 Within the American criminal justice system, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for  punishment  maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment (see, e.g., Moore 1997; Berman 2008, 2013). This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the  moral  improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions (see Robinson 2008). Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s specifying retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty” (see Robinson 2008: 145–146; see also the entries on  legal punishment and  retributive justice.) 