I have recently been thinking more about the concepts of justice and punishment in the context of modern criminal justice systems.
A couple of recent events brought this to the front of my list:
The first of these was yesterday's
The Best of the Fray thread about John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio auto worker accused of being an accomplice to the murder of 29,000 Jews for his role as a prison guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943.
The second was watching TV coverage of Bernie Madoff entering court to plead guilty to multiple charges in connection with his $50 Billion ponzi scheme.
My point in this post is not to discuss the specifics of either case, so much as to raise the questions of what it is we expect our justice system to accomplish.
I expect that the roots of our concepts of justice are with our most primitive sense of vengeance -- the idea that if you do something bad to me, I will do the same, or worse, to you. I can easily imagine that in primitive, family-oriented society, such a threat was likely one of the bases for the formation of rules of behavior. One family would attempt to somewhat control the behavior of their family towards members of other families, because of the risk of retaliation by members of the other families.
Early organized societies began to assume the role of the avenger, in place of the victim or the victim's extended family -- likely in large part because of the desire to prevent escalating rounds of violence. The Leviticus laws of the Hebrews would be a good example of this, with specific limits to the amount of vengeance to take for selected crimes -- the eye-for-an-eye idea, as well as reduced penalties when the offense was caused by accident, etc.
For thousands of years, most societies inflicted rather draconian punishments for a number of crimes -- often involving protracted, painful death. However, outside of a few Islamic nations, such punishments have been long abandoned in modern times -- even those few nations retaining the death penalty take great pains to assure that the death is as painless as possible.
I raise the question of whether there is any 21st Century reason why vengeance itself is a valid part of our concept of justice.
I am not specifically addressing the death penalty in this post, so I will assume for purposes of discussion that the penalty in question is imprisonment.
So What is Justice?One one level, justice could involve some attempt to make the victim whole -- in the case of economic crime, this might involve economic restitution. But in the case of crimes against the victim's person, that is not so simple. Economic restitution may be part of the process -- some financial compensation for the suffering caused, for the economic losses incurred, etc, but it is hard to imagine what financial compensation would adequately compensate for someone being raped, for example, not to mention being permanently disfigured or crippled, and certainly not for being killed.
So beyond economic restitution, there is little that can be done to the perpetrator what will do much to un-do the damage to the victim. Killing or imprisoning the perpetrator will not do anything to unrape the young woman, to bring back someone's murdered son.
What punishment can do is two things:
First, it can be an effective deterrent to others who might be otherwise inclined to commit similar offenses. Certainly, for those of us who are reasonably rational, the fear of the consequences is one of the reasons we might resist the temptation to commit many crimes.
The second is that a convicted criminal who is imprisoned has far fewer opportunities to commit further crimes, at least for the duration of his/her incarceration. Locking up individuals who have proven themselves to be dangers to society can be seen as serving to protect the society. The same can be said of those committed to secure mental facilities. In this respect, it matters little, if at all, whether the perpetrator can be help personally responsible for his/her actions (ie moral culpability), but instead is a matter of whether the individual would constitute a danger to the community if left free.
My opinion is that the concept is justice as vengeance has long been obsolete -- that it should have no place in our justice system in the 21st Century. I see the desire to have revenge as an obsolete artifact of our earliest humanoid ancestors -- one that is at least as dysfunctional as are many of our "fight or flight" responses to the stresses of modern life.
