Abstract Human dignity as a value to guide criminal justice reform emerged strikingly in the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata. But with Justice Kennedy retired and courts generally reluctant to go far down the road to practical reforms, its future lies in the political realm shaping policy at the local, state, and national levels. For human dignity to be effective politically and in forming policy, we need a vocabulary robust enough to convey a positive vision for the penal state. In this essay, I discuss three concepts that can provide more precision to the potential abstractness of human dignity, two of which the Supreme Court has regularly used in decisions regarding punishment: the idea of a “decent society,” the idea of a “civilized system of justice,” and the idea of a “condition of dignity.” In brief, without a much broader commitment to restoring a decent society, and to civilizing our justice and security systems, there is little hope that our police stations, courts, jails, and prisons will provide a condition of dignity to those unfortunate enough to end up in them.

中文翻译：

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知道我们想要什么：一个体面的社会、一个文明的司法系统和一个有尊严的条件

摘要 人的尊严作为指导刑事司法改革的价值，在 2011 年最高法院对布朗诉普拉塔案的裁决中引人注目地出现。但随着肯尼迪大法官退休，法院普遍不愿在实际改革的道路上走得太远，它的未来在于塑造地方、州和国家各级政策的政治领域。为了使人的尊严在政治上和制定政策方面有效，我们需要一个足够强大的词汇来传达对刑事国家的积极愿景。在这篇文章中，我讨论了三个概念，它们可以为人类尊严的潜在抽象性提供更精确的信息，最高法院在有关惩罚的决定中经常使用其中两个概念：“体面社会”的概念，“文明的社会”的概念司法系统”，以及“尊严条件”的概念。简单来说，