Punishment is a sadistic ritual and the justice system is meant to protect the criminal

Great Debates
1

Most people seem to be naturally vengeful. After all about 70% of Americans support the death penalty and polls I’ve seen and posts I’ve read throughout the Internet support this figure and suggest it’s similar in other countries.

We don’t really punish people to protect society or rehabilitate them. People who are put in prison generally end up more dangerous to the public upon release and the kinds of crimes that people are sentenced to life for (murder) are statistically unlikely to be repeated. As far as I’m concerned unless you intend on keeping a person in jail for their whole life (which is unrealistic considering how quickly times and policies change) or work on rehabilitating them it’s actually better just to let them go free.

I think punishment is something that the government, usually the local government does to appease the anger of the victims and of society. The justice system is actually about protecting the criminal.

Think about it. If there was no justice system to hand down sentences and punish vigilantism John Chapman would have been killed in a matter of days. Putting someone in prison for a crime such as rioting or animal abuse for a year basically does nothing aside from make them worse people (unless there’s some element of rehabilitation involved) yet most people wanted Michael Vick and the Stanley Cup rioters in Vancouver a couple of years ago to go to jail.

Even though short jail sentences really do nothing to improve the criminal’s behavior or the safety of the general public, people still support them because they either naively believe they will teach criminals a lesson beyond becoming worse criminals - or more likely just because they get a sadistic kick out of seeing people who have done bad things suffer.

I find this ugly for several reasons. For one thing if we hate people for doing bad things, we are discouraging them from rehabilitating. It’s become common to label criminals “sociopaths” and to basically say there is zero good in them and people who even suggest a possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation are seen as being “soft on crime”.

Secondly I don’t see revenge as virtuous. Even though we spout platitudes like “two wrongs don’t make a right” we obviously don’t really believe such things. We teach our children not to hit back when they are hit by a sibling yet we cheer when a murderer in Georgia is put to death.

And lastly I suspect that our bloodlust towards criminals is a safe, “guilt free” avenue to express our inherent rage as a partially carnivorous species. We can feel righteous about hating them and feel good about ourselves because they’re “bad people” or not even human at all. In the fact we could feel this way about “n****rs” or Jews and other rival tribes/nations but in today’s world the only people who it’s acceptable to hate are those who have done bad things. I wish we could go beyond hating altogether.

Punishment by law, what we call “justice” I see as a muted form of revenge. Because 2 out of 3 people give or take demand retribution for harmful acts without a justice system people would take matters into their own hands. Most people find the sentences courts hand out for crimes ridiculously soft (personally I actually think they range from fair to too harsh in most cases) and would rather see elements of torture and brutality feature in the punishment, but are okay with it to an extent since they still respect the law and its necessity in a civilized society.

I think if we abolished punishment it would cause crime rates to surge, but not for the reason people think. Without a justice system there would be blood feuds, witch hunts and vendettas by the “righteous” against criminals both alleged and real.

Punishment is necessary not because it reduces crime by keeping people safe from criminals and by deterring them but because it’s needed to keep law abiding people from taking matters into their own hands and descending into intergenerational vengeful madness against everyone who wrongs them. In places such as New Guinea that do not have modern legal traditions we see a huge rate of revenge killing and I don’t think Western people are any more humane or forgiving than they are.

2

Justice isn’t just punishment by law, it’s a far broader concept of moral rightness. It can be tainted by vengence (or sadism), but the two concepts are distinct. Believing that those who do harm to others should pay a price for that harm isn’t “ugly”, it’s part and parcel of morality and civilization.

Yes, protection of the accused is the motive for much of our criminal procedure, and in the absence of it we would have vigilantism and blood feuds and a generally worse-off society. It doesn’t follow that justice isn’t real, but rather that it’s so important that it must be protected by careful, passionless procedures.

3

Okay, an example. Let’s say some guy beats somebody up. He’s an otherwise nice guy perhaps who just got really drunk and acted like a jerk. He’s sentenced to prison for a year.

What good will putting him in prison for a year do, other than satisfy people’s righteous sadism and likely turn him into a career criminal? Will it teach him a lesson or will it just give him PTSD and/or cause him to absorb the sick ideas of the very violent and disturbed people around him?

I think for economic crimes people should have to pay back what they stole as far as they can, but for violent crimes you can’t really undo the damage unfortunately. People have this fallacious idea that committing violence against someone who has done violence somehow rights the wrong. It doesn’t change anything, really.

IMO there are only three reasons for punishment. Revenge - which is immoral, deterrence - which is ineffective, and appeasement of revenge - which is the reason we should punish people in a court of law.

4

The useful purpose of prisons is incarceration, to protect the public from dangerous people. It’s poorly used for that purpose, and largely used as a punishment and deterrence.

5

Well, is that what really happens? If you are a first time offender, do you get a year in prison (as opposed to jail, which is whole different thing) or do you generally get probation or some other less severe punishment?

