Rehabilitation vs Retribution

[HappySqurriel]

The real question is "what do you want to achieve in a criminal justice system?"

I think the primary desire of most people is a system that protects everyone from physical harm and sexual abuse, followed closely by protection of people’s property, and far down the list is punishing people for their acts; and in most cases I suspect that the punishment is desired as a deterrent to promote the first two considerations and not as punishment for the sake of punishment.

With this in mind, the criminal justice system has to be flexible to address the issues of particular criminals to be highly effective.

A large portion of crimes are committed by individuals who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or as a way to get the money to fund their addiction; if you treat the underlying drug and addiction problems the crime that comes from that will disappear. There are multiple ways you could approach this, and the most effective way would be preventative measures that discourage/limit hard drug use and alcohol abuse, but I don’t think that punishment is an effective strategy in these cases.

At the same time there are a lot of people who make rational (or irrational) decisions that lead them to commit crimes. A mixture of retribution to deter these people from making these choices and rehabilitation to ensure that they have the option to make better choices will be highly effective.

Finally, we have people who have a compulsion to commit crimes and are unlikely to be rehabilitated or deterred regardless of what we do. These individuals will almost certainly offend as soon as they can, and there will be a pattern of escalation in their crimes. There really are only a couple of options on how to deal with these people, to lock them up in prison for as long as can be justified or to kill them; because they are a threat to countless people every moment they’re free.