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.
I leave this blog purposefully incomplete to get your impressions about that. I will go on in a few days.
posted by Chorvatos at 14:58
2 Comments:
Well let me first comment that if social reinsertion works in about 1% of the case it might be a good idea to rethink our techniques and/or the idea of social reinsertion. Perhaps part of the reinsertion should be a punishment. The proverbial slap on the wrist to help the person realise he made mistake.
As for the death penalty, well their is a way to work it not as the ultimate punishment but as the last recource in case of a complet faillure of reinsertion. A way for society to removve dangerous individual that have proven to be impossible to return to the society. Granted exile would work just as well but exile is basically a delayed death penality or dumping your problem on another society.
One last thing, because of the relatively high probability of killing an innocent I am against the death penalty, but in the interest of discussion I'd like to present this "alternative view"
The main reason that death penalty is bad is the risk of punishing an innocent. If there was a way to be 100% sure of the details of the crime (the whys, wheres, whens, whos), I think I would agree with this kind of punishment.
You say that the goal of putting people to jail now is not to punish people. Well, honestly, it should be. Why should a society not have the right to exact revenge on its criminals? Jail is the "civilized" way to get revenge. I admit death is harsh, but when someone orders the death of tens of thousand people, does he not deserve it? (As a side note, I think that the Saddam Hussein judgment is a joke, since Irak is not even independant and his death are commanded by the US of A and their lapdogs, the British. They kinda choose on which case to judge Hussein, knowing that they helped him on other of his crimes. Nonetheless, he did ordered the kills).
You said yourself that many people think that jail is a punishment. If that many people (which form a good amount of society) believe it so, why not make it so? Choice to the people, that's the beginning of freedom.
You also said that, now, the goal of jail is to make the prisonner take time to think of what he did. If someone goes in jail because he has unpaid tickets, what will he think about? "Oh, I was very bad to park my car in this place over and over and not pay, I so regret this" This sounds a little awkward. Jail IS a punishment, although community work would have been better to "reintegrate" them in society.
Finally, I just want to tone down my opinion on death sentence. This sentence should be very very limited. The best "death sentence" I can think of was that one given to Ciacewsku (spelling?). He made his whole country suffer for his own gain, killing innocent. He deserved death.
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