But what if doing so best served the purposes of Goals #1, 2, and/or 3? Would you support giving one person 2 years (or even 2 days) and another person 4 years (or even 40 years) for the same crime, committed under the same circumstances, if you could somehow know that that would most completely accomplish goals 1, 2, and 3?
As part of the experimental process. Presumably finding the optimal punishment would be subject to continual refinement.
Actually I didn’t have the Minority Report scenario in mind.
Say statistical studies show that socioeconomic status mandates that 1 guy be given 1 year in prison, another 2.5 years – for smoking pot, say, to make it especially unjust. What to do?
I for one wouldn’t mind spending the extra tax dollars to establish equal justice under the law. So I wouldn’t act on that purely hypothetical study.
Ok, now say we think that prisoners who have a job offer as well as a person outside who will vouch for them monetarily are less likely to get into trouble upon release. And we have the stats to back it up. What to do?
In that case, this voter would say, “Fuck the poor”, or something analogous if I was in polite company. Others may differ on this. Heck, I hope others differ on this.
No, then the taxpayers of the society are continuously harmed by having to pay to support this prisoner, every single year until he dies in prison.
Because lawyers and judges are paid better than guards, the death penalty is more expensive than life without parole in the US.
Does this change your mind? I suspect not. Death penalty advocates are typically not moved by cost considerations, though there may be exceptions.
Many are uncomfortable advocating retribution or revenge, but still favor the death penalty. Their true colors are revealed when they are exposed to evidence yet remain wholly unmoved.
Personally, I’d favor the death penalty if it could be shown that it was a cost-effective means of saving a statistically significant number of lives. Over the past several years, some evidence has arisen along these lines, so my position could shift in the future, pending closer analysis. At that point I’d have to weigh the probability of killing a certain number of innocent defendants.
- Vengeance - Explicitly to punish the person for the act.
I disagree that you feel this goal as unworthy of the U.S. criminal code.
I feel that people need to be held accountable for their actions. (There is a difference between “Justice” and “Vengeance” in my mind.)
There are certain acts which society at large has decided it will not tolerate. (Like murder.) If you do these acts, you can and should expect to suffer the consequnces of your actions, IMO.
As an example: I don’t have any emotional ties to David Westerfield’s victim ( Murder of Danielle van Dam - Wikipedia ), so there is no anger in me driving some desire for “revenge”. But I do think her murder was an act that Mr. Westerfield should suffer the consequences for (incarceration).
The other goals are indeed worthy ones, but if they do not fit an individual convicts circumstances, what would you do?
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“Rehabitualtion” is not always succesfull. Some individuals just don’t give a rat’s fuzzy butt about other folks.
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“Deterrence” is not always effective, either. For example, pot smoking is a crime, one that some folks are in jail for, but it doesn’t seem to have deterred too many individuals. Indeed, because it’s illegal, it may have even picked up a “forbidden fruit” aspect to it.
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“Prevention” is somewhat situational. While for a lot of crimes, merely being in jail removes the opportunity to continue doing some of these bad acts (like stealing cars), it won’t with others. (Drug use/sales, murder.)
As far as sentencing goes (too much time in jail for pot use, for example), we can debate on what our collective sence of “right” should entail. I think sentencing should consider all four of your goals.
I am open to the idea of allowing the Judges some latitude in sentencing, as not all crimes (covered by a single statute) are the same on a real world level.
Example: murder. David Westerfield killed in cold blood.
Compare that to a murder were it is a “crime of passion”. Let’s say that a man and his child are going to a city park. His child darts across the street, eager to get to a merry-go-round, and is hit and killed by a car. In an act of emotional rage, that father kills the driver of the car.
I don’t think the emotional father should receive the same sentence as Westerfield.
However, I realise that is a bit of a subjective opinion. I certainly am willing to leave all that in the hands of the presiding Judge’s, and/or the ballot box (if there is a voter referendum on murder sentencing…).
Quite frankly, I couldn’t disagree more with the OP. Not only would I order the list in the exact opposite order, but I feel like you’ve unfairly marked punishment as vengeance. That is, I think of vengeance as a “you hurt me, so I’m going to hurt you” mentality is why you look at it as an unworthy cause. This shouldn’t be why people are punished. It should be punished simply because society has set up rules and violating the rules of society deserves consequences. This is what establishes the authority of law, otherwise we have anarchy.
