> Justice is not done unless people get what is due to them
Even if it's momentarily rewarding, I don't think that's useful from a societal perspective. The justice system should focus on minimizing crime - if punishment does that, fine, but any kind of "getting even" just feeds our base instincts and doesn't accomplish anything.
If someone murders someone but it seems really unlikely, due to the circumstances of that particular murder, that they would murder someone else again, should they simply go free?
I personally don't think so, but that's what a Justice system without any retribution component would prescribe. I think punitive measures are a reasonable. I also think that the prison system in the US is needlessly punitive and often cruel.
Those kind of questions never occur in a vacuum, so there's no simple answer. What were the circumstances of this magic one-time murder? At least you'd expect a pretty thorough evaluation and monitoring of the person, probably while they were detained.
But anyway, there's still the question of deterrence, which is not the same as retribution. If others see you can murder with no penalty, that may increase crime.
> What were the circumstances of this magic one-time murder?
There's many cases of say, a father going out and murdering their daughter's rapist. It's unlikely that they would kill people that aren't raping their daughters, but if you simply let them go free, it really kind of signals that murder is okay as long as you can justify it well enough. Generally the only time we really condone killing someone is when he's defending himself... and sometimes not even then.
I do think that putting said person in prison for a period of time is appropriate. No punishment whatsoever is condoning murder.
It's just that it's tough to condemn decent people like that to a prison system that is so focused on being terrible for everyone in there. I think prisons need to be a better place to live for all prisoners and the current system simply isn't adequate or reasonable.
On the contrary, emotion is at the very core of any justice system. When we minimize crime, we are trying to minimize the psychological harm done by crime and criminals. It is "base instinct" for me to wish to avoid being punched, "base instinct" for me to wish to maintain control over my property, "base instinct" for me to want my children to grow to adulthood.
To be rational, we want to choose our goals wisely, and then act rationally and without emotion when it comes to the pursuit of those goals. Personally, my goal for the criminal justice system is not merely to minimize crime, but to ensure that justice is done.
In my opinion, if someone intentionally rapes and kills a child, for example, it is a positive good to remove them from existence. You simply do not get to commit such an act and remain on earth with the rest of us. If we lock such a person up forever, that is good. If we kill them, that is even better. To me, that's what justice means.
I take issue with killing them because it requires an infallible system that never kills anyone that doesn't deserve it and my conscious rests easier not killing someone that doesn't deserve to die than it does to kill someone that obviously does.
Human sentiments are the the primary driver of human behavior. You get better results out of harnessing those sentiments than by trying to treat people as purely rational machines.
Maybe, maybe not. But the point is that the system should leverage people's sentiments for the sake of minimizing crime, and not be designed the way human sentiment would want it to be designed (in this case, yours).
If retribution turns out not to minimize crime, then there's no place for it in the justice system. So the only question becomes whether or not retribution minimizes crime more than non-retribution methods.
It’s not really possible to measure this over the long run. Short and medium term studies show that mass incarceration dramatically reduced crime in the US, mostly by literally removing violent young men from society, but that’s not the main reason why I support strong punishment. The moral decay of a society can take a hundred years to set in, but once the consequences become apparent, it can be too late to do anything about it. There is a lot of wisdom encoded in the ways of the past. Retribution for crimes is a universal institution for a reason.
There's also a lot of bullshit encoded in the ways of the past. Just because you like one of them doesn't make it good for the society.
And talking about "moral decay" (as if morality was some objective set of rules that society can either follow or not follow, and not a huge continuum of various moral standards of both individuals and societies) makes me quite sure that you're speaking from sentiment, rather than from reason.
"It feels right to me, therefore it is right" is not a good argument for convincing anyone of anything.
I agree that it's very hard to measure this sort of thing. There are way too many (constantly changing) factors that affect the crime rate, that it's almost impossible to isolate a single cause and measure its effect.
However, that should only motivate us to approach the problem even more rigorously, rather than to resort to subjective heuristics.
Even if it's momentarily rewarding, I don't think that's useful from a societal perspective. The justice system should focus on minimizing crime - if punishment does that, fine, but any kind of "getting even" just feeds our base instincts and doesn't accomplish anything.
Emotion has no place in a justice system.