Thank you for replying.

There seems to be two components to your reasoning. The first is to disincentivize that individual’s repeated behavior or to disincentivize via anticipation of it in advance with the threat of punishment. Most people think this is a positive ethical stance.

The problem is that there’s not a ton of actual evidence supporting the idea. There are numerous studies (the majority as far as I’m aware) that indicate that there is no relationship between the harshness of a punishment and the crime rate. Having the death penalty does not make the murder rate go down, for example. As a more general observation, the US has the highest incarceration rate and some of the worst prison conditions in the industrialized world, and still manages to have crime rates that are on par with, or even much higher than, those other countries. The same relationship holds true at the state level within the US. The southern states and those known for a harsh criminal justice system have high crime rates as well. Countries like Norway, for example, have prisons that are better than many US hotels, but they have lower crime rates and lower rates of recidivism. For the most part, there seems to be no causal connection from harshness of punishment and lack of crime. I can go into some amount of detail as to why that might be true from a biological perspective.

As far as an ethical philosophy of justice goes, though, deterrence is largely seen as being morally defensible as it exchanges a lesser harm (locking a person up) against a greater harm.

The second part is a bit more challenging to defend as an ethical position, as it boils down, essentially, to revenge for the sake of revenge. There’s some other interpretations (like trying to balance some cosmological equations via accountancy), but those usually have outside assumptions and this is already getting long. To be clear, I am separating the motivations of disincentives versus causing harm for the sake of causing harm (because of a harm already caused). Once that is removed, we are left with (as an extreme example) a father beating his daughter’s rapist to death with a baseball bat in secret rather than seeing the guy go to prison (or whatever). Again, it’s not about preventing that one man from re-offending (you could lock him in the Ritz with daily room service and be effective at preventing his raping someone again). It’s pure revenge. This is understandable (and again I can speak to the sociobiology behind it) but in the case that it does not achieve a larger objective (ie the greater good) as per the previous paragraphs, it’s less morally defensible. It relies on the idea that the offender (who we will assume for the sake of argument is the actual guilty one) has become a literal out-law, which means that the laws that protect people’s lives and freedoms no longer apply to them.

All of the foregoing assumes free will and rational actors, which does not generally have a lot of empirical support, and which may be why the punishment model tends to underperform our expectations.

So a question that raises is whether, if you could hop into your tardis and go back in time and help that rapist grow into someone who doesn’t rape, would that be a more just solution? Let’s say you know someone who is a serial child rapist who also raped your child. If you were able to go back into their own childhood and remove them from the home of their drug addicted single mother living in poverty and their crime-ridden violent neighborhood and give them a life of ease, sending them to the best schools and into a high earning and prestigious job, would you do it if you knew with god-like certainty that it would make them into a not-rapist? Would you view that as rewarding future-them for being a rapist?

Unlike the general lack of correlation between harshness of punishment and the rate of serious crimes, we do know with statistical certainty that there is a very strong relation between things like nutrition, education, and trauma, and the likelihood of committing crimes. That’s a fact we can hang our criminological hats on.

The question of free will is another discussion, but just going off of empirical evidence we can find correlations in one approach and a general lack of them in the other.

None of this is to say that people doing harm should be allowed to run around continuing to do harm. It’s really just presenting two ideas:

1. If the point is to reduce overall harm to society (murder and rapes and robberies and such), there are more effective techniques than making punishment more severe
2. If an individual does cause harm, there are more efficient ways of making sure they don’t do so again. If a person can be socially adjusted by education or medication such that we knew they wouldn’t re-offend they could be released as soon as the solution was secured. If that is not possible and they must be incarcerated for the safety of others, there’s no moral justification in creating more harm by making that incarceration any less humane than it needs to be (eg, locking them in their room at the Ritz), so long as it achieves the same society-level effect that would be achieved by sticking them in solitary at a supermax.

Does that make sense?