The primitive and mature kinds of guilt in Freud identified in Chapter 7 are revisited and related to the two parallel kinds of guilt Melanie Klein finds in infant life in the paranoid–schizoid and depressive states. In both accounts, guilt is seen to be either primitive and persecutory or mature and restorative, and these are foundational for adult life. I take the two accounts so consolidated to represent different ways of organising guilt in modern social, political and legal practices. I argue that legal guilt as understood in existing retributive theory is essentially primitive and punitive and consider the counter-productive impact of a persecutory penal regime on the immature and the maturing psyche. I argue that an alternative approach based on a mature retributivism is possible. I consider Jeffrie Murphy’s view that there is no logical reason why retributive theory should lead to persecutory practice and argue that there is an historical logic behind it. A mature retributivism based in moral psychology on a person taking responsibility leads to a conception of guilt as reparative and reconciliatory. This constitutes an ethically real basis for critique of law’s existing institutional practice, in what I call an ERIC critique.