[oceanplexian]

> The hardships aren't self-imposed, our justice system is specifically and intentionally retributive

If you want to know why this is, I would recommend Discipline and Punish by Foucault. Our present systems of justice go back hundreds of years, when a crime was considered an attack on the sovereign, aka the King, or the Prince. Back then crimes were punished by Hanging, or Torture, and it was done as an exercise of terror. The primary purpose of this wasn't the prevention of crime (Do you really think royalty cared if peasants killed each-other?), but rather punishment for disobeying the King.

All modern systems of Law are essentially still medieval systems, and it's why crimes that happen exclusively between two people are prosecuted as Person v. State of Whatever. The process of justice isn't for the criminal, it's to remind the rest of us of the total power of the State.

[orthecreedence]

That's a very interesting historical viewpoint of the justice system. I've often wondered what in our culture (in the US at least) lead to such a draconian system. I think the thing I take issue with most isn't even the system proper itself as much as the culture around it: stripping felons of voting rights (in a country billing itself as the "Land of the Free"), using prisoners as slave labor (we have protected slavery in the bill of rghts!), and treating them almost like lepers after they have served their sentence/punishment. It's sickening.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Do you really think royalty cared if peasants killed each-other?)

Kinda hard to raise an army to fight the adjacent royal when one town's contingent hates some other town's contingent more than they hate the enemy.

But yeah, they mostly let the peasants do whatever so long as the particular whatever wasn't potentially bad for them.

[floxy]

>it's why crimes that happen exclusively between two people are prosecuted as Person v. State

That's to eliminate the inter-generational blood feud's that were previously common when it wasn't the case that violent crimes were crimes against the state.