I feel like America's big prison problem is rooted on a deeper issue than mismanagement/corruption.
The fundamental idea that "retribution" needs to be a component of the criminal justice system is erroneous and the big issue here. As long as the country legally recognizes that those who wronged others need to be wronged to "get their just desserts", the prison system will not reform to a sufficient degree as to stop the excessive incarceration and recidivism problem.
This is already continuously tried. All it creates is a lack of trust in the justice system. If you remove the ability of the justice system to make the people feel that justice has been served, people will revert to vigilante justice. You need confidence in the system.
It's all well and good to say that that's irrational, and has no place in a logical society - but this isn't a logical, rational society. That's why we need a justice system in the first place.
Ultimately, until you can change human nature, some amount of tangible consequences that make the victims, their family, and the public at large feel that justice has been served, perpetrators have received appropriate consequences, and vigilante justice is unnecessary.
Finally, has the infinite-empathy approach been shown to work anywhere where there is an existing, significant crime problem, and where it's liable to being abused - that is, most of the world? And working is about more than empathy towards violent criminals and the reduction of crime statistics (though anecdotally I doubt it would achieve the latter).
Ultimately the justice system's number one priority should be victims, their interests and welfare, and reducing the amount of new ones. Criminals have made their decision; victims are innocent.
I'm not saying the American justice system doesn't have issues. I'm not American personally, but it appears to have a lot of problems. However, I don't think incurring consequences for people's actions is the root problem here.
>This is already continuously tried. All it creates is a lack of trust in the justice system. If you remove the ability of the justice system to make the people feel that justice has been served, people will revert to vigilante justice. You need confidence in the system.
Sorry, but that's just ignorant. Countries with non-retribution based justice systems fare much better in lower crime than the US. So much better it's not even funny.
>I'm not saying the American justice system doesn't have issues. I'm not American personally, but it appears to have a lot of problems. However, I don't think incurring consequences for people's actions is the root problem here.
"Incurring conseqeuences" is orthogonal to the issue here. Going to jail and being kept there is already a consequence.
The US system turns "inflicting medieval/biblical conditions and systemic revenge" into the consequence.
There's a chunk of the population that should be warehoused for the safety of the vast majority. Consider the 327 people that commit 1/3rd of NYC theft (https://nypost.com/2023/01/05/327-crooks-made-up-30-of-shopl...) or pedophiles. You're never going to fix some people.
The world is not as soft as people hope. If the system doesn't provide justice, people will - consider the enormous adoration for Jason Vukovich.
I’m not sure there is a justification for your point, but I hear the point.
The counterpoint is that retribution MUST be a goal of the state, because if the state does not provide a sanitized replacement of what some surviving victims of crime will naturally want to do.
Put it this way: if someone killed my son, I would quite naturally want them dead. But then I would be killing someone’s son, and I’m sure you can detect the problem there.
If the state provides an implicit contract to everyone that the result of citizen on citizen violence will contain some sanitized version of retribution that substitutes for eye-for-an-eye justice, then overall violence will be reduced by the severance of the cycle.
It's not about retribution or revenge, but costs (which are way beyond just monetary).
That's also why it's not up to the wronged personally to decide, but the State (the process; but other people, their peers).
If the victim of a horrific triple-homicide (let's say their family) decided to "forgive and forget", and let someone truly destructive free (which letting them live out gives the risk of, like when violent criminals were released due to overcrowding and COVID), they would be externalizing all the associated costs/risks of having that person live or be free onto us and the rest of society.
Yes, it needs serious controls around it (the few times the option is actually used). But like we see with some officials, the pendulum has swung so far the other way where even violent crime is sometimes downplayed out of "tolerance" and "empathy", pitting the value of his rough childhood against the expectation of safety of your child.
Don't state an opinion as fact. There's many examples of the state letting people off, then the family taking matters into their own hands, with public approval. Retribution is important for those who hurt others.
I understand that some people are troubled by retributive justice (I am not). But the idea that criminality in the US stems from retributive justice isn't true. Japan has low crime and executes people regularly. Russia has a high crime rate and hasn't executed anyone since the 90s.
Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: "In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord." (Ps 101:8)
– Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part III, 5, n. 4 (1566)
Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live.
– Pius XII, Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System (14 Sep 1952)
> fundamental idea that "retribution" needs to be a component of the criminal justice system is erroneous and the big issue here
It's irrational. But probably necessary for broader buy-in. The other purposes for prisons are reformation, incapacitation and deterrence. Deterrence and retribution are tightly linked.
