Recent writing about punishment includes attempts to provide sophisticated consequentialist accounts of punishment, to develop plausible versions of retributivism that will explain the concept that criminals deserve punishment, and to develop "teleological" accounts that cannot be classified as either strictly consequentialist or purely retributivist. Consequentialist accounts remain open to some version of the general objection that they fail to respect the moral standing of those who are punished or threatened with punishment. Strict retributivist accounts still face serious problems in explaining the role of difficult treatment in punishment. Accounts that portray punishment as communicative offer the most hopeful way forward. Difficult treatment may then be portrayed as a supplement, serving a limited deterrent role or as itself part of a communicative process that aims to bring the offender to repent of his/her crime, seek rehabilitation, and become reconciled with the victims. The conflict between this account of punishment as penitential communication and the more modest account of punishment as censure plus supplementary deterrence is relevant to sentencing issues and reflects an underlying tension between liberal and communitarian conceptions of society. 211 references