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> You can't give prisoners free, high-quality education, no matter how helpful it would be to prevent crime after they're released, if you're not giving it to the general public, or else the general public would commit crimes to be educated.

Doesn't the US do exactly that with health care? I have heard of a few people committing crimes to get free treatment, but it doesn't appear to be a widespread issue.

Prison healthcare exists but is by no means a gold standard. It just needs to be good enough to not be negligence or abuse in terms of obligations. The stories are still rare enough to warrant their own news articles.

There is a long history of infamous "donut holes" in medical coverage via things like Medicaid on state by state basis. Even without the benefits people become better off as a write-off to collectors than to attempt pursuit, a state somewhat derogatorily called judgement-proof.

Yep. IIRC, if you've been incarcerated in the past year, that's an automatic in to state healthcare. They don't exactly advertise this, but it's pretty well-known.

As a victim of violent crime, that is not my experience. Whether or not the victim wants retribution seems IMO to be cultural, religious and based on education. I am in support with victims of violent crimes (including murders), and the majority of the victims do NOT want retribution, unless it involves some magical method of enlightening the perpetrator. They often feel that retribution is yet another thing (like the original crime itself) that is being projected onto them involuntarily. Let it go already. If you do not let it go, you own it as physical pain and sickness in your own body.

Punishment is a form of compensation of the damage inflicted.

The perpetrator of a,crime must compensate the damage to the victim(s), at a somehow excessive rate to prevent crime from being a viable business model.

This is relatively simple (though not easy) for property-related crimes. It's much harder for crimes like battery or rape.

That said, staying in a prison is about the least productive way to compensate, or to repent. Prisons, as seen in USA, should be abolished and replaced with other institutions.

Property crimes can be paid for with labor, with less limitations of freedoms than in a prison. Education should be provided not just for rehabilitation (which is a worthy aim), but to also produce the compensation faster, while earning the basic upkeep.

Non-property crimes should likely be paid for in repentance work, on top of material compensation work: by working at places that expose the perpetrator to the woes of people who suffered through consequences relevant to the crime. Maybe something like menial work at a hospice.

Punishment isn't any sort of compensation. Victims receive compensation. Compensation replaces a portion of the loss represented by crime. Perpetrators receive punishment, and it doesn't replace anything. It actually represents even more loss (in the US to the tune of something like $40K a year per prisoner.)

edit: Punishment for the victim is like a gift-wrapped empty box. It doesn't fix anything that the crime did, and the system pretends like they're doing it for the victim. The system punishes perpetrators in order to stop the victims from doing it themselves. It's not a favor.

A model like this is prone to devolving into forced servitude or even slavery.

Also any non trivial work requires a degree of care by the laborer to ensure quality, how does this model enforce quality? Physical force? Extending servitude?

I am far from a fan of incarceration state. However criminal justice discussions frequently ignore or discount the drawbacks of proposed solutions.

I liked the article as a historical survey but didn’t gain any new insights from it.

There are several reasons we punish in the modern day; retribution is just one of them:

1. Retribution, to give the victims a sense of justice and avoid potential collateral damage from vengeance and feuds.

2. Compensation, to help make the victim whole, to whatever extent possible. This is related to but subtly different than (1).

3. Segregation, to prevent the perpetrator from victimizing others.

4. Deterrence, to dissuade would-be perpetrators.

5. Rehabilitation, to try to reduce or eliminate the factors that caused the perpetrator to commit the crime.

Different people have different opinions on the morality, efficacy and value of the various reasons. Haidt et al have postulated that different worldviews are associated with different factors in people’s moral calculus, so I would not be surprised if, on average, conservatives favor a more retributive punishment system and, on average, liberals favor a more rehabilitative one. But since we all have to live with the same system, we compromise. I don’t think that there is one true approach that is the pinnacle of morality.

[ed] fixed formatting of list

Imo there is no political ideology that has a properly self-consistent philosophy for justice. I’ve always considered a part of the issue to be that revenge is clearly a very important element of the existing system (whether it should be or not), and nobody wants to talk about the importance of revenge, so it just gets thrown on the pile of issues with the justice system that never get talked about.

I disagree. Victims of assault aren't after "revenge" - they're after safety. The goal of prosecution and jailtime specifically is to ensure that the perpetrator doesn't do it too them again, and to society to ensure the perpetrator doesn't keep doing it.

