The core point of organized justice is to prevent blood feuds and long-running inter-personal or tribal conflict. Essentially, to interrupt or prevent a cycle of violence. Justice is reaching consensus on a set of facts and then ascertaining an appropriate compensation. That compensation can include a loss of freedom, a monetary payment, mandated service hours, or historically - torture and death. But what matters is a process that is broadly seen as a fair assessment and compensation sufficient to prevent revenge by the impacted parties.
Justice as prevention is secondary - and arguably ineffective - or we'd have no crime, no recidivism, no addicts, nobody acting with obviously negative personal outcomes.
Systems that seek to reduce conflict and compensate victims did not historically make much use of imprisonment.
For a modern look at this, look at the xeer system of Somalia, where victims will almost always prefer payment/compensation over punishment.
Imprisonment is largely an invention of the state, as they push victims and inter-personal conflict aside, and rather use their tools to subordinate the citizen to the order of the state and then charge the victim taxpayers the cost of imprisonment and funnel the money into their buddies running and working the prisons.
Must justice include punishment? If someone hits me, I'd much rather they take responsibility, apologise, and work on themselves to become a better person, than simply get locked up for a while.
Those are not the only two options that they can choose from. And being hit is a very minimal example. Would you say the same for rape? No punishment required; just apologise and work on yourself?
You skipped the “take responsibility”. In case of a more serious crime a simple apology is indeed not enough. But it should still be possible to proceed with something more productive for everyone than putting the perpetrator behind bars. As you say, there are many options.
> those who spend a lot of time in prison seem to come out worse and reoffend. How is that helpful?
You're implying that imprisonment makes people offend more - perhaps the simpler explanation is that most criminals will commit crimes when they get the chance, especially prolific criminals. Prison takes them off the streets and stops them victimising more people - this is helpful.
Prison is nonsense and a waste of human life. Best punishment is caning like Singapore. Do fast and quick. Pain is an excellent memory aid. Most stable lowest recidivism rate.
Depending on how hard they hit you, the extent of your injuries, and the circumstances surrounding the assault (premeditated or not, provoked or unprovoked), why not both lock them up and have them work on themselves?
If the only repercussion for assault is they need to apologize and "work on themselves", then what's stopping more people from committing assault? There needs to be punishment.
I don't think that people are stopped from committing assault by an abstract risk-benefit calculation that considers the likelihood of jailtime. It's not what stops me, at least. Mostly I just don't want to. And even if I do want to hit someone, I know that that fleeting temptation doesn't accord with my fundamental values; I'll feel bad afterwards. I'm intimately aware that they might retaliate, or that I might accidentally kill them (or vice versa). It just doesn't feel worth it because I've been socialised to weigh up those odds. But the distant prospect of jail time feels abstract and harder to socialise into people in the heat of the moment.
You're not a remorseless psychopath, though. Some people are.
For a nuanced discussion, the Illustrated Guide to the Law is an excellent introduction. Here's the section on Punishment: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41
It ends with the summary "The State punishes those who commit crimes partly in the hope of preventing future offenses (via rehabilitation, deterrence, and removal)... partly to restore a sense of balance and fairness (via retribution)... and partly because fuck you, that’s why (retaliation)"
Namely that it is unlikely to factor into people's decision-making process - and when it does, the extent of the punishment makes little difference. Slightly disappointed to wade through slides of challenging handwriting to find that it wasn't saying much more :/
Because vengeance has never done anyone any good. You never feel better after getting vengeance, just hollow. Thus, a good legal system should strive to provide justice, not vengeance.
To use the example from a sibling comment, if a person kills a child and the father kills this guy out of vengeance .. it will do those children good, who can now live in safety afterwards from that person.
But if in reality the murderer also had family who did not believe he murdered anyone in the first place now set out to seek justice/vengeance, then yes, it becomes a war .. which is why we have courts and police nowdays, but what justice is, is still rather arbitarily defined. Concretely it means enforcing the law. And laws are written by people.
Have you ever distributed vengeance so you can personally speak how you felt? Or are you mindlessly repeating strings of words that are supposed to go together like an LLM?
I don't have to justify to you, random internet stranger. I have made my share of experience, and read a fair bit about that of others, in history and literature; and I'm confidently standing behind my opinion.
What you are asking about is called Retributive Justice.
The reason the answer is not clear is attitudes to Retributive Justice vary widely across cultures and political systems. In OECD countries, the dominant (but not universal view) is there is no role for Retributive Justice in a modern society.
That is my position. The reason I don't think vengeance should be part of Justice is it's counter productive. The role of society as I see it, is to create an environment that produces nice things for myself and my family, so we prosper. I think it's self evident having as many people as possible working hard maximises this.
Justice is a unfortunate blight on that. Producing nice things requires people to work cooperatively, people working cooperatively requires rules. You can't have someone kill another for food when they could be working on a farm instead, so we have a rule for that. The role of Justice is to encourage people to follow those rules, so Justice is necessary too. But Justice is costly. It requires police, lawyers, judges, and jails. It removes people who could be producing nice things from society and makes them a burden to carry instead. "An eye for an eye" sounds equitable, but it means there are now two people without an eye instead of one. There have been calculations on what the Justice systems costs a typical OECD country. The answer seems to be around 2% of GDP. For the USA, that's about $600 billion per year.
Because of that large cost to me it is self evident you want as little Justice as possible. Just enough so just about everyone follows the rules, and no more. If you are forced to productive people from society and feed, house, and protect them in a jail, then you should strive to redirect, educate, and train them so when released they will become productive, and produce nice things. For me. This is called rehabilitation. Every modern society preaches rehabilitation over vengeance, but not all do it.
So what rule does vengeance play in this? Vengeance is by definition punishing people more than rehabilitation requires. Thus it costs money to extract vengeance. Sometimes a lot of money. In my country jailing someone for life means it costs my government $300/day, potentially for decades. That means I have less nice things. It even means the victim has less nice things, in the end. After all, that money could be paying for teachers and schools, to educate the victims kids. The conclusion most most people in OECD societies have drawn from that is vengeance has no role in Justice.
In this view, the becoming the victim of a crime is no different to any another unfortunate event, like losing your house to a storm, or becoming the victim of a plane crash, or dying from cancer. You don't get to seek vengeance for those events, so why should being the victim of a crime be any different? Adding to that, you are not entirely powerless against random destructive events. You can insure against them. Crime is no different. We can and do insure against the ill effects of crime.
Justice as prevention is secondary - and arguably ineffective - or we'd have no crime, no recidivism, no addicts, nobody acting with obviously negative personal outcomes.