Sure, there are certainly people who hold that justice can only be achieved if the perpetrator pays in pain, with any discouraging effects being incidental.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who want to reduce the amount of crime that happens, and then they are more concerned with if the justice system actually achieves this goal. Pain based justice plainly doesn't.
I think this depends very much on what you consider the intention of a justice system to be. If it is to strive towards balance between individuals, then you are correct. If a person causes suffering, then they should experience suffering themselves. Balance attained.
However, if the intention of a justice system is to reduce the total amount of injustice done in the world, then punishment is surprisingly ineffective.
Being a criminal does not _preclude_ a person from also being a victim. People who inflict violence have very, very often experienced a great deal of violence against themselves. In these cases, punishment is going to do far more harm than good in society. Harsh punishment, especially incarceration, makes pre-existing issues much worse. It creates recidivism, and increases the total amount of injustice over the long term. Compassion, support, empathy, education, and carefully guided opportunity to improve would, in many of these cases, improve that person's circumstance to a point where they no longer have cause to harm others. The original victims may not have received the recompense that they deserve, but the likelihood of more people experiencing pain at the criminal's hand in the future is reduced.
So it's not quite as simple as all one way or all the other. I think that is why the raw concept of 'retribution' is a less desirable idea these days than it has been in the past. It makes the demands of individual balance at the expense of community balance.
Don't get me wrong, I think that ignoring individual balance outright in favour of community balance is equally flawed. The trick is providing lots of options, so that someone like a judge can make the call as to where that balancing point should be and be confident that it is played out.
Plenty of people want criminals to suffer. Eg, from earlier in this thread:
> In cases where the victim never gets to move on with his or her life how much should we work towards making sure the victimizer can?
Ie, “the perpetrator should suffer at least as much as the victim”. I’m sympathetic to the argument that this is medieval and not aligned with humanist ethics. But plenty of people, at least in the US obviously think this way.
Suffering consequences for crime is, to most people, an element of justice. That form of justice also has the benefit of deterring other would-be criminals. There are those who believe there is no deterrent effect. They're idiots.
It's not just the suffering of the offender, but the idea that justice to the offending party can only happen if the offender suffers like the offending party suffered. It's "An eye for an eye", just a few layers of abstraction over it.
Not the person you’re responding to, but typically this mindset is about punishment more than deterrence. It won’t reduce the incidence of bad outcomes, but some people feel better knowing that judicial vengeance will be meted out.
What would you like the point of your country's justice system to be? To be a venue for state controlled vengeance, where the victims (or the friends and family of a victim if somebody died) get to enjoy the fact that at least the criminal got their life ruined as well?
Or would you like it to be to attempt to deal with criminals in a fashion that reduced recidivism as much as is possible, allowing for compensation of victims where reasonable and possible, but providing explicitly no vengeance-based 'compensation'?
Because a justice system is going to look radically different depending on which option you want (especially if you're trying to optimize it so it does what you want it to do well, fairly, and cheaper than alternatives) – and the anti-recidivism style leads to vastly lower levels of crime. It's also vastly cheaper for society.
When you feel outrage at a child molester getting 5 years in a comfy jail cell, getting a state-paid education to boot – that's your sense of vengeance being offended. Be aware that satisfying it is incredibly expensive.
When you feel outrage at a child molester that gets out after 15 years and strikes again soon after – that's presumably you being upset that the justice system is, based on a rather lacking 'anecdotal evidence of 1', not doing its proper job.
Even if punishment isnt the point at all, incarceration and other restrictions of personal freedoms are likely required. How do you prevent recurrence of the crime?
There are some drastic options available. You could, purely out of economic expediency, just execute all criminals. But even if you're morally okay with that drastic measure, in practice that has a lot of externalities. so, _IF_ you free criminals at some point, it makes very little sense NOT to focus on reducing recidivism rates.
One could consider the punishment itself as an anti-crime measure: Use the fact that if you are convicted of a crime, you will be punished, as a deterrence. For some types of crime it works well, but for many, it has barely any effect. Crimes of passion and sexual deviancy just aren't reduced by measurable rates by increasing the punishment if caught and convicted, for example.
Add it all up? Yes, please. Provide counsel to criminals before you consider the punishment (but, as they ARE criminals, if the most effective counsel the state can provide requires significant reductions in personal freedoms, by all means).
Yes, people have a desire for justice, for fairness. This desire is natural, as well as it is right. Therefore it deserves to be addressed properly. It is also however, as you say, not what is best for society. Therefore its harm needs to be minimized, while still properly addressing the desire.
Which is why we have mostly symbolic punishments. And they work very well. Already, most of our punishments are symbolic substitutes for much, much worse punishments we could do (and used to do) to people. We don't chop off body parts any more, banish people or torture people to death (well the US does, but I hope we agree this is not a required part of a good justice system).
You deserve to have your desire for justice and fairness met, while society deserves to have its needs for public safety, deterrence and rehabilitation met. You can't really get the benefits of safety or rehabilitation symbolically.
