 The more powerful abolitionist challenge is that punishment cannot be justified even in principle. After all, when the state imposes punishment, it treats some people in ways that would typically (outside the context of punishment) be impermissible. It subjects them to intentionally burdensome treatment and to the condemnation of the community. Abolitionists find that the various attempted justifications of this intentionally burdensome condemnatory treatment fail, and thus that the practice is morally wrong — not merely in practice but in principle. For such accounts, a central question is how the state should respond to the types of conduct for which one currently would be subject to punishment. In this section we attend to three notable types of abolitionist theory and the alternatives to punishment that they endorse.