Retribution shouldn't be the driving force, but I can understand it from a societal standpoint. Victims and the families of the victims will want to see a punishment applied for the harm they've suffered. It's in the state's interest to make sure that it's not excessively applied, but to degree there's a mix of correction and retribution that has to be taken into account at sentencing. One person's spite is another's justice.
I think that if too many people see retribution as no longer being applied, some people will start to take matters into their own hands to seek vengeance.
The state has an interest in preventing that and assuring retribution is applied as evenly as possible, and counterbalanced by other mitigating factors (e.g. the degree of offense, the circumstances under which it occurred, likelihood of reoffending, penitence of the guilty, etc.).
I find your points quite interesting. If I'm understanding correctly, that if the victims, families of victims, or frankly, anyone who feels pain and wants to seek retribution, don't believe that the retribution is sufficient, then they may take action into their own hands. I witnessed this living in Tanzania, where if people didn't trust the police to arrest and punish someone who stole, sometimes the people would track down and seek mob justice (violence?) against the person who stole.
So if the government would take a true rehabilitative approach, and maybe arrest people but treat them well, try to help them so they don't do the same behaviors in the future, a percentage of the population might see that as insufficient and take retribution into their own hands.
You've helped me realize why I've actually shifted my professional focus from wanting to change politics to wanting to change culture. Seems a lot of being in government is doing what the people want, and if the people want retribution, then the government has to follow it.
I hope for (and am working towards) a world in which we help people know our pain not by trying to cause the same pain to them, but by expressing our pain to them with more granularity, because the pain they'd feel as a result of retribution will never be the exact same pain we feel, as our contexts are way too complex to replicate exactly.
I really appreciate your comment, thank you for helping me think more deeply about this.
Yes, I think you've eloquently summarized my thinking on this. Thankfully I've never had to witness people trying to take justice into their own hands, as you have, though I imagine it must be harrowing to witness especially in a mob situation.
It sounds like you're trying to be part of the solution, which I deeply commend. Thank you also for your very thoughtful reply. It's appreciated.
One of the most "unstabalizing" things in a society is a person or people with nothing to lose. You could make an argument for much of government being reducing the number of people with nothing to lose.
I think both of those are flawed views. Not necessarily mistaken, but incomplete. One of the key reasons we imprison people is to prevent them from doing further harm to society: i.e., we put them in prison for our benefit, not theirs. It's definitely good if they're rehabilitated along the way, but rehabilitation isn't necessary for their imprisonment to be a net benefit to society.
I think it depends on how we define victim, and especially how direct and tangible the harm needs to be to be considered a victim.
But maybe it also has to do with whether people feel victimized. If no one felt victimized, would we punish?
So I imagine it's probably a combination of who feels victimized and who society believes should feel victimized. Because as others may respond, white-collar crime has people who get harmed as a result of the actions, even if it's not as obvious as the person directly punching them in the face.
One could argue that even the fact of breaking the law can harm those who went through great lengths to not break the law.
What SBF has done is not a victimless crime though: lots of fairly ordinary people lost money because of what he did, some of them lost everything.
Yes, I know some of the people who lost money are rich, and much is being made of that by people who want to troll by saying that's the only reason he really got into trouble (e.g., on Reddit). But that's not true: there are plenty of victims from SBFs crimes, both rich and not rich.
And in this kind of discussion I suggest it's helpful to avoid hypotheticals and to look at the real situations and outcomes relating to the case we're talking about.
What is a victimless crime? Speeding? Even though excessive speed is strongly correlated with crash deaths?
Fraud? The money comes from somewhere; someone is harmed by it (Pratchett's Going Postal has a good line on it - "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
IMO an important component of punishment is convincing society that justice has been served. Too light a punishment, and vigilantism will become prevalent.
Your comment and another above has me thinking that it's almost like vicarious punishment. "If you don't punch them, I will, so you better punch them hard enough."
It makes sense. We empower the government to act on our behalf, including with violence. Arguably it is one of the fundamental reasons for government to exist.
And I wonder if certain calculations, like preventing vigilantism, tend to act on the behalf of not the majority of a population but an extreme few. Or in other words, if 95% of the population support an idea but 5% violently opposes it, does the government cater more to the 95% or 5%? At what point are government officials afraid that the 5% will commit violent acts against society or them and their loved ones and therefore cater to their perspective more than the majority?
I'll try to find the article, I think the point was that we think we are being violent to others with a conscious intention of trying to prevent future violence, but that most of the time we are doing it with the intention of them knowing our current pain that we think they caused to us, not really thinking much about the future.
So if the spite causes people to feel sufficiently afraid to do the action in the future, maybe it deters people from acting that way?
I wonder how the measure they measure the deterrence effect, it seems impossible to me. It would be a society-wide thing (hard to come up with an isolated experiment) and it seems like something where people would bring in a ton of bias.
Recidivism I think is a great one: direct experience of the traumas of imprisonment not only fail to address the root failures which lead to crime, it seems to exacerbate it! If direct experience fails to deter, I am unconfident proxy experience would see success either. It's a meme by now, but see Norway for something closer to the mark.
Recidivism was something I wondered about for a second, but I think it is not what we’re looking for. I think the theory of deterrence is specifically that punishing crimes harshly will make other members of society less willing to commit crimes. Recidivism is a failure of rehabilitation, not deterrence, right?
It also seems like the population of ex-criminals couldn’t be representative of the population as a whole, right?
(FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
> (FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
There are absolutely times that I do not speed because I am concerned about the consequences of getting caught.
There are absolutely students in the school where I teach who follow given rules not because they agree with them, but because they are deterred by consequences. They refrain from climbing the volleyball net not from moral agreement, but because it will get them in trouble.
It's better for people to not commit crimes because they agree on the morals and principles involved... but if people don't agree or have a moment of weakness, the consequences are still influential.
I think that if too many people see retribution as no longer being applied, some people will start to take matters into their own hands to seek vengeance.
The state has an interest in preventing that and assuring retribution is applied as evenly as possible, and counterbalanced by other mitigating factors (e.g. the degree of offense, the circumstances under which it occurred, likelihood of reoffending, penitence of the guilty, etc.).