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This should help, you'll just need to summarize it.
Justifications of Punishment As a first step we need a definition of punishment in light of the considerations mentioned above. Can a definition be proposed that meets the test of neutrality (that is, does not prejudge any policy question)? Consider this: Punishment under law (punishment of children in the home, of students in schools, etc., being marginal rather than paradigmatic) is the authorized imposition of deprivations — of freedom or privacy or other goods to which the person otherwise has a right, or the imposition of special burdens — because the person has been found guilty of some criminal violation, typically (though not invariably) involving harm to the innocent. (The classical formulation, conspicuous in Hobbes, for example, defines punishment by reference to imposing pain rather than to deprivations.) This definition, although imperfect because of its brevity, does allow us to bring out several essential points. First, punishment is an authorized act, not an incidental or accidental harm. It is an act of the political authority having jurisdiction in the community where the harmful wrong occurred.
Second, punishment is constituted by imposing some burden or by some form of deprivation or by withholding some benefit. Specifying the deprivation as a deprivation of rights (which rights is controversial but that controversy does not affect the main point) is a helpful reminder that a crime is (among other things) a violation of the victim's rights, and the harm thus done is akin to the kind of harm a punishment does. Deprivation has no covert or subjective reference; punishment is an objectively judged loss or burden imposed on a convicted offender.
Third, punishment is a human institution, not a natural event outside human purposes, intentions, and acts. Its practice requires persons to be cast in various socially defined roles according to public rules. Harms of various sorts may befall a wrong-doer, but they do not count as punishment except in an extended sense unless they are inflicted by personal agency.
Fourth, punishment is imposed on persons who are believed to have acted wrongly (the basis and adequacy of such belief in any given case may be open to dispute). Being found guilty by persons authorized to make such a finding, and based on their belief in the person's guilt, is a necessary condition of justified punishment. Actually being guilty is not. (For this reason it is possible to punish the innocent and undeserving without being unjust.)
Fifth, no single explicit purpose or aim is built by definition into the practice of punishment. The practice, as Nietzsche was the first to notice, is consistent with several functions or purposes (it is not consistent with having no purposes or functions whatever).
Sixth, not all socially authorized deprivations count as punishments; the only deprivations inflicted on a person that count are those imposed in consequence of a finding of criminal guilt (rather than guilt only of a tort or a contract violation, or being subject to a licensing charge or to a tax). What marks out nonpunitive deprivations from the punitive ones is that they do not express social condemnation. This expression is internal, not external, to the practice of punishment.
Finally, although the practice of punishment under law may be the very perfection of punishment in human experience, most of us learn about punishment well before any encounters with the law. Thus, “authorized deprivation” must not be so narrowly interpreted as to rule out parental or other forms of “punishment” familiar to children, even though those deprivations are often ambiguous in ways that punishment under law is not.
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