Law doesn't seek to punish but to rehabilitate. Act of taking freedom away from the criminal is violent enough. Treating them badly is just a sign of unfair/poor society that cannot maintain (afford to keep) it's promise to be civil to all citizens.
The purposes are punishment are deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation [1]. (Incapacitation is also typically considered in sentencing.)
The potential deterrence and retributive benefits of cruel have been known for ages. It’s why jailers did it. Those potential benefits are balanced against rehabilitation. But that doesn’t make it the supreme consideration, particularly for crimes of corruption.
Maybe Norway prisons are just really nasty. No drugs, no fights, no conflict with the wardens, just boredom and then solitary confinement if you do anything that's "not OK".
But most of the people live in countries with death penalties. All the top 6 countries by population have death penalty and only 4 out of biggest 17 countries do not have death penalty.
There are 53 states (out of 193 UN states + 2 observer states) that have not abolished, and continue to use the death penalty.
"First-world" is Cold War terminology meaning Western countries and their allies, as opposed to second-world Warsaw Pact states and their allies, versus third-world non-aligned states. This would include death penalty states like Pakistan and Iran, who at one point were British dominions.
If we instead mean "developed countries" (as defined by the IMF), then 4 out of 60 developed countries have not abolished the death penalty: they are the United States, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
The other 49 states continuing to use the death penalty (including China) are not considered "developed countries" by the IMF.
Not entirely. There are a few different motivations for punishment: one, is to act as a deterrant (people won't do the crime because they fear the punishment. Tends to work best when people think they are likely to be caught), two is to act as a form of correction/rehabilitation: (after one punishment people are less likely to do it again. Tends to have problems when the punishment sets people up to be more likely to commit crime, by either putting them in contact with other criminals or further pushing them into desperate circumstances after the punishment), third is as a sense of justice, to some extent as revenge. The punishment of an offender can help the victims on an emotional level and also foster trust in the system (requires that the punishments are viewed as just and proportional). Lastly, in extreme cases, as a form of protection/prevention: by removing the person from being able to commit any further crimes.
So the idea is this will rehabilitate Sarkozy? Do you believe that this experience will rehabilitate Sarkozy, or even that he's an active threat to commit more crimes in the future? It seems like the only conceivable social benefit of incarcerating him is to punish him for corruption as a deterrent to others. But his luxury prison room probably won't do that, so it's basically just an expensive legal formality to satisfy public demands for "justice" (ie, retribution for wrongdoing)
It's not a luxury room like drug lords have had in corrupt countries. He's in the VIP wing, which means life generally sucks except he won't have to worry about random violence or gang politics. It's a lot better than normal prisoners get, but it's hardly a vacation.
I agree that the point is punishment and deterrence to other public officials, proving no one is truly out of reach of the law.
Rehabilitate and/or deter. The extent to which it is either the former or the latter depends on the country. That also determines whether or not "treating them badly" should be a feature of the justice system.
Your confounding how things should be with how they are. These are two distinct philosophies, only one of which is relevant in most of the real world, unfortunately.
Punishment and rehabilitation aren’t mutually exclusive. Arguably, the punishment aspect is served by the removal of freedoms that being locked in prison entails. Rehabilitation can be any number of things that the prisoner does while in prison.
I would like a mixture of punishment and rehabilitation. If some kid shoplifts, then the balance should be in favor of rehabilitation. If someone commits treason or murder, then that balance is entirely on punishment, there is not rehabilitation left.
I would be fine with it if all prisoners had similar conditions, which they do not.
Also he and his supports have always criticized prisons for being "too luxurious", so hearing them complaining about his conditions now is infuriating.
As for rehabilitation, there is little hope for him. Prisons also serve to isolate individuals which are dangerous to the society, which he is (he is currently investigated for attempting to rig his current trial, something for which he was already condemned in the past).
An eye for an eye makes the all world go blind. But, one eye for both eyes quickly renders the all bad actors of society blind and incapable of harming the law abiding citizens.
It’s not fancy around these parts to give the example of El Salvador, because most of us live in a very comfortable bubble and can pretend we support all these fancy thing of “reintegration and not punishment” but go ask what the people in El Salvador think about how their country got rid of criminal violence.
The core point of organized justice is to prevent blood feuds and long-running inter-personal or tribal conflict. Essentially, to interrupt or prevent a cycle of violence. Justice is reaching consensus on a set of facts and then ascertaining an appropriate compensation. That compensation can include a loss of freedom, a monetary payment, mandated service hours, or historically - torture and death. But what matters is a process that is broadly seen as a fair assessment and compensation sufficient to prevent revenge by the impacted parties.
Justice as prevention is secondary - and arguably ineffective - or we'd have no crime, no recidivism, no addicts, nobody acting with obviously negative personal outcomes.
Systems that seek to reduce conflict and compensate victims did not historically make much use of imprisonment.
For a modern look at this, look at the xeer system of Somalia, where victims will almost always prefer payment/compensation over punishment.
Imprisonment is largely an invention of the state, as they push victims and inter-personal conflict aside, and rather use their tools to subordinate the citizen to the order of the state and then charge the victim taxpayers the cost of imprisonment and funnel the money into their buddies running and working the prisons.
Must justice include punishment? If someone hits me, I'd much rather they take responsibility, apologise, and work on themselves to become a better person, than simply get locked up for a while.
Those are not the only two options that they can choose from. And being hit is a very minimal example. Would you say the same for rape? No punishment required; just apologise and work on yourself?
You skipped the “take responsibility”. In case of a more serious crime a simple apology is indeed not enough. But it should still be possible to proceed with something more productive for everyone than putting the perpetrator behind bars. As you say, there are many options.