Most victims would prefer absolute assurance the perpetrator cannot come near them again - i.e I suspect if offered "give them jail time" or "force them to stay out of your half of the country, with GPS tracking to ensure compliance" then almost all would choose the latter.

You can’t make generalisations about “victims” like that. I’m sure there are victims of crime who don’t care whether their perpetrators are punished or not, but ensuring that a criminal is sufficiently punished for their crimes is a very important element of the justice system. This is plainly obvious, and whether perpetrators are being sufficiently punished is routinely the subject of public controversies. This component of the justice system is entirely about revenge.

For every “I just want to move on with my life” victim you can find, there’ll be a dozen court rooms cheering an excessively long sentence, or “I hope you rot in jail” victim impact statements.

You're simply making a generalization in the opposite direction, and since neither of us is presenting hard statistics you have no special claim here.

Perpetrators being insufficiently punished is the subject of controversy because of the nature of the crime: it is not unreasonable to think that someone who murders a person should never be let back out into the community (because they have shown they're a clear and present danger to anyone).

The same basic problem exists with rapists: victims fear that the rapist will be released, but more importantly fear that they will either return and re-offend, or re-offend anyway - again, public safety.

In both these situations, the actual goal being expressed is "this person makes me feel unsafe, if they are somewhere they literally cannot ever get near to me, then I would feel safe - and so that period of time should be as long as possible".

A rapist in jail for 15 years is 15 years they cannot possibly commit another crime against the victim or the community (ignoring the grotesque situation prisons have in that regard as a separate but very valid issue).

Controversies over jail time exist due to deficiencies and lack of control over actual safety concerns, and where they do not they exist as absurdities: i.e. murder - permanent deprivation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - somehow being less seriously punished then drug possession - literally no possible impact to anyone except the possessor, and maybe some handwavy indirects surrounding the drug trade.

I’m not making generalizations at all. You are claiming to have knowledge of the motives of all victims of crime. I am claiming that some victims of crime, as well as some other 3rd party members of society, have a particular motive some of the time, as evidenced by all of the occasions when it becomes a matter of public controversy.

I could go and find examples of this, but that would just be a waste of my time, because if you are not prepared to accept that such perfectly obvious events take place every day, then you’re clearly not actually trying to discuss the topic.

I could not agree with you more.

It is not uncommon in my experience for victims to keep on getting victimized by the very prosecution and judicial process that is supposed to be working for them. As an example, during a home invasion the perpetrator came into our home wielding a knife looking to kill a family member (or more). Fortunately the perpetrator was overcome after much physical altercation by multiple family members. In his prosecution the perpetrator was not charged with attempted murder even though that's what he was doing (and yelling). The prosecutor charged him with burglary on the basis that it had the same maximum (25 year) sentence as attempted murder but a much lower burden of proof. So he was more likely to get a prosecution (and career advancement). We did not care if the prosecution was successful. We wanted him charged for what he did, whether it failed in the courts or not. We came away from the experience more feeling like victims from the entire judicial process than from the attempted murder (which we actually did something to thwart).

The same type of story gets told over and over again by victims. Punishment is doing nothing for the victims who I know.

> The prosecutor charged him with burglary on the basis that it had the same maximum (25 year) sentence as attempted murder but a much lower burden of proof.

Not doubting your story, but this seems like a very weird reason to me; there's no reason they couldn't be charged with both, and it's extremely common for juries to return different verdicts for each charge when a defendant is charged with multiple. I'd be interested to see statistics about whether charging someone with murder along with burglary results in fewer convictions for the burglary charge, because it doesn't seem super obvious that it would be the case; I would think that the idea that the jury could "split" the verdict by convicting on the lesser charge if they were having trouble coming to an agreement and the fact that alleging someone is an attempted murderer is a stronger reprimand than just calling them a burglar would at least somewhat act as a counterbalance to the chance that the jury would decide to render a not guilty verdict on the burglary charge because they doubted the story due to the murder charge.

No jury. Again it is not up to the victims. Like most prosecutions, it was plea bargained down to a lesser charge (first offense etc). Small district court in a rural US county with population under 20,000, where "everyone" knows "everyone".

Most cases get resolved through plea deals, not jury trials.

> the primary reason for punishment is that if you don't punish the perpetrator, the victim, their family, and their loved ones will consider the matter unresolved, and attempt to carry out what they think would be an adequate punishment themselves

Are you sure about this?

I think you underestimate how the general public values freedom vs “golden handcuffs” incarceration