Further, I like to look at justice as a bit of human enforced karma. If anything it PREVENTS vengeance because it takes that opportunity out of the hands of the people who were effected and into an unbiased system. For instance, say my car is vandalized. Vengeance would be tracking down the punk who did it and beating my satisfaction out of him. Justice would be getting him to make reparations and pay penance for his deeds. Again, this karmic priniciple is part of the fabric that holds society together IMO.
This, here’s my list of reasons:
- Punishment - Attempt to establish a balance for the acts commited. The punishment should be equitable. IMO, this is sufficient reason in and of itself.
- Prevention - The person has established that he violates the rules of law. It is of the utmost importance to prevent a known threat from repeating. I think this is a sufficient justification for making punishments become more serious for repeat offenders so it is either less profitable or simply doesn’t let them back into society.
- Deterence - I’m not so sure this really works except in a sense of “keeping honest people honest”, so I put a lower priority on it. This is difficult to achieve because the threshold on punishment is set based on what is equitable, and thus deterence is more of a side-effect, because making it higher to increase deterence then sets the balance off.
- Rehabilitation - Beside the fact that the criminal is the one that owes society, not the other way around, this just plain isn’t possible in many cases. Sure, many criminals end up getting put back out in society and so this is a desirable outcome. However, if this is the goal, how do we subjectively determine this? If one person can be, in some magical way, determined to be rehabilitated for a crime in 1 year, but another person takes 10 years for virtually the same crime, does the latter have to spend more time imprisoned?
A couple of thoughts: first, I think vengeance is kind of a loaded term. It implies an emotional, perhaps excessive, response to a wrong, as opposed to terms like punishment or retribution, which are not so emotionally loaded.
I don’t see anything wrong with punishment for a heinous act. But the more salient point is, if the OP values deterrence more than punishment, one cannot deter without punishment. If deterrence is going to work, there has to be undesirable consequences, and I don’t mean to say that that bad consequences are sufficient to establish deterrence.
If there was some publicly-known reason or explanation showing that it would completely accomplish goals 1, 2, and 3, then sure. I can’t think of any possible way that could happen, though.
All punishment - imprisonment and capital punishment alike - costs money. And as Measure for Measure indicated, more money is spent on someone on death row than on someone serving a life sentence.
I probably should have chosen a better word in place of vengeance (as Ravenman said, it’s a pretty loaded emotional term). I would still place the idea of “Justice” in that category, though, because it operates on the same basic level as retribution/vengeance/etc. Basically, the person “deserves” what they’re getting. None of the other items in the list operate on that principle; they operate more on a “how do we avoid this in the future” principle.
There have been some good responses so far - I will need to visit this thread again after work to respond to the remaining points.
But the key there is that little phrase you slipped in: “in the US”.
That is so expensive here because we keep convicted capital criminals on death row for years & years, while they file appeal after appeal (via those expensive lawyers & judges). If there were reasonable limits on the number of appeals that could be filed, and a reasonable time scheduled for the execution (say 1 year after conviction), the death penalty would NOT be more expensive.
And in the US, it hardly qualifies as a death penalty at all – don’t more death row inmates die of old age or other natural causes than are actually executed?
P.S. I am not a death penalty activist; I generally oppose it and have campaigned to keep it outlawed here in Minnesota. But we need to be honest in our arguments about this.
winces
Ugh, that was worded pretty sloppily…
A little on nomenclature.
Well the OP didn’t say that the list was put in order of importance: I certainly didn’t treat it that way. Also, I seem to recall #4 being called “Retribution”, which is somewhat less loaded than vengeance or revenge.
“Punishment” won’t work for as a label for #4, because we’re discussing various justifications for punishment or criminal sanction. (Pst: Ravenman) And frankly I think the term “Justice” is loaded as well. How about “Retaliation” or “Collective Retaliation”?
But under that status quo, it appears that a fair number of innocent people are put to death. So it seems that we might need more safeguards, not less.
I see from here that Kansas found that capital cases are 70% more expensive than parole cases. Other states have different experiences (and we need to be careful to capture total lifetime costs), but the gap is wide enough that hand waiving about cost cutting doesn’t cut it. Hm. That link claimed that in Texas, the death penalty costs about three times more than imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security for 40 years. And that’s in the hang 'em and move on state of Texas.
