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Even if it's momentarily rewarding, I don't think that's useful from a societal perspective. The justice system should focus on minimizing crime - if punishment does that, fine, but any kind of "getting even" just feeds our base instincts and doesn't accomplish anything.
Emotion has no place in a justice system.
I personally don't think so, but that's what a Justice system without any retribution component would prescribe. I think punitive measures are a reasonable. I also think that the prison system in the US is needlessly punitive and often cruel.
But anyway, there's still the question of deterrence, which is not the same as retribution. If others see you can murder with no penalty, that may increase crime.
There's many cases of say, a father going out and murdering their daughter's rapist. It's unlikely that they would kill people that aren't raping their daughters, but if you simply let them go free, it really kind of signals that murder is okay as long as you can justify it well enough. Generally the only time we really condone killing someone is when he's defending himself... and sometimes not even then.
I do think that putting said person in prison for a period of time is appropriate. No punishment whatsoever is condoning murder.
It's just that it's tough to condemn decent people like that to a prison system that is so focused on being terrible for everyone in there. I think prisons need to be a better place to live for all prisoners and the current system simply isn't adequate or reasonable.
To be rational, we want to choose our goals wisely, and then act rationally and without emotion when it comes to the pursuit of those goals. Personally, my goal for the criminal justice system is not merely to minimize crime, but to ensure that justice is done.
In my opinion, if someone intentionally rapes and kills a child, for example, it is a positive good to remove them from existence. You simply do not get to commit such an act and remain on earth with the rest of us. If we lock such a person up forever, that is good. If we kill them, that is even better. To me, that's what justice means.
I take issue with killing them because it requires an infallible system that never kills anyone that doesn't deserve it and my conscious rests easier not killing someone that doesn't deserve to die than it does to kill someone that obviously does.
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.
And talking about "moral decay" (as if morality was some objective set of rules that society can either follow or not follow, and not a huge continuum of various moral standards of both individuals and societies) makes me quite sure that you're speaking from sentiment, rather than from reason. "It feels right to me, therefore it is right" is not a good argument for convincing anyone of anything.
I agree that it's very hard to measure this sort of thing. There are way too many (constantly changing) factors that affect the crime rate, that it's almost impossible to isolate a single cause and measure its effect. However, that should only motivate us to approach the problem even more rigorously, rather than to resort to subjective heuristics.