It generally demands deterrence. Helping the victims out is great, and the proceedings should do that as best they can, but the largest benefit that can be brought to society as a whole is showing that doing these kinds of things will be bad for you.
I think the principle includes a certain degree of deterrence as well as inconvenience to the victim. Calculating exactly the right punishment is, of course difficult. That's what courts are for.
While I agree that much more focus should be given to helping victims and much less to retribution, deterrence is also a key pillar of the justice system and should definitely be exercised here. It's likely not possible to make all victims "whole again", but we can make up for that by "making an example" to other potential criminals, showing them the "danger" of committing similar crimes. If "the next SBF" sees the risk of life in prison isn't worth it and decides against running a similar scheme, we've actually saved more people than we could've by only repaying damages to SBF's victims.
The point is to simultaneously satiate the public's need for retribution, while also keeping people's lives from falling apart. If the public didn't demand retribution, this wouldn't be an issue.
Depends on the goal, are we trying to make sure their life is worse than the victims to it's own end or are we trying to optimize the outcome for society by preventing future damage and removing as much as we can? If the latter then the inability to negate the effects on the victim alone probably isn't the driving factor on how we create the optimal outcome for society. Especially for crimes where a permanent separation of the criminal from society (e.g. death or imprisonment for the rest of their life) is deemed excessive or too expensive and recidivism can result in more damage than the initial crime if the goal is to expressly ignore integrating them back into society.
I have a hard time with the concept of retribution alone, but I think if it is phrased in terms of modeling societal standards and demonstrating to others that this behavior is unacceptable, it is still valuable to society. I guess you can mark that under "deterrence", but it's less about sending a signal to future would-be criminals, and more about communicating societal standards to the entire society at large.
Up front the prospect of even greater damage might deter people.
Similar to how punishing wrong-doers in general doesn't help anyone after the fact, but one justification people bring up is deterrence before the fact.
(I profess no firm opinion in the matter. This is just giving the argument a steelmanning.)
The application of legal penalties should be deterrent enough. If they are not, they should be made more severe.
The whole reason we have laws is to help people protect other people. If we expected everyone to protect themselves, we'd have no use for law. This is exactly why victim blaming is pointless and stupid.
Providing a strong disincentive to the perpetrator (and in the mean time, locking them up) improves society, whereas doing so to the victim does not. That makes all the necessary difference.
It's the difference between restorative justice and retributive justice. This is the former, and seems better for the public good.
I want them to know they'll lose everything they gained if they're caught. I don't want them coming up with ever more clever and socially destructive ways to avoid being caught because of harsh penalties.
Consider this: someone drives without paying proper attention and kills someone. It's time for victim impact statements, and relative after relative asks the court for lenience on the driver because the victim was a drunk and a wifebeater, the world is better off without him.
Not sure that that is a good idea, justice is about more than just those immediately affected by a crime
a) don't underestimate the importance of feeling like having received justice
b) deterrence is important, especially in cases like this: if there are consequences for willfully ignoring something that causes severe harm to others, it's less likely to be willfully ignored in the future. If you can expect to only have to make others whole (if caught), it's a lot easier to just not care. And legal compensation rarely actually makes people whole.
And I think the punishment part has two aspects to it. Deterrence being one, and preventing vigilantism being the second.
In cases where someone is wronged, they want to see the perpetrator punished and feel like they are getting what they deserve. It's not enough to have the perpetrator punished quietly. The victim wants to know it. And they want to feel as though it matches or surpasses their suffering. Eye for an eye.
The problem with this line of argument is the assumption that deterrence is the only purpose of punishment. Justice (in the hard-to-quantify sense referenced by the GP) for the victim and community (and on a practical tangent, the deterrence of vigilante justice) is a pretty significant purpose of punishment.
I don’t agree and not agree, just exploring the idea. I think the deterrent part of a justice system is to deter the person harmed from initiating or continuing a cycle of retribution that reduces civilization to ruin. If it could be a deterrent for people who do wrong, then it does a bad job of it. In reality the wrongs and rights people do are not their own, just random happenstance that configured a person to be in the position to act in a certain way at a certain time.
reply