, and that society is less served for not recognizing this.
|