How Criminal Offenders Offend Society's Equality Expectations

Criminal justice systems worldwide differ in many important respects.

Yet, there is unanimous agreement that a person affirmatively shows criminal hostility towards another’s rights by intentionally, recklessly, or carelessly violating or otherwise disregarding them. This consensus encompasses an understanding, even if rarely articulated in this way, that antisocial self elevation, inherent in almost all crimes, raises the offender’s moral blameworthiness. This orthodox view, which focuses on the offender to assess criminal culpability, is unobjectionable as far as it goes. But, as we will discuss, it does not go far enough. 

What is missing is a more explicitly victim-centric approach for thinking about criminal culpability. This article makes the case that modernizing our conventional conception of culpability and expanding our criminal justice vocabulary will allow us to account better for the additional (and distinctly unique) psychological harms offenders inflict when they wrong another by disrespecting their victims’ right to equal standing in the public sphere.