Abstract
Over time, various justifications for punishment have shaped sentencing decisions and penal systems worldwide. While retribution has been used to justify punishment as a deserved response to law-breaking, utilitarian approaches—such as deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation—are found to be beneficial in penal sanctions only if they help prevent future crime. In Revisiting Justice: The Moral Meaning of Parole (2025), Netanel Dagan studies a particular aspect of the penal system, parole, and examines the extent to which retributive ideas regarding punishment find their way into parole hearings.
Dagan's book is part of the Elements of Criminology Series, edited by David Weisburd. The purpose of the series is to present new and cutting-edge scholarship that invites readers to question and rethink a few common assumptions regarding criminology. Dagan's work begins with just that, as he tracks a recent ‘moral turn’ in the discipline. Researchers have begun paying closer attention to the social values and norms criminal legal systems worldwide are built upon; however, Dagan finds that this moral turn has thus far not been fully recognized in parole. He asserts that parole research has traditionally relied on utilitarian frameworks, as evidence of rehabilitative efforts, and low-risk calculations are traditionally employed to justify conditional release from prison (p. 3).
To reveal that parole also has a moral implication and involves considerations regarding whether conditional release from prison is justified based on desert, Dagan conducts a case study of the decision-making process of the Israeli parole board, which he describes as complex and discretionary. As a faculty of law in Jerusalem, he has become an expert on criminal punishment in Israel over the years and has already published several studies on its penal system. For Revisiting Justice, Dagan decided to study the board's hearing transcripts of all homicide cases—murder and manslaughter—over a 5-year time period (2018–2022). He ended up reviewing almost 500 transcripts, which enabled him to collect rich data suited for both qualitative and quantitative analyses. While a case study of a specific country could be limiting due to the unique character of each criminal legal system, Dagan makes the case study of Israel relevant to criminologists and criminal justice researchers elsewhere as well. He references several studies conducted in other jurisdictions that focused on parole hearings and skilfully draws parallels to his own case. After all, parole has become an integral part of other penal systems, most notably the United States and the United Kingdom, and complex release decisions have to be made regularly for the many people serving life or other long prison sentences for murder and manslaughter (Van Zyl Smit and Appleton, 2019).
After describing his case, data collection process, and analytic strategy, Dagan presents his research findings in two separate chapters: Chapter 4 presents the quantitative findings, and Chapter 5 presents the qualitative findings. While the quantitative findings suggest that the parole board balances risk, morality, and rehabilitation in its decisions, the qualitative content analysis exposes the ‘moral labour’ done by the various participants in a parole hearing. Dagan refers to these participants as parole actors: the attorney general, secondary victims, the parole candidates, and the parole board members.
A specific strength of the study is the close attention Dagan pays to the different contributions of the parole actors, which enables him to highlight what is at stake for each one of them in the decision-making process. Acknowledging each parole actor's unique contributions to the process and exposing that their participation is not merely about assessing risk and rehabilitation but rather also has a moral dimension, Dagan equates parole hearings to ‘moral theatres’ (p. 30). First, attorney generals and secondary victims tend to naturally be opposed to conditional release and use the hearing to remind all participants of the gravity of the offence while excluding risk and rehabilitation considerations. The parole candidates themselves also engage in moral labour. They are tasked with managing their guilt during the hearings, in light of what they gathered from the attorney general and secondary victims. Dagan discovered that they often choose to recontextualize their commitment offence, attempting to revisit what led to the crime without minimizing their own culpability. For many, this is a particularly fine line to walk, given the severity of their crime and the time that has elapsed since they were convicted. Other candidates foreground a reflection on the time they have spent being incarcerated and how that time has reshaped their moral character through natural aging, community service, or specific work done to preserve their victim's memory. Finally, the board itself—which Dagan states has historically been reluctant to grant parole to people convicted of murder or manslaughter in Israel—not only addresses rehabilitative efforts and risk calculations but also passes moral judgment. For example, a few of the quoted narratives reveal that risk assessments are reviewed but they are not presented as objective tools established to predict future behaviour. Instead, they also encourage board members to revisit the past and evaluate the candidates’ life choices along the way (p. 30–67).
For criminological theory, Revisiting Justice is a particularly important read, as it advances the retributive theory and applies it to the penal realities of today. As traditional retribution has narrowly focused on sentencing and determining deserved punishment for the crime committed, many criminologists have long associated retribution with harshness. Dagan now shows that retribution can also be a useful framework for studying what comes after sentencing. After all, not all murders are the same, and punishment—after a sentence has been given—is not final. Rather, as the parole candidates’ narratives suggest, individuals who are given a prison sentence respond to the punishment during their incarceration. Therefore, Dagan encourages the reader of this book to refocus the theory from ‘crime to character, from penal quantity to quality, from monologue to dialogue, and from a philosophical to an empirical desert’ (Dagan, 2025: 7). Moving forward, individual culpability must be considered over time in the decision regarding crime-proportionate punishment. Life sentences and the long-term imprisonment that follows the imposition of such a sentence lend themselves well to making a case for advancing retribution as a penal theory.
While Dagan exposes the complexities underlying parole board decision-making, he also reveals that there is need for additional research in other jurisdictions. For example, he admits that his focus on murder and manslaughter cases in Israel could be considered limiting because the moral labour of the various actors could be different in other parole-eligible cases elsewhere. He specifically mentions cases that involve sex offences (p. 29); with that, it would have been interesting to see how any murder cases that involve sex offences are handled and whether there are any differences that could be quantitatively or qualitatively assessed as compared to other types of murder cases. Another avenue for further exploration could be a deeper engagement with the concept of remorse. While remorse can be considered a retributive factor because it is rooted in one's moral character, it has also been cast as an indicator of rehabilitation in certain jurisdictions (Paratore, 2016). If a parole candidate expresses genuine remorse, some might consider it a sign of reduced risk for reoffending, as the candidate is able to display the weight of the harm committed.
Overall, Revisiting Justice contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about the future of parole (Annison et al., 2025). Dagan sheds important light on a process that has long been characterized by opacity and arbitrariness. With the help of both quantitative and qualitative analyses, he is able to pinpoint the intricacies of parole board decision-making and the significant moral labour that is performed by the different actors during parole hearings. Apart from penal-legal scholars interested in his critical engagement with retributive theory, this book is therefore also recommended for lawmakers and parole practitioners who want to gain more insight into the complex decision-making process and work toward more equitable parole outcomes.
