| > > I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure. > It's called prison. No. Prison (and the threat of it) accomplishes a few things: It's punitive, which allows people who enjoy retribution to feel some satisfaction at their idea of justice being carried out. The threat of prison theoretically prevents some people from inflicting some societal harms on others. And it keeps dangerous people away from the general public. It also has the consequence of lining the pockets of the people running for-profit prisons (this is actually really really bad for society though), and also costs taxpayers a ton of money. And another nice benefit of adversely affecting minorities, poor people, and otherwise marginalized people disproportionately. It largely is not successful at rehabilitating people. Maybe some people, sometimes, but in the U.S. at least, there are more people who come out of prison more broken than they were going in, and also have fewer options for living an ethical life coming out. They fall in with gangs for protection, and those networks extend back out of the prison. The money spent imprisoning people (especially for things like nonviolent, victimless crimes) could likely do much more good to society if it was used differently. If someone theoretically did something bad, and was remorseful for their actions, and we could say with a degree of certainty that they were no more likely to commit the same act again than any random person on the street, I think it would be better to not imprison them, and spend that money on, say, social services instead. If you're looking for models of actually allowing people to atone and work towards improvements in their future behaviour, we'd do better with a restorative justice model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice |