Punishment vs Revenge

What is the purpose of putting someone in jail? Many people may still think that prison serves as a way to inflict pain or some sort of suffering to the prisonner for the crime he or she commited. This would be the application of the ancient Lex Talionis created in Babylonia : an eye for an eye. But in our contemporary society, the actual goal is to give the prisoner time to think about what he did, find out it was wrong, and prepare himself to come back in our society as a good person. I grant you that social reinsertion works in about 1% of the cases, but the purpose is not to punish. So the death penalty, being the ultimate punishment, has no reason to be.

I leave this blog purposefully incomplete to get your impressions about that. I will go on in a few days.