Boston Book Festival 2019

This session deals with complicated issues of crime and forgiveness. Martha Minow, in When Should Law Forgive?, asks whether laws should encourage individuals to forgive and when the law itself should be more forgiving. She points out that debtors (other than holders of student debt) are forgiven through bankruptcy proceedings, so why not a forgiveness process for those convicted of crimes? In The Limits of Blame, Erin I. Kelly argues that our practice of assigning blame goes beyond a pragmatic need for protection or a moral need to condemn harmful acts publicly and represents instead a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Thomas Abt looks at crime prevention in Bleeding Out. He asserts that violent crime is by no means a permanent feature of urban life. By identifying the small number of people responsible for the majority of violent crime and deploying support and treatment, homicides and other violent crimes can be reduced dramatically. Our moderator for this conversation on the philosophical and practical issues around crime and punishment is Harvard Law professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement.