What about justice for the person or people who were victims of the crime? What about justice for the society in which the crime took place?
While the perpetrator may be a wholly different person now, what if not everyone agrees that a crime, or the consequences of that crime, can be expiated so easily?
How do we balance rehabilitation and punishment properly? Right now, the USA seems to do it very poorly.
There's also greater than 80% support for capital punishment, and implicitly this system, in Japan. Yet crime rates, especially violent crime, are practically zero. And what violent crime does exist is almost entirely inter-personal (argument turns violent, deal gone bad, etc) as opposed to random. The obvious explanation for all of this is simply that people are different. And consequently, mimicking the methods of a country with a meaningfully different population is highly unlikely to result in mimicking their results.
So the hypothesis seems unlikely to be valid.
Asia as a whole does not have nearly zero murder rates. It contains quite unsafe countries.
Excessive punishments result in "missed" crimes - if the punishment for speeding was immediate death, cops would be much less likely to pull over speeders I feel.
I think we have different ideas about what this means. For me, it is that crime ceases to exist because criminals integrate into society because of successful rehabilitation. For you it is that crime ceases to exist because criminals are scared.
I will editorialize that your system has the population effectively coerced into compliance by the state (so not coming to these conclusions about how to be a good community member on their own).
I hypothesize my scheme results in a better/happier/stronger community/society but I don't have data in either direction. With that said my system is more humane/humanistic and results in a positive outcome for the "criminals" too.
2) Unmentioned, but sort of obvious, is that the immigration groups that Europe is adding aren't necessarily the same ones that the United States has. There can be significant differences in how different cultural groups react to different situations so the comparison between America/Europe is still much more complex than just saying "both groups have diversity now so they should be alike in every way".
Ultimately, humans don't randomly make choices. It is up to us if we want to prioritize less suffering for everyone and fixing the problems in the first place, or prioritizing some sort of vengeance.
If cause and effect exists in human beings as they do for literally everything else, than claiming 'agency' as an excuse to do nothing is basically moral bankruptcy.
Our science is not perfect, nor is our policies, and people will fall through the cracks, but we should keep striving and trying nonetheless.
This for me is one of the strongest arguments against the death penalty. If the state can kill its prisoners and the state's government falls into authoritarian hands, one political faction, the authoritarian faction, can simply kill off those who oppose it. Did the accused commit a crime, a "crime", or do nothing at all? Well, too late to find out.
Of course, an authoritarian government can bring back the death penalty, but at least make it harder for them to hide what they are doing. And the longer your nation goes without the death penalty, the more egregious it is when the authoritarians reinstitute it, the more obvious it is what they're doing.
Really makes one wonder what would be just and working society.
And incidentally, indefinite detention without trial or representation, of US citizens, was legalized in 2012 [1]. An initial legal case against it managed to obtain a permanent injunction against indefinitely detaining US citizens. That victory was tossed out by a higher court who ruled that the plaintiffs lacked the standing for a preemptive challenge to the law. So they need to be indefinitely detained, then when released (if ever) they might be allowed to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Great system.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
After all it's much easier to "remove" someone who was "resisting arrest" than go through the bother of a trial.
The delivery of justice vs human rights is not a simple matter and anyone trying to discuss it in this type of forum is doing themselves and the subject a disservice.