Working on databases from prison

Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent.

In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.

So many things can never have full repatriation. The best we can do is have society acknowledge, forcefully, the wrongs done via prison sentencing.

But then many countries go wrong on policy - punitive imprisonment leads to worse individual and social outcomes than a rehabilitation focus.

Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.

The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title).

https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...

One might argue a fourth end as well: removal.

When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said.

For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug.

Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders.

So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.

In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.

It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime.

Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.

If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.

IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.

In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.

There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.

There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.

The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.

The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.

1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive

2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort

3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end

This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.

For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”.

I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.

Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility

Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".

Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice!

Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.

damn…

First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population.

Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose.

And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies.

So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.

I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.

https://www.wbtv.com/2025/06/17/what-forgiveness-charleston-...