Benjamin Ewing (Queen's University – Faculty of Law) has posted Prior Convictions as Moral Opportunities (American Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2019 )on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper presents a novel theory of why recidivists appear to have a weaker moral complaint about punishment than first-timers: we implicitly assume that crime and punishment give people valuable “moral” opportunities to reflect upon the sources of their fallibility as agents and take steps to guard against them. This helps to secure them against succumbing to crime, thereby diminishing the reasonableness of their objection to future punishment. Though compelling in theory, this line of thought is problematic in practice because ex-offenders’ opportunities to avoid reoffending are arguably worsened by criminogenic prison conditions and collateral consequences of conviction to a greater extent than they are improved by the moral opportunities inherent in crime and punishment for it. The moral link between ex-offenders’ opportunities and recidivist “premiums” implies we should bolster the former or scale back the latter.