It is? Why? I would say that excessive punishment (death penalty for stealing a loaf of bread) might be immoral, but punishment that fits the crime? Nope.

So why isn’t the US like New Guinea? IOW, you just contradicted the last paragraph of your OP.

I don’t know what you mean by “appeasement of revenge”.

6

I find the OP to be a poorly constructed and borderline childish argument. States have historically developed criminal justice systems because society demanded it and if the state did not satisfy this demand it lead to degradation of societal order. States want order over all things.

Ideally a justice system is about fairness, equity etc, but those are always always always secondary to its primary purpose of keeping order.

You are certainly correct that if not for government administration of justice people would administer their own justice. That, however, is not an indication that government administration of justice as a concept is barbaric, retributive, or sadistic. Government can and many times is a place where we refine things like criminal justice, something we as a society demand, and we refine it into something at least somewhat in line with Enlightenment views on the world.

You’re hanging a lot of practical failures of the American criminal justice system (recidivism rates, institutionalization, mandatory minimums, excessive sentencing for non-violent offenses etc) on the whole concept of organized criminal justice. Instead the reality is much more nuanced, in America we have a criminal justice system that certainly has problems but it is structured and operated in a manner consistent with Enlightenment ideals. The accused are generally guaranteed a trial under standardized rules, and we have a healthy appellate process to try and find when those rules and norms are violated by trial courts. Nothing is perfect, and certainly not our criminal justice system, but just because you can point to problems with it doesn’t indicate the concept of criminal justice is sadistic.

Your statistics for support of the death penalty are also about ten years out of date, support for the death penalty is waning and has been for some time. More and more States have either decided to administratively stop executing people or to legislatively end the practice (Maryland was the most recent State to end the death penalty.) Just in the past few years Maryland, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey and New York have abolished the death penalty. Many of the remaining death penalty States have carried out few to no executions since the 1976 reimplementation of the death penalty in the United States. Nationally, we’re at some of our lowest numbers in history for actual executions carried out. It was not that long ago that States like Virginia, Florida, Georgia were carrying out 10+ executions per year and Texas was sometimes carrying out more than 40. Last year the whole country executed fewer than 50.

7

I happen to believe in justice, so putting him in prison is good in itself, as it is just. Your focus is purely on the material outcome, as opposed to the moral one.

I’ll turn it around, actually, and keep it in material terms: what good does it do to not imprison those who beat up others? It sends a pretty clear message, there’s now no disincentive to beating people up, except that he or his people might come after you afterward for revenge. Which is exactly the outcome you say you don’t want. This isn’t evidence that people are vengeful, so much as that people have a sense of justice. If it were all about vengeance, we’d see a lot more instances of people being beaten or killed by their victims or victims’ families after they were released from prison. Vengeance is a personal, visceral thing, it can’t be delegated to the state to perform on your behalf. Justice, however, can.

I don’t think people believe that it rights the wrong; they believing that punishing the guilty is right in itself. Note that we prosecute crimes like attempted murder, where no actual material harm may have been inflicted: a shot that missed, for example.

8

I would prefer that we could refine our ability to distinguish rehabilitatable offenders from non-rehabilitatable ones (we’re working on it) and devise a more humane plan for removing them from civilized society forever. I have ideas about that - something along the lines of “Alien 3.”

Until we are able to find a way for people who don’t want to/aren’t able to live by the rules of society to continue their lives we seem to have only two options - to either house, clothe, feed and “rehab” them for their lifetimes. Or to end their lives so as to free up money for those who will enhance society with our assistance. Both of these choices are obscene to me.

As far as hate goes, we would all be better off learning to erase that emotion from our hearts and vocabulary. It’s far more destructive to the person who carries it than the person whom is the object of it.

Forgiveness is not the job of society; it is the job of the individual who has been harmed. And is best accomplished to give that person peace and closure. If more people did that our society in general would develop healthier attitudes.

9

This is as fallacious as the guy who was posting awhile back saying blacks who were unjustly sentenced to prison terms due to racist white juries should be given ludicrous sums of compensation ($50bn+.) His argument was “nothing could atone” for the deprivation of liberty so they must be given some insane payout.

You are correct that you cannot undo the mental damage or sometimes the physical damage of an assault, but that does not mean you cannot impose a societal penalty on people who commit assaults. By and large the U.S. prison system does not have a clear goal of rehabilitation at a systemic level. We have programs in place that can and do rehabilitate inmates interested in pursuing them, but by and large most are not interested. In some countries such programs are basically synonymous with the prison system, and they have better rehabilitation rates. But rehabilitation or no rehabilitation, since time immemorial the purpose of criminal justice system has been to attempt to right wrongs perpetrated by individuals on one another or on society.

Rehabilitation is a modern, and ancillary goal of a criminal justice system. Wanting someone punished for breaking the law is not sadism, it is a demand for justice. A concept you seem to be totally oblivious to.

