| Jay520 said: Your plan would make sense if we could somehow read other people's minds to determine if they were truly regretful. Unfortunately, we don't have an accurate method to make that assessment. And even if a person is truly regretful, that only describes their current state of mind. We have no way to determine how they will feel in the future, so we can't know if they will commit future crimes or not; that would require a time machine. |
We wouldn't need to read their minds if the rehabilitation truly was perfect.
In many (if not every) civilised countries part of stopping crimes from recur is to find out why the crime was commited in the first place. A poor upbringing can be one reason, poor economy can be another, mental disabilities or shortcomings can be yet another, even the inclination of taking a risk without expecting a crime to occur can be a reason, but what all cases have in common is that they can be treated, or at least be dealt with to prevent future crimes. Different forms of treatment can compensate for a poor upbringing, poverty and mental illnesses. In the last case committing what ended up as a crime could even be the treatment. And one thing that all these have in common is that I wouldn't put any criminal who committed their crimes for those reasons through harm. Why punish someone for having a poor upbringing, disability, poor judgement or for being poor?
Still, the problem that you presented still applies to punishments. How do we know that a person who has been punished won't commit a crime again? How do we know that they regret doing what they've done after being punished? We don't. Punishing them is just an attempt at discouraging them and future potential criminals from commiting crimes. Treating criminals and giving people few reasons to committ crimes in the first place through other methods than fear of harm is an alternative attempt at doing the same thing. In fact, the latter also seems to be a more successful method, given how more wealthy countries tend to give their criminals less severe punishments and more treatments.
