Abstract
“Compared with the enormous amount of attention moral and legal philosophers have for centuries devoted to the justification of legal punishment itself… and more recently to questions of justified criminalisation, the permissibility of collateral consequences has received relatively little consideration. I suggest it is time for this to change” (p. 222).
These last few sentences of this book summarise succinctly the aim, significance and force of the book. While significant work has been done in recent years by many sociologists, criminologists, activists, legal scholars and practitioners on the collateral consequences of criminal convictions (examples can be found in the footnotes on p. 6), much less work has been done on the more general philosophical question of whether the imposition of formal legal collateral consequences can be morally justifiable, and if so, under what conditions. As far as I know, this book is to date the most comprehensive and systematic attempt at tackling this philosophical question head on.