"Deterrence" solely operates on future actors. "Retribution" on those who have already transgressed. We know that the vast vast vast majority of crimes are not committed with a cost-benefit analysis. So no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes. No man willing to kill his cheating wife thinks "Well, I could 15, 17 tops, sure, but 25 is too much. Okay, I need a new plan".
Do you have any references to support that “no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes”?
I would expect that more strict sentencing has diminishing returns. The difference between no crime, versus a crime and a fine, versus a crime and jail or prison time, are steep escalations, but the difference between 15 and 25 years in prison seems much smaller. I agree you probably won’t prevent many murders by raising the minimum sentence on murder, but other less severe crimes/sentences don’t present the same obvious conclusion to me.
For deterrence it doesn't matter what the tariff (the potential sentence for a crime) is because the vast majority of criminals don't know exactly what the tariff is, so it can't deter them, the same reason that they can't be deterred by other things they don't know like the lyrics to the Shriekback song "Going Equipped" †
† Going Equipped is reference to an English crime, I don't know if Americans have it, in which it's illegal to have with you things whose purpose is to help you commit burglary or various similar offences. Prosecutors need to show that you had things which were obviously useful for these crimes (e.g. bolt cutters, a ladder), and show intent and that you weren't at home..
> deterrence it doesn't matter what the tariff (the potential sentence for a crime) is because the vast majority of criminals don't know exactly what the tariff is, so it can't deter them
This is not true. I may not know the specific punishments for some crimes. But I know they’re tough, and that has deterrence value.
The deterrence element of punishment is often overstated. Punishment is a really poor behavioral modifier. For punishment to reliably modify behavior, it has to be immediate and consistent. The criminal justice system is neither. It is not only behavioral scientists that are aware of the flaws, criminologists also look at the data, and there seems to be no indication that the severity of the punishment is negatively correlated with the frequency of the crime, neither across time, nor between jurisdictions with different penal code.
What criminologists have found however is that racial minorities are often given the harsher punishment when available (the reason WA deemed the death penalty unconstitutional back in 2018; and they had the data to back it up). So the deterrence value seems to be primarily used to discriminate against minorities, not to reduce crime rate.
> there seems to be no indication that the severity of the punishment is negatively correlated with the frequency of the crime, neither across time, nor between jurisdictions with different penal code
This is literally why I flagged the link between retribution and deterrence [1]. Retribution is the moral layer that communicates deterrence.
There's a wide spectrum of behaviors in relation to future penalties. Some people are so far gone that they don't care about death. This includes people who livestream their murder sprees or are willing to commit suicide bombings, for example. There's no prospect of deterring them. At best you can permanently isolate surviving perpetrators from the rest of society. Until we invent slap-drones [1] I wouldn't trust them to roam free again.
Other people won't violate minor rules even when there's nobody watching. Some people will come to a full stop at every stop sign, even when there's perfect visibility and no cross traffic, even when there's no cameras or police cars around.
In between these two extremes you do have people who are deterred by enforcement. My sister didn't come to a full stop at a certain intersection on the way to work until she was ticketed for it. She stopped completely every time afterward. For this in-between set of people who respond to deterrence, likelihood of facing a penalty is more important than the severity of a penalty [2].
The problem I have seen repeatedly is that catching more violators is more expensive/difficult than increasing the severity of punishment, so lawmakers are tempted to increase penalties to "make up" for rare enforcement. Fining $1 for littering and catching half of litterers seems mathematically equivalent to fining $5000 for littering and catching 1 in 10000 litterers. It's also a lot cheaper to catch only a handful of people. But the rare-enforcement, high-penalty approach has a much weaker deterrent effect because most people are not mathematically rational agents and fail to consider long tail events. The deterrent effect of extreme penalties is even weaker for murder. Most people are not interested in murdering anyone even in circumstances where they would get away with it. The remaining subset of people with a non-negligible propensity to murder is enriched in people who behave erratically and cannot be deterred by rational means.
> only linked insofar as they both use prisons as "weapons", i.e, undesirable places to be in
They're linked in that "a sense of morality transcend[s] immediate self-interest and fear of punishment" [1]. Retribution links the justice system to our sense of morality. That deters crime.
The research on punitive damages tends to be more clear-headed than anything I've read on criminal law in this matter [2]. (For example, punitive damages provide "aggrieved parties with an attractive substitute for revenge.")
Lots of countries don't have this, at least to the same extent. Americans are exceptionally focused on retribution and the effects are deleterious. Also they really don't like the messy reality of justice, hence not only modern shows like Law & Order, but even Columbo. If you can imagine real justice is always like Columbo, then when you hear that cops arrested a person on suspicion of murder, you know they're guilty - why else would cops arrest somebody?