Maybe, maybe not. But the point is that the system should leverage people's sentiments for the sake of minimizing crime, and not be designed the way human sentiment would want it to be designed (in this case, yours).
If retribution turns out not to minimize crime, then there's no place for it in the justice system. So the only question becomes whether or not retribution minimizes crime more than non-retribution methods.
Maybe unpopular, but I don’t think the victim’s pain and suffering should be relevant in determination of guilt, sentencing, or reintegration, just as a victim’s resiliency is obviously not. The important thing is the demonstrated intent and willingness to do harm, or inability to control their harmful behavior, because that is what we can expect more of.
But you do know why this is a terrible point, right?
This is exactly why we have courts; to deliver justice over vengeance, having proven guilt.
Victims and offenders are extremes. Victims want maximum sentencing for vengeance and punishment, offenders want maximum mercy. Neither is likely to be fair to the other. Courts are there to moderate and hand out fair rulings based on societies agreed laws. (yes I know many have problems with laws, but thats a totally different discussion)
Your point relies on the notion that because as a victim we would want maximum punishment for vengeance, that is how the law and justice system should be. Well, no, it is the exact opposite. You must have heard the opposite argument : What if you and your family were starving, would you steal to eat? Would you kill to steal so that your child might eat? Exact same logic, just opposite. Now we can argue for a very lenient justice system, right? Well, the justice system sits squarely int he middle of both. Its must give out fair punishment. Its must be fair to BOTH sides.
This type of point is as bad and manipulative as the "what have you got to hide" routine. IMHO, its an abuse of language and the people its used against. It is politician talk.
I think a lot of people here disagree with you, but you aren't wrong. This is a fact a lot of people forget when they jump to the defense of criminals.
It's also possible to believe that revenge against a criminal isn't positive for anyone on its own. There should be consequences to crime, especially egregious ones like murder, but that doesn't mean that the victims are better off and it doesn't mean we should sadistically torture people who almost always have wiring issues that made them prone to committing terrible acts. It's essentially saying that we believe that criminals are hopeless for reform, which can be true, but often times it's not true.
I find your points quite interesting. If I'm understanding correctly, that if the victims, families of victims, or frankly, anyone who feels pain and wants to seek retribution, don't believe that the retribution is sufficient, then they may take action into their own hands. I witnessed this living in Tanzania, where if people didn't trust the police to arrest and punish someone who stole, sometimes the people would track down and seek mob justice (violence?) against the person who stole.
So if the government would take a true rehabilitative approach, and maybe arrest people but treat them well, try to help them so they don't do the same behaviors in the future, a percentage of the population might see that as insufficient and take retribution into their own hands.
You've helped me realize why I've actually shifted my professional focus from wanting to change politics to wanting to change culture. Seems a lot of being in government is doing what the people want, and if the people want retribution, then the government has to follow it.
I hope for (and am working towards) a world in which we help people know our pain not by trying to cause the same pain to them, but by expressing our pain to them with more granularity, because the pain they'd feel as a result of retribution will never be the exact same pain we feel, as our contexts are way too complex to replicate exactly.
I really appreciate your comment, thank you for helping me think more deeply about this.
I think a lot of people also don't make a distinction between punitive and rehabilitative justice.
Do I want to punish people? No, the threat of punishment seldom deters people (there's even that saying, it's better to ask forgiveness than request permission). I don't care about punishing people, I care about having a better society. Helping people who've done wrong fix their mistakes and be better citizens is what I care about. If punishment did that, then sure, let's do it, but it doesn't.
People need to get past their need for vengeance, whether dressed up as justice or laid bare.
On the other hand, it can be equally traumatizing for the victim's family to see the perpetrator get off with a slap on the wrist.
We don't have to go into the extremes either way.
Also, the desire for punishment is is not about seeing the perpetrator suffer, but about paying for the damage they've done. If someone bumps your car, would you describe the desire for the guilty party to pay for the damages to be a mental illness?
People that are OK with innocent people getting hurt never seen to realize that this usually guarantees that criminals get away with their crimes by the wrong person being convicted. Is that also something you are OK with?
That's laudable, and what most people in the justice system probably work for. But go and talk to the people that system serves, i.e. the public, and I think you'll come out with a different understanding of what purposes punishment in the justice system serves.
Not to mince words, we've managed to humanize the justice system to a large extent, but by no means have we been able to remove the desire of the public to see criminals humiliated and deprived of their freedom, even lives, on tit-for-tat moral grounds. So, while the justice system in many 'civilized' countries does the best it can to be rational, in order to keep the public happy, it also needs to be seen to be sufficiently harsh on crime.
I feel the same way. However, some people are more "eye for an eye" types and nothing makes them feel better than seeing someone punished that "wrongs" them.
There are more than a few people that fetishize punitive actions for evil doers.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who want to reduce the amount of crime that happens, and then they are more concerned with if the justice system actually achieves this goal. Pain based justice plainly doesn't.
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