Doing Justice, Preventing Crime lays normative and empirical foundations for building new, more just, and more effective systems of sentencing and punishment in the twenty-first century. The overriding goals are to prevent crime while treating people convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and even-handedly, to take sympathetic account of the circumstances of peoples' lives, and to punish no one more severely than he or she deserves. Michael Tonry discusses
philosophy and punishment theory, surveys what is known about the deterrent, incapacitative, and rehabilitative effects of punishment, and explains what needs to be done to move from an ignoble present to a better future.