In all fairness though, there may be places where the death penalty could be exercised cheaply, though I suspect some number of innocent bystanders would find themselves caught under the guillotine.
Ok, now, where was I? 
Then we would have to modify the approach we’re using to achieve the goal, but still aim for that goal.
Unfortunately, you’re right. But if you have a kid that just won’t play nice with other kids, you have to try all sorts of different approaches to change that.
I agree, especially about the “forbidden fruit” comparison.
Agreed.
My point in all of this (it might be hard to spot, since I’ve agreed with all of your points) is: alone, each of these goals can’t quite cut it, but together, they should.
The major points of reference that I keep in mind through all this, are the methods we use to punish our children. We only punish them when they carry out some act that shouldn’t be repeated. It’s punish the behavior, not the behaver.
I agree. I think the sentencing for the emotional father should not be as severe as the sentencing for Westerfield. But, there are actually two different types of crimes occurring in this example - one murder was premeditated, the other wasn’t. So, I don’t see a problem with there being different punishments.
The behavior in both cases, though, is what needs to be punished. Society would prefer to be without either of those actions.
I think vengeance was probably a poorly chosen word. But I’d still feel the same way, even if you replace it with “justice”.
What is supposed to happen once the criminal serves their time in jail, though? We want to avoid the criminal behavior in the future, right?
I completely agree that society has set up rules and it doesn’t want people to break them. I completely agree that punishment should be doled out to people who break those rules. I just think that the punishment should be geared towards making people not break those rules again in the future.
This is exactly why I don’t think it has any place in a legal system. Vengeance isn’t prevented when the opportunity is taken out of the hands of the people affected, because the “unbiased system” is actually a “biased system”. Many people want to see Charles Manson put to death - even though they are completely removed from the crime (i.e., they only know about it from the news).
The legal system is not an “unbiased system”, simply because it is enforced by people and people have biases. Because of this, it can’t handle the concept of “human enforced karma”.
I completely agree about reparations (that should probably be included in my list somewhere), but the “pay penance” part I disagree with. Yes, I think they should be punished (e.g., imprisoned, fined, etc.) - but it should be carried out with the idea that the system is trying to prevent the crime from occurring again in the future.
I completely agree, Ravenman. I should have used a different term.
Readers, please mentally replace the term “vengeance” in my OP with “justice”.
I think I’m losing people with my subtlety.
I do not think that punishments should be eradicated.
I do not think that crimes should not have punishments.
I do think that punishments should serve the goal of prevention.
Vengeance/punishment/retaliation is a moral issue. Everyone’s going to have their own subjective opinion on that.
The other three are more subject to objective standards. But the facts on rehabilitation and deterence are inconclusive. Nobody’s ever been able to prove a sufficient link between the punishment of one person and another person’s decision not to commit a crime. And nobody’s been able to come up with any reasonable form of rehabilitation that’s proven to be generally successful. So prevention (or what I’ve called segregation) seems to be the only part of imprisonment that is founded on objective evidence that it works - if you imprison a lot of criminals, the crime rate in general society will usually go down.
And we would potentially execute a higher number of innocent prisoners. We have an appeals process for a reason.
I’ve never heard any statistics on that before. In any case, why not let all of the prisoners on death row just die of old age? What’s the rush?
Actually, I did mention it (in passing) in my OP. But I’m mostly just interested in debating the individual items anyway, so you’re good.
Exactly. If only I could be so succinct. 
Agreed. But since many (most?) of the people in prison are likely to get out at some point, we should try to do something to make their “re-entry” less jarring - and try to decrease the chances that they will become repeat offenders (or, at the very least, not increase the chances).
We do. We put a huge amount of effort into rehabilitating prisoners. But as I said, nobody’s come up with a program yet that’s generally successful.
Um, that wasn’t my impression, though I’m not familiar with the literature.
Googling, I found the following. Regarding rehabilitiation:
FWIW (no cite) I seem to recall an interview with Lipton from the early 1980s who said something like, “Well actually I do know of a program that seems to work, but there were a lot of programs that didn’t…”
As for deterrence, it’s my understanding that the probability of arrest matters more than the magnitude of the punishment. The former has been established. The latter effect has been found by some though not all studies. http://www.allbusiness.com/specialty-businesses/922325-1.html