It is argued that threats of punishment are justified by the right of self-protection: at its moral core, punishment is a practice of self-protective threats. Further, every intuitively justified punishment has as its counterpart a threat of punishment that is justified by the right of self-protection. Thus, there is a functional moral equivalence between the threat and the actual punishment, and both are systems of deterrent threat justified by the right to self-protection. Given this, punishing criminals for their crimes does not violate their rights because subjecting them to the threat of punishment for a crime did not violate their rights in the first place. 55 footnotes.