Starting life in (or getting eventually out of prison back to) a highly individualistic society, where "you're on your own", and one where gun ownership is trivial, doesn't help either.
> Justice is not done unless people get what is due to them
Even if it's momentarily rewarding, I don't think that's useful from a societal perspective. The justice system should focus on minimizing crime - if punishment does that, fine, but any kind of "getting even" just feeds our base instincts and doesn't accomplish anything.
If someone murders someone but it seems really unlikely, due to the circumstances of that particular murder, that they would murder someone else again, should they simply go free?
I personally don't think so, but that's what a Justice system without any retribution component would prescribe. I think punitive measures are a reasonable. I also think that the prison system in the US is needlessly punitive and often cruel.
Those kind of questions never occur in a vacuum, so there's no simple answer. What were the circumstances of this magic one-time murder? At least you'd expect a pretty thorough evaluation and monitoring of the person, probably while they were detained.
But anyway, there's still the question of deterrence, which is not the same as retribution. If others see you can murder with no penalty, that may increase crime.
> What were the circumstances of this magic one-time murder?
There's many cases of say, a father going out and murdering their daughter's rapist. It's unlikely that they would kill people that aren't raping their daughters, but if you simply let them go free, it really kind of signals that murder is okay as long as you can justify it well enough. Generally the only time we really condone killing someone is when he's defending himself... and sometimes not even then.
I do think that putting said person in prison for a period of time is appropriate. No punishment whatsoever is condoning murder.
It's just that it's tough to condemn decent people like that to a prison system that is so focused on being terrible for everyone in there. I think prisons need to be a better place to live for all prisoners and the current system simply isn't adequate or reasonable.
On the contrary, emotion is at the very core of any justice system. When we minimize crime, we are trying to minimize the psychological harm done by crime and criminals. It is "base instinct" for me to wish to avoid being punched, "base instinct" for me to wish to maintain control over my property, "base instinct" for me to want my children to grow to adulthood.
To be rational, we want to choose our goals wisely, and then act rationally and without emotion when it comes to the pursuit of those goals. Personally, my goal for the criminal justice system is not merely to minimize crime, but to ensure that justice is done.
In my opinion, if someone intentionally rapes and kills a child, for example, it is a positive good to remove them from existence. You simply do not get to commit such an act and remain on earth with the rest of us. If we lock such a person up forever, that is good. If we kill them, that is even better. To me, that's what justice means.
I take issue with killing them because it requires an infallible system that never kills anyone that doesn't deserve it and my conscious rests easier not killing someone that doesn't deserve to die than it does to kill someone that obviously does.
Human sentiments are the the primary driver of human behavior. You get better results out of harnessing those sentiments than by trying to treat people as purely rational machines.
Maybe, maybe not. But the point is that the system should leverage people's sentiments for the sake of minimizing crime, and not be designed the way human sentiment would want it to be designed (in this case, yours).
If retribution turns out not to minimize crime, then there's no place for it in the justice system. So the only question becomes whether or not retribution minimizes crime more than non-retribution methods.
It’s not really possible to measure this over the long run. Short and medium term studies show that mass incarceration dramatically reduced crime in the US, mostly by literally removing violent young men from society, but that’s not the main reason why I support strong punishment. The moral decay of a society can take a hundred years to set in, but once the consequences become apparent, it can be too late to do anything about it. There is a lot of wisdom encoded in the ways of the past. Retribution for crimes is a universal institution for a reason.
There's also a lot of bullshit encoded in the ways of the past. Just because you like one of them doesn't make it good for the society.
And talking about "moral decay" (as if morality was some objective set of rules that society can either follow or not follow, and not a huge continuum of various moral standards of both individuals and societies) makes me quite sure that you're speaking from sentiment, rather than from reason.
"It feels right to me, therefore it is right" is not a good argument for convincing anyone of anything.
I agree that it's very hard to measure this sort of thing. There are way too many (constantly changing) factors that affect the crime rate, that it's almost impossible to isolate a single cause and measure its effect.
However, that should only motivate us to approach the problem even more rigorously, rather than to resort to subjective heuristics.
All you can ever do is the best that you can under the circumstances. Avoiding a wrongful execution is just one goal. Other goals include the ability of the innocent to enjoy life and the need for justice against wrongdoers.
The fundamental idea that "retribution" needs to be a component of the criminal justice system is erroneous and the big issue here. As long as the country legally recognizes that those who wronged others need to be wronged to "get their just desserts", the prison system will not reform to a sufficient degree as to stop the excessive incarceration and recidivism problem.