Now, I do believe that non-violent offenders, unless they are “habitual criminals” should be spared any incarceration and should instead be sentenced to a combination of fines and community service (more community service if they cannot pay fines.) But I think only the harshest penalties should be given to violent offenders.

I basically think any serious assault, with lifelong physical injuries to the victim should result in a life prison term. I think rapes and murders should likewise be life prison terms. No exceptions, no parole, no discretion.

But we would have virtually no problem with prison overcrowding in my system because I would not be imprisoning people for non-violent drug offenses or non-violent crimes. Most murderers already serve very, very long sentences as to many rapists. So in the end you’d see prison populations dramatically decline under such a system.

You seem to just truly have it backwards. You seem to understand that non-violent offenses can be justly punished without incarceration (and I agree) but because you feel you can “never undo” the effects of a violent crime you are arguing we shouldn’t imprison violent criminals? Even if you are constitutionally unreceptive to the concept of justice and fair punishment, you should at least acknowledge that one premise is unambiguously wrong: that prison cannot protect society. A violent prisoner incarcerate for life is no longer a threat to society, and that is plain fact. It’s most likely at least part of the reason violent crime fell starting in the early 90s and mostly continuing to this day (there is no consensus on the reason, but I suspect it’s a multitude of reasons, and while much mandatory minimum sentence laws are bad news the large number of criminals locked up for longer terms almost certainly has to contribute to lower violent crime rates.)

10

Also, on this, you’re again incentivizing crime. If the penalty for theft or fraud is just repaying what I took (with an “as far as I can” mitigator, no less), unless I get caught 100% of the time, I have no reason not to steal or defraud.

11

A nitpick, if you will. A violent offender incarcerated for life is still dangerous to those with whom he is incarcerated and can still have a negative effect on society by harming or murdering those who are assigned to care for him.

With the multitude of rights to methods of contact with the outside world he is also able to influence co-conspiritors to continue damage to society.

This is another reason why I’d like to see a complete removal of incorrigible prisoners from social contact.

12

I’m not involved in the justice system but I thought there were entire slews of tools designed to help people who break the law get their lives back on track.

Diversion programs, drug courts, rehab, various forms of counseling, education opportunities, mental health care, etc.

I’m all for these increasing things. I know a lot of mentally ill end up in jail because society doesn’t care about what happens to them. Sadly, that is where some of them end up getting treated and start to stabilize.

13

It’s more that society did care what happened to them, and their outrage replaced one badly flawed system with another one, in a classic case of the law of unintended consequences.

14

This is true, but generally speaking we accept that COs do a dangerous job to keep the rest of society insulated from those people. I think all COs should be paid equivalent to LEOs (and in some States they are, and in some they are even sworn), they get sent into a cage full of murderers and rapists every day and in many states they make a marginal minimum wage with iffy benefits. I think the horrifically bad pay for COs is at least part of the reason they are so much more prone to abuse their authority than for example, police officers. Someone making $18,000-20,000 a year is an easy person to bribe into sneaking contraband into the prison and probably not someone it’s easy to discipline or control since he’s not losing much if he loses his job.

15

No, because they were supposed to create community health centers to replace the missing institutions. Instead they just left the mentally ill to become homeless and now many end up in and out of jail and prison.

16

There are tons of community mental health centers. But they have some of the same problems mental hospitals did (limited beds) combined with one of the problems mental hospital did not (limited legal authority to hold anyone involuntarily.)

17

The US isn’t like New Guinea because people who are not normally criminals are free to get revenge on those who have harmed their family/tribe. Deterrence only has a strong effect on people who are generally law abiding, and when the punishment is far worse than the crime (I’m sure cutting off hands does deter quite a bit of theft but its cruelty makes tolerating more theft the lesser evil).

18

I should note that I do think we should punish crime. However, I consider it an evil necessitated by people’s need for justice (revenge).

If we didn’t have a justice system people who stole would have to fear the wrath of their victims and society and not prison.

19

Do you have a cite for you statement about deterrence? Sounds like pretty circular reasoning to me: Deterrence only has an effect on law-abiding people. Well, people who are law abiding don’t need to be deterred. But what makes you so sure they would be law abiding without the deterrence?

All societies have strong social taboos about certain crimes, and the members of those societies are socialized to avoid criminal behavior, partly through punishment when they do. It’s not at all clear to me that most people would be law abiding if they didn’t think there was any consequences to being otherwise.

20

Wishing suffering upon somebody is sadism. Period.

According to Wikipedia sadism is “the derivation of pleasure as a result of inflicting pain, cruelty, degradation, or humiliation, or, watching such behaviors inflicted on others.”

“Pleasure” might be a strange word to use but I would say that it would adequately describe the feeling many people get when they hear of a criminal being sent to prison or put to death. Satisfaction is probably nearer the mark but being happy that somebody is suffering is sadism. Whether it’s “good” or “bad” sadism might be debatable but it’s still sadistic.