Pathos of justice: Moral-affective dynamics of crime and punishment

This article takes up a pressing challenge in the discipline of criminology, that is, how to restore the relationship between crime and punishment into a theory of justice. Scholarship on crime and punishment has tended towards parallel paths, underestimating both their linkages and their incompatible logics. By bringing together insights from critical philosophy and the sociology of punishment, we elaborate a concept of justice we call pathos of justice. Based on moral-affective dynamics, the pathos concept connects the injustice, pain and suffering of crime with the allure of punishment and its promise to repair moral injury. We illustrate this framework with the political response to shooting deaths in contemporary Sweden. Pathos of justice offers an explanatory framework intended to supplement existing macro-level approaches to better understand the joint dynamics of crime and punishment.