Human dignity as a value to guide criminal justice reform emerged strikingly in the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata. But with Justice Kennedy retired and courts generally reluctant to go far down the road to practical reforms, its future lies in the political realm shaping policy at the local, state, and national levels. For human dignity to be effective politically and in forming policy, we need a vocabulary robust enough to convey a positive vision for the penal state. In this essay, I discuss three concepts that can provide more precision to the potential abstractness of human dignity, two of which the Supreme Court has regularly used in decisions regarding punishment: the idea of a “decent society,” the idea of a “civilized system of justice,” and the idea of a “condition of dignity.” In brief, without a much broader commitment to restoring a decent society, and to civilizing our justice and security systems, there is little hope that our police stations, courts, jails, and prisons will provide a condition of dignity to those unfortunate enough to end up in them .

This essay explores the role that U.S. criminal courts play in shaping the uniquely punitive social order of the United States. U.S. courts have long been defined against the common law of England, from which they emerged. In this essay, I consider the English legacy and suggest that while the United States does draw heavily from common-law traditions, it has also innovated to alter them, a process that has established a criminal justice system even more punitive than that of England.