This sounds good. It is important that we recognize all of the purposes of punishment instead of overemphasizing one or neglecting the other.
Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent.
In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.
> Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.
One might argue a fourth end as well: removal.
When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said.
For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug.
Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders.
So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.
>harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero
Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility
Yeah, and part of the problem is that punishment cannot be made inevitable (any more than crime can be made "zero" as I'd inferred, despite what public expectation might look like xD).
First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population.
Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose.
And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies.
So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.
You're missing a function: Removal. Locking up criminals prevents them committing additional crimes that impact the general public. Data from the last few years shows that there's definitely a Pareto aspect to criminal populations, and absent an ability to rehabilitate, removal is the next best option for society at large.
I would argue that removal can be analyzed into the other categories, or into something that isn't the province of punishment.
1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive
2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort
3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end
This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.
The idea is that if they are making a rational choice to embezzle or not (and have other viable options for living), then knowing jail time is a possible outcome changes the expected payout equation. In that way it can be preventative, but only in those specific sorts of cases.
Would love to read into this research if you have a link or something to search
I think there's also a fourth "end" to prison punishment, but I don't know the proper name for it.
It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime.
Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.
The technical term is incapacitation. (Other commenters in this thread are also referring to it as “removal”.)
For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”.
I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.
>"It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice"
Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice!
Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.
I've read the Bible. Especially as you get towards the end, the books don't seem to have an especially lofty view of the criminal justice system.
I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.
Rehabilitation is retribution.
So many things can never have full repatriation. The best we can do is have society acknowledge, forcefully, the wrongs done via prison sentencing.
But then many countries go wrong on policy - punitive imprisonment leads to worse individual and social outcomes than a rehabilitation focus.
It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice
damn…
One of the most baffling elements of the justice system is how little the victim is involved in the justice. 'Society' should not lord the lion's share of the justice decisions over the victims. Quite often the victim would prefer compensation and release over getting fuck all while the perpetrator languages in prison at the tax dollar of the victim.
Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.
You are baffled by the western concept of justice.
In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.
There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.
There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.
The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.
I think you're confusing or conflating civil and criminal courts. If someone breaks a law, that's generally a matter for the state to decide in a criminal court. If someone was damaged (i.e. if the victim feels the perpetrator owes them compensation), that's a matter for them to bring up themselves in the civil courts. These are separate functions; one situation could be tried in both courts. A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.
> A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.
The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title).
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...
No, I don't think they are confusing those things. I think they are critiquing the system at large and are alluding towards alternatives such as restorative justice.
There's no element of the civil trial I'm aware of that allows the prisoner to be released to perform activity to compensate the victim. In practice imprisoning the perp against the wishes of the victim robs them of their civil awards, either by delay or denial.
Distancing the victim from the outcome of sentencing is by design and, arguably, for the better in a democracy. Crimes violate the social order, not just the victim. It behooves us all to have a system wherein (in theory) the system, not the victim, applies a set of rules to determine punishment, as contrary as that might seem to one’s sense of self, morals, etc. It’s a part of why “justice is blind.”
Also victims are nearly always emotionally involved, and emotional-based decisions aren't generally good. Punishments would be much more severe if it were up to the victims.
If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.
IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.
It'd be such a mixed bag it wouldn't resemble anything 'fair'. I know some people who are against capital punishment even for obviously guilty serial killers. I know some people would think capital punishment is called for if you accidentally dinged their car door.
Very well said. Here's a concrete example. After the Charleston church shooting, some members of victims' families forgave their murderer. Should that mean the shooter should have gone free? Certainly not, he was still prosecuted because that is what is good for society.
https://www.wbtv.com/2025/06/17/what-forgiveness-charleston-...
I strongly disagree. The victim is generally deeply incapable of being objective about the situation. How many perpetrators of domestic violence would go free because their spouse is too scared to ask for proper punishment? This is already a big problem with securing cooperation for prosecution, and I'd aim to make that better, not worse. You'd have enormous disparities in sentencing based on the personality of the victim. Should mugging a vindictive asshole carry a harsher sentence than mugging a nice person who believes in second chances no matter what?
The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.
There are (institutional, complicated, well-ordered) civil and criminal systems elsewhere in the world where victims are much more directly involved in sentencing and punishment, and you probably wouldn't want to live in one.
There are certainly differing personal opinions on what they'd like to live under. For instance, Dutch lawyer Michael van Notten moved from the western to to the xeer system in the horn of Africa, and found it superior in his personal estimation from the perspective of serving victims, as documented in his book.
A clan-based blood-money system? I reiterate the claim I made previously: while you might enjoy reading about them, you wouldn't want to live under one.
I don't see it as a binary option. Why can't we learn from one another? I'm more interested in some of the elements found in for instance that system, where the victim can elect to prioritize restitution over retribution when it leads to a higher likelihood they will be made whole. I don't see any requirement that one has to embrace everything about a societies' system to find advantages in elements of it.
Well, I'll just say, when I referred earlier to institutionalized systems wherein victims are given principal roles in meting out justice, I was specifically using that word to contrast with things like xeer clan law --- a system you just implied might be superior to our common law system (it is not). There are "modern" legal systems descended from that kind of oral tradition honor law. You would not want to live under them.
Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".
I'll be honest, I have not seen a single implemented legal system I would like to live under, although that's not to dismiss all systems as equally bad. I was imprisoned in the USA once because an officer claimed a dog alerted, resulted in being stripped naked and cavity searched -- but that doesn't mean the entirety of our justice system is bad. Which isn't implied to be as bad as, say, a rapist getting away with it via a forced marriage as might happen under Shariah or xeer law.
The fact that someone can be temporarily jailed without any evidence or a change to challenge the charges is a painful compromise that the Founding Fathers made to balance justice (they themselves were at risk of arbitrary imprisonment by the Crown) with order (sometimes you see someone running with a bloody knife and you should arrest him before you trace his steps to find a corpse). Police departments try really hard to push what they can get away with, and there are certainly areas where I wish the courts would constrain them.
Most criminals aren't in a financial position to pay compensation. And even if you get a judgment, good luck ever collecting. When a drunk driver damaged some of my property I didn't bother sueing him because he was obviously a worthless deadbeat.
In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.