[jeremyfranco]

Because it's not a lie.

Justice system in Europe is not a business, like it is in US, or a way to inflict a punishment, it is a rehabilitation process: if you prove you have changed, you can benefit from reduced sentences, furlough for good behavior and/or early releases.

If you haven't, you stay in jail.

Think about the U.S. system where people can be taken to custody for murder but can bail out, is that better in your opinion?

In Italy, for example, to keep mob affiliates in jail in solitary confinement, so they can't speak with the outside, they had to make a specific law, otherwise it would not be possible within the Italian prison system.

[larnmar]

The justice system is, and should be, always primarily about punishment. Governments who forget that do so at their peril. Punishment isn’t just why we have a justice system — there’s a reasonable case that it’s why we have government at all!

Humans have a strong natural instinct towards justice — when soneone wrongs us, we want to take revenge. In a state of nature this of course leads to endless and bloody feuds, so at some point it became more sensible to devolve the job of taking revenge to some kind of king or government, to ensure that revenge is taken exactly once instead of becoming a never-ending cycle.

This worked pretty well for thousands of years, but in the last century or so it has been falling apart. Soft-headed Government types have started to believe that the actual purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, not justice, and as a result justice is rarely if ever served. Ask victims of crime if the sentence given to the perp is anywhere near what they’d choose, and they’ll say no. And then, the sentence that is given rarely gets carried out, like this scumbag who was sentenced to life and released just twenty years later.

The right to revenge is one of the most important human rights of all, and it is utterly neglected in western societies these days. A proper justice system would have a lot more crooks dying in jail and a lot less crime being committed.

[jeremyfranco]

> The justice system is, and should be, always primarily about punishment

Not in Europe, since "Dei delitti e delle pene" (On Crimes and Punishments ) from Cesare Beccaria.

It was 1764, we were already aware of that.

Justice is not a way to inflict punishment, the sentence, as Beccaria put it "should be in degree to the severity of the crime" and should work as deterrent, not as retribution (which is usually the case in US especially the death penalty, that have the purpose of giving "an eye for an eye" to the victim's family).

> Humans have a strong natural instinct towards justice

No, they don't.

Homō hominī lupus, men are very social animals, it doesn't mean they lean naturally towards justice, they just defend their communities against other communities.

> This worked pretty well for thousands of years

It didn't actually.

That's why we constantly reformed our justice system.

Think about the code of Ammurabi, does this work in your opinion?

"If the wife of a man has been caught lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the waters. If the owner of the wife would save his wife then in turn the king could save his servant."

It never really worked, especially for the regular folks, still today has a lot of flaws let alone thousands of years ago. In Italy it was legal to kill the wife that cheated (but not the husband who did the same), it was called "honor killing" and it was abolished only in 1981.

So, no.

> The right to revenge is one of the most important human rights of all

It is its greatest fault indeed.

And it is what makes USA a country where the risk of being killed by a stranger is 10 times higher than in Italy (5.63/100,000 vs 0.55/100.000), it is higher than many third world countries or countries that are at war like Sudan, Kenya, Niger, Libya, Syria or Iran.