For the amount of money it costs to keep someone in prison, we could pay their tuition at Harvard. Like it or not, the victim is going to pay for the criminal somehow.
On a different subject: Retribution? How about justice? I once heard about someone who had finished serving his term for rape (it might have been Tyson, I’m not sure), but his victim was still a wreck. She had tried to commit suicide and was still afraid to leave her house. I was indignant. Why the hell should a criminal be free to go about his life when his innocent victim was still in prison? That’s why we need retribution: because it’s not fair that the guilty should be happy after they’ve made the innocent miserable.
On this, we differ greatly. I believe that your human rights* are inalienable. Nothing a person does can cause them to be revoked, no matter how aggregious the crime.
Your rights are not contingent upon whether or not you “deserve” them. Possibly, what he deserves is to be taken out back and beaten to a bloody pulp. But we don’t do that. We’re better than that.
Frankly, two “wrongs” don’t make a “right.” By violating a criminal’s human rights, we become no better than he. On this issue, society should take the moral high ground, else we are hypocritical in punishing him for violating others’ rights.
**
Remember that not everyone convicted of a crime is guilty. Mistakes do happen. By restricting access to the courts, you remove any chance a wongly convicted man has of gaining his freedom.
Yes, inmates abuse this access with nuisance suits, but just because some misuse their rights, doesn’t mean that all should be punished with their removal. Most inmates will never file a suit. It’s only a minority of inmates who abuse the system.
I’m sure there are quite a few people who abuse Social Security, but should we simply scrap the program in order to stop the dishonest few from being able to cheat the system?
Oh? So youd have no problem with a felon walking straight out of the prison gates to the welfare office?
*By this I mean the right to be treated humanely-- to be housed in clean, safe, healthy conditions, to have decent medical care, to be fed adequately, to have access to attorneys and the court system, etc.
My own feeling is that the primary reason for retribution should be in recognition of the worth of the victims. That is, if you let a guy get away with beating a woman senseless and raping her, you’re saying that her pain and suffering does not matter. By imprisoning the criminal, you recognize the victims’ worth – you are saying, “It is wrong that he did this to her, so wrong that we are going to deprive him of his freedom for years.” It is a way that society has of recognizing the value of the victims’ life.
Back in the Jim Crow years, black people were not considered to have any social worth, and just as you might expect, black-on-black crime was treated much more casually than black-on-white crime. White-on-black crime rarely got treated at all. One of the reasons that the crime rate rose after Civil Rights, I suspect, is that black-on-black crimes started getting recognition in the stats.
Of course, the worth of the victim rationale applies primarily to cases where there are individuals harmed by other individuals, and posits a certain amout of rationality in the justice system which an objective analysis shows to be laughably absent.
Frex, we imprison people in jail for smoking pot in some places for longer than we imprison people in jail for assault and/or rape. Our justice system is a hodgepodge, more a reflection of the ignorance and stupidity of the American voter and their legislators than any well-considered reasoning about retribution, deterrence, rehabilitiation, or any of the other ephemera that are brought forth when the topic of justice is discusssed.
Yes, because what we are all saying here is that nobody should be punished for committing crimes. No wait, that’s not what was being said. In fact, there was nothing said against punishing criminals at all. It was about whether RETRIBUTION was an acceptable MOTIVATION of society.
Considering that was the OP question as well as the title of the topic, it is a surprisingly small amount of posts that actually deal with it.