A C a S E S Pe C I F Ic a Pproac H

Should the fact that a criminal off ender lives in a society that fails to give him what he ‘deserves’ in terms of economic or political or social rights aff ect the determination of what he ‘deserves’ from that society in terms of punishment? More generally, to what extent is the fairness of a given system of retributive justice dependent on the fairness of the system of distributive or socioeconomic justice within which it is situated? Are questions of distributive or socioeconomic justice conceptually prior to questions of retributive justice? Most writing on these issues has tended to assume that there is one set of principles that will explain the proper relationship between retributive and socioeconomic justice. Th e fact that an off ender has been denied the basic entitlements of a just