Exile as an Alternative to Incarceration

While terms like “exile” and “banishment” evoke dramatic images of regimes distant in time or character from the modern liberal democracy, penal practices that rely on the geographic removal of offenders remain with such societies in the twenty-first century. The US state of Georgia, for instance, routinely imposes sentences of banishment, and the practice also exists in Mississippi. ¹ Formal banishment policies, however, remain relatively rare. ² Exile offers a tantalizing alternative to incarceration: it obviates the costs of feeding, housing, and providing medical care for prisoners, it offers a comforting cushion of distance between the offending party and the community or person against whom they transgressed, and a banished offender need not suffer the hardships that accompany imprisonment in most instances. On the whole, banishment appears to offer a humane, cost-effective alternative to incarceration. Given its benefits, it appears obvious that liberal democratic societies should consider adopting banishment as an alternative to imprisonment. This chapter will evaluate that intuition from a comparative perspective, considering the cases in which formal banishment policy has been employed recently in various societies and analyzing whether the features of those policies that accommodated exile are consistent with the norms, capacities, and commitments of mass liberal democracies.