I think most people who commit a crime either do it in the heat of the moment, or believe that they're very unlikely to get caught. The distant prospect of punishment doesn't apply in either case.
I guess there are some edge cases. Drug smugglers for example are probably aware of the rough probability of detection and weigh it up against the length of jail time. But I reckon Sarkozy thought he'd just get away with it and didn't even consider what the potential punishment would be.
There's definitely some truth to that. There are situations where someone might restrain themselves because of the consequences of getting caught. I suppose the question is whether the consequence needs to be punishment as opposed to correction or isolation. In the case of a narcissist like Sarkozy, the reputaional tarnish of being publicly labeled as guilty would be an emotional blow.
> those who spend a lot of time in prison seem to come out worse and reoffend. How is that helpful?
You're implying that imprisonment makes people offend more - perhaps the simpler explanation is that most criminals will commit crimes when they get the chance, especially prolific criminals. Prison takes them off the streets and stops them victimising more people - this is helpful.
Prison is nonsense and a waste of human life. Best punishment is caning like Singapore. Do fast and quick. Pain is an excellent memory aid. Most stable lowest recidivism rate.
Depending on how hard they hit you, the extent of your injuries, and the circumstances surrounding the assault (premeditated or not, provoked or unprovoked), why not both lock them up and have them work on themselves?
If the only repercussion for assault is they need to apologize and "work on themselves", then what's stopping more people from committing assault? There needs to be punishment.
I don't think that people are stopped from committing assault by an abstract risk-benefit calculation that considers the likelihood of jailtime. It's not what stops me, at least. Mostly I just don't want to. And even if I do want to hit someone, I know that that fleeting temptation doesn't accord with my fundamental values; I'll feel bad afterwards. I'm intimately aware that they might retaliate, or that I might accidentally kill them (or vice versa). It just doesn't feel worth it because I've been socialised to weigh up those odds. But the distant prospect of jail time feels abstract and harder to socialise into people in the heat of the moment.
You're not a remorseless psychopath, though. Some people are.
For a nuanced discussion, the Illustrated Guide to the Law is an excellent introduction. Here's the section on Punishment: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41
It ends with the summary "The State punishes those who commit crimes partly in the hope of preventing future offenses (via rehabilitation, deterrence, and removal)... partly to restore a sense of balance and fairness (via retribution)... and partly because fuck you, that’s why (retaliation)"
Namely that it is unlikely to factor into people's decision-making process - and when it does, the extent of the punishment makes little difference. Slightly disappointed to wade through slides of challenging handwriting to find that it wasn't saying much more :/
Because vengeance has never done anyone any good. You never feel better after getting vengeance, just hollow. Thus, a good legal system should strive to provide justice, not vengeance.
To use the example from a sibling comment, if a person kills a child and the father kills this guy out of vengeance .. it will do those children good, who can now live in safety afterwards from that person.
But if in reality the murderer also had family who did not believe he murdered anyone in the first place now set out to seek justice/vengeance, then yes, it becomes a war .. which is why we have courts and police nowdays, but what justice is, is still rather arbitarily defined. Concretely it means enforcing the law. And laws are written by people.
Have you ever distributed vengeance so you can personally speak how you felt? Or are you mindlessly repeating strings of words that are supposed to go together like an LLM?
I don't have to justify to you, random internet stranger. I have made my share of experience, and read a fair bit about that of others, in history and literature; and I'm confidently standing behind my opinion.
What you are asking about is called Retributive Justice.
The reason the answer is not clear is attitudes to Retributive Justice vary widely across cultures and political systems. In OECD countries, the dominant (but not universal view) is there is no role for Retributive Justice in a modern society.
That is my position. The reason I don't think vengeance should be part of Justice is it's counter productive. The role of society as I see it, is to create an environment that produces nice things for myself and my family, so we prosper. I think it's self evident having as many people as possible working hard maximises this.
Justice is a unfortunate blight on that. Producing nice things requires people to work cooperatively, people working cooperatively requires rules. You can't have someone kill another for food when they could be working on a farm instead, so we have a rule for that. The role of Justice is to encourage people to follow those rules, so Justice is necessary too. But Justice is costly. It requires police, lawyers, judges, and jails. It removes people who could be producing nice things from society and makes them a burden to carry instead. "An eye for an eye" sounds equitable, but it means there are now two people without an eye instead of one. There have been calculations on what the Justice systems costs a typical OECD country. The answer seems to be around 2% of GDP. For the USA, that's about $600 billion per year.
Because of that large cost to me it is self evident you want as little Justice as possible. Just enough so just about everyone follows the rules, and no more. If you are forced to productive people from society and feed, house, and protect them in a jail, then you should strive to redirect, educate, and train them so when released they will become productive, and produce nice things. For me. This is called rehabilitation. Every modern society preaches rehabilitation over vengeance, but not all do it.
So what rule does vengeance play in this? Vengeance is by definition punishing people more than rehabilitation requires. Thus it costs money to extract vengeance. Sometimes a lot of money. In my country jailing someone for life means it costs my government $300/day, potentially for decades. That means I have less nice things. It even means the victim has less nice things, in the end. After all, that money could be paying for teachers and schools, to educate the victims kids. The conclusion most most people in OECD societies have drawn from that is vengeance has no role in Justice.
In this view, the becoming the victim of a crime is no different to any another unfortunate event, like losing your house to a storm, or becoming the victim of a plane crash, or dying from cancer. You don't get to seek vengeance for those events, so why should being the victim of a crime be any different? Adding to that, you are not entirely powerless against random destructive events. You can insure against them. Crime is no different. We can and do insure against the ill effects of crime.
