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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

But the primary purpose of justice is to punish criminal behaviors. We may want as a secondary goal to reduce recidivism but it cannot be at the expense of the primary goal. I strongly disagree with the idea that criminality is a form of mental disease and that prisons are just a sort of hospital to cure criminals.

For the same reason the severity of the sentence should be driven by the aversion of the society to the crime committed more than considerations on what will happen to the criminal after the sentence has been executed.

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The purpose is neither to punish, nor to rehabilitate: A perfect criminal justice system is one that prevents future crime, while at the same time minimizing how many people aren't doing something useful with their lives. Imprison or kill someone that could be helping society, and you are failing too.

Punishment and rehabilitation are just parts of achieving the goal: Punishment tries to prevent further crime, both by the person being punished, and people that know what will happen to them if they are caught. Rehabilitation is great when it succeeds: Sending a rapist out to do more raping isn't so great.

All of our policies about punishment, rehabilitation and enforcement quality are tradeoffs, and the question is what's the best tradeoffs. The biggest one, IMO, has little to do with the size of the punishment (they are all pretty big), but with deterrence. Nobody is going to stop killing someone because they'll "only" get 15 years in jail. 15 years in jail is horrible for most people that aren't living in terrible conditions outside. The real kick is in chances of getting caught. The criminal believes that he won't get caught, so the size of the punishment is not necessarily that relevant, other than in keeping the person that committed the crime away from doing the same again outside of jail (crime vs other immates happens!). Improved enforcement quality, and making sure that people just don't even want to do criminal things, regardless of the punishment, is where it's at.

The problem with that is that enforcement itself is a tradeoff: We could do a lot to prevent crime in NYC if 25% of people were in some form of law enforcement (including policing the police), but it'd be a tradeoff we'd all be unwilling to make, because it'd be very wasteful.

So it's nowhere ear as simple as you paint it.

Why punish people? That's not a goal, not a moral value or something anyone should have a desire to do.

The goal is peace. It has to be peace. You might never reach that goal entirely but you can try and you want people that ensure peace exists and people that restore it once it has been violated.

Quite clearly exerting vengeance through the justice system is not the best way to achieve that goal, in fact it's obviously by far the worst.

The only form of primitive justice is the law of talion. The problem with the law of talion is that it relies on the capacity of the offended party to retaliate on the offending party. If the offending party is too powerful, there is no justice.

That's why from feudal to modern societies, the Lord / King / Judge renders justice. The system becomes just again by the retaliation being decided and executed by a higher form of authority.

If someone beats me up, and we both go in front of the judge and the judge decides to do nothing because of some procedural reason or because doing nothing would benefit some greater social good, this is the very definition of injustice.

I am not saying that a justice system shouldn't care about rehabilitating criminals after they serve their sentence, but that negating the punitive role is negating the very reason why the justice system exists and is accepted.

I'd argue that the purpose of justice is to ensure that a society can be sustainable in the long term.

That means justice is combination of deterrence and rehabilitation to a. discourage behaviours that are detrimental to society as a whole and b. to ensure that the offender ceases that behaviour and becomes a productive member of society again.

'Punishment' can play as small or as large a part in point (a) as you want, but the more you make it a large part of (a), the less success you will have with point (b). And failing at point (b) means you effectively fail point (a) - ie offenders coming out of the justice system who can't integrate back into society often reoffend.

No, the purpose is not necessarily to punish. That's your opinion. Others have a more pragmatic and civilized approach.

the primary purpose of justice is to punish criminal behaviors

Americans are a scary people.

Americans didn't invent this principle, and certainly are not unique in having applied it.

...and I am not even american!

You are however unique amongst developed countries in how far you applied it.

Per capita you incarcerate more people than any other major country (developed or not).

That is true.

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