| I wish society would stop viewing punishment as a tool for the greater good, whether as revenge or as something that will "correct" the criminal. Treating it as a correction feels like a lie that polite society tells itself in order to absolve itself of the distaste of knowingly harming someone. We shouldn't pretend we can "re-educate" anyone. We can merely provide opportunities for self improvement, but we can't actively "correct" them. On the other hand, treating punishment as revenge is unhealthy too. It's too easy to get carried away and it's even easier to get carried away by perverse incentives (gestures broadly at US incarceration rates). Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say. So then how should society decide what punishment is fair? I believe the punishment should be as harsh as an elected judge feels is necessary for the perpetrator to think, "it wasn't worth this"—and not a bit more. Isn't that using punishment as a deterrent? It's easy to see it that way, but no. That would make punishment impersonal again— unbinding it from the specific person, place, and circumstance that we should elect judges to consider carefully and compassionately. In other words, when one says, "the perpetrator should be punished {this much} to deter the others", then the perpetrator becomes a pawn, not a person. All that leads me to believe that: the purpose of a punishment should be to inflict a harm equal to the perceived personal benefit of the perpetrator's crime, as an enforcement action of the social contract between the perpetrator and society. |