Poverty, Provocation, and Punishment

Abstract There are cases where we think that poor offenders should not be held criminally responsible or punished to the same extent as non-poor (and, a fortiori, privileged) ones. Despite sharing this judgment, philosophers have offered different accounts of why or how poverty matters for criminal responsibility or penal judgments. In this paper, I present a new account of how poverty matters for criminal responsibility and corresponding penal judgments. The crux of the argument is this: a reasonable person who is trapped in poverty can be (and sometimes is) provoked to offend following reasonable emotional reactions prompted by how that person is treated while in poverty. Call this the provocation view. I discuss how this view applies to some of the cases where poor citizens offend, address some objections against it, and briefly explain why provocation aims to supplement, rather than supplant or subsume other normative accounts which argue that poor offenders are (or should be held) less criminally responsible or be punished more leniently than non-poor ones.