Fifteen years while loved ones of the deceased spend the rest of their lives in mourning? Thank God I'm not.
We lock people up as a punishment just like your parents may have sent you to your room when you were acting up. We do it under the thinking of they won't do it again once they've paid their debt but that thinking is flawed on SO many level. Among them are:
1. Prison does NOT reform people in fact it pushes many deeper into a life of crime
2. Even after they have "paid their debt to society" they are still ostracised and disadvantaged
3. Unlike your parents there is no mercy/compassion in our judicial system AFAICT or if there is it's only directed at upper-class white males....
I don't know if it's valid, but it certainly a reason why we lock people up. "An eye for an eye" is a universal principle and I assume victims expect some type of revenge. Maybe that's something we should refrain from in a perfect world, but I don't think we're there yet!
I think that concept is fundamentally flawed... I don't think it's sustainable or really fair.
Vengeance is never a good agenda. Eye for an eye is an universal sadist principle.
How much they have varied from the Victorian method of prisons depends on the country, from Scandinavia at the one end,to the UK at the other.
No, it's not. It's a common desire, but it is not universal. And plenty of victims of various crimes don't want revenge, but to just put the whole affair behind them.
It's one of the established reasons: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. The following are all from Wikipedia:
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Deterrence is the use of punishment as a threat to deter people from offending.
Incapacitation in the context of sentencing philosophy refers to the effect of a sentence in terms of positively preventing (rather than merely deterring) future offending.
Rehabilitation is the re-integration into society of a convicted person and the main objective of modern penal policy.
Retributive justice is a theory of justice that considers punishment, if proportionate, to be the best response to crime. When an offender breaks the law, justice requires that they forfeit something in return.
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The U.S. certainly puts more weight to retribution - in my opinion, too much weight - while European justice systems are more interested in rehabilitation, sometimes being ridiculously naive.
Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Germany/Uni...
Murder rate for 2011 (Homicide rate per year per 100,000 inhabitants): Germany: 0.86. USA: 5.
That's nearly 6x as many murders per capita in the USA than Germany.
Regardless, the length of the prison sentence has no bearing on the mourning process.