To those saying that doctors wouldn’t go along with it, since it’s doing harm: I don’t see a difference on that score from kidney donation (or bone marrow, or blood). Doctors do cut kidneys out of healthy people to put them in those that need it, and I don’t think any doctor has moral qualms about this. The difference, of course, is that kidney donors are volunteers. But it’s widely understood that any sort of punishment involves removing some degree of freedom of choice from the punished.
To use another, perhaps closer, analogy, the punishment for sexual crimes sometimes involves castration. Again, that’s medically removing some of the functionality of the criminal’s body. If it’s acceptable to do so to prevent the criminal from relapsing, is it not also acceptable to do so to make restitution to the victim?
Which makes the situations only superficially alike, and different in the ways that matter. A procedure designed to cripple a healthy non-consenting person is not the same as procedure that takes a donation from a volunteer.
That’s chemical castration. It’s treatment with a drug. The testicles are not physically removed and the effects go away if the criminal stops taking the drug. (I don’t think it’s clear that it even works.) So it’s not the same as cutting off a criminal’s arm or foot or removing an organ for transplantation to his victim. I don’t approve of the procedure in the first place and it’s not common (it’s mandatory in three states, I think, and it’s offered as an option in some others). Your statement that it qualifies as removing the “functionality” of the testicles is dubious because chemical castration is supposed to reduce the sex drive but it doesn’t make the criminal sterile.
I’m curious as to whether the victim of a brutal or heinous crime would want or be emotionally able to handle the psychological weight of knowing their attackers hand, leg, face, etc. is now theirs.
I admit, I didn’t think of that aspect. Yeah, a lot of people would find that disturbing; although they might well prefer it to not having functional body parts.
Yeah. The creepiness of receiving an evil body part has been tapped a fair amount in fiction. An eye in the film The Eye, for instance, although I’m certain I recall the reception of an evil eye transplant as a plot well before 2002. A hand is particularly popular: Evil Dead II, Idle Hands, and an important secondary character in the TV series Angel, just off the top of my head.
And in reality, some individuals with body dysmorphia genuinely believe that a body part has been replaced with one that doesn’t belong to them. It is apparently quite disconcerting, sufficient to desire amputation.
[LIST]
[li]Unlike killing people slowly, this proposal actually accomplishes something in terms of justice, it repairs some of the harm done. It’s not just cruelty for the sake of cruelty or for vengeance.[/li]
[li]I’m not promoting it as a good idea, I’m asking if it’s a good idea. It’s a question that popped into my head that I thought might produce an interesting discussion.[/li][/QUOTE]
There are 4 main theories of punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and retribution. There is also a fifth school advocating restorative justice, which is what the OP is a variant of.
It sounds great to me. Amputation with anesthesia sounds far less cruel than what the criminal inflicted.[sup]1[/sup] More to the point, (Marley) while recovering from surgery isn’t a walk in the park, neither is 7 years in the clink. It seems to me that if you gave prisoners a choice between:
Amputation + a prosthetic + health insurance that will replace your unit every 5 years
and
Five additional years in prison,
that many would rationally choose the former.[sup]2[/sup] We shouldn’t evaluate the OP’s policy in a vacuum. I believe it could be applied (hypothetically in our SF scenario) without brutality. My underlying theme is that we should not artificially limit punishment to our broken system of incarceration: I’m open to considering alternatives.
[sup]1[/sup] Spot the logical fallacy!
[sup]2[/sup] This argument isn’t decisive either, though it does have salience.
Yes! this is what I was thinking too. I certainly wouldn’t want to look at a body part from my attacker every day (nor feel it etc). Nor, I suspect would it be all that likely that the new part would be a good fit, in appearance or size. I’m now imagining having a man’s hairy outsize leg attached to my body… apart from anything else what a pain finding shoes! I’ll take the prosthetic thanks.
What if someone’s crime resulted in multiple limb loss to multiple people? If two or more people are missing a left foot which one gets it? This topic is fundamentally absurd.