I’m sure it is probably unintentional but this question poses a false choice between “restitution” and “incarceration.”
As a consequence, people immediately leap to the case of rape and murder, which between them account for less than 0.05% of all crime. So, right off the bat, people are framing broad questions of “crime” and “justice” in the most emotional possible terms and using the most atypical cases to formulate their ideas about crime. Not surprisingly, the juiced up conversation quickly slides downhill to earnest proposals that we mutilate and kill people “just to see” if it would “work.”
I don’t know why people think it is some kind of bright new idea that if you just make the penalties harsh enough people will be terrorized into law-abiding obedience. It’s been tried over and over and over throughout history, and has never worked. Perhaps the best documented case (other than our own) is England during the rein of Henry VIII. There, the penalty for nearly every crime—even pinching a loaf of bread—was death by hanging. Even children were sent to the gallows. It had absolutely no deterrent effect on crime. In fact, it had the opposite effect. It made people even bolder, as the saying, “Might as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb.” attests.
In fact, the rate at which people were put to death was roughly the same as the rate we incarcerate people (i.e., about 1 per 100) population. In this respect, we are now the most punitive society on earth by far, and our crime rates are no different than other industrialized democracies. We have about 6% of the world’s population and between 26% and 30% of the world’s prisoners. We are one of a handful of countries that puts children to death, and we are the only country in the world that sends children to prison for life without possibility of parole. And, in fact, we actually execute more children than all other countries combined.
All these brutal measures succeed in doing is cheapening life and creating a more vengeful and brute force oriented society overall. It’s not for nothing that death penalty states like Texas have higher rates of murder and violent crime than states which have outlawed the death penalty. Harming people who harm people in order to show them that harming people is wrong is fundamentally flawed as an idea.
First, restitution is just one aspect of a more general restorative approach to justice. If restitution is forced on the offender or simply becomes a way of punishing him further; e.g., by piling on a crushing debt (as it often is today) it will, of course, be self-defeating. In restorative justice the emphasis is not about inflicting pain on the offender because that’s what he “deserves,” but getting the offender to acknowledge the harm he has caused and getting him to take responsibility for “putting right” whatever he can.
Since 99.5% of all crimes are not rape and murder, this is should be widely applicable and appropriate. Even in cases of rape and murder, the evidence suggests that it does seem to help the victims to move on when they can find out why the offender did what he did and whether he is sorry about it. In some cases, they find they are able to forgive the offender, which seems to be much more healing and closure-promoting than straight up vengeance.
I’ve been to prison and I’ve met literally hundreds of thieves like @Axemusica. He is right, they don’t steal out of necessity; mostly, they are opportunists who have no regard for the rights and feelings of others. Threatening them with even more dire punishments will have absolutely no effect. Trust me, going to prison is already a dire punishment and it hasn’t stopped anybody I know from stealing. (According to a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest, practically everybody steals.) Threatening to kill people or cut their balls off would only succeed in getting them to turn in their partners in crime. I would bet @Axemusica that some of his old buddies are on their second time down by now—and if they thought they could get 30 days off their sentence, they have probably already given him up for some crime of note he has committed in the past. I’ve seen it before.
Anyway, restorative justice is all about harm mitigation and harm reduction, and that involves addressing the reasons why the offender offends. Not everyone steals just because they want stuff and they don’t care how they get it. Only about 16% of the people in prison are there because they caused some person actual harm. That is about 4.5% are there on some sort of violent crime; and about 9% are there because of some property crime. The vast majority of people in prison are there because of drugs, and race has a lot to do with it. About 25% to 30% of the people in prison are there because they are mentally ill; around 56% are there on a parole violation, mostly for some bullshit technical beef, like missing an appointment with their P.O. or having beer cans in their trash—i.e., things that are not even crimes. (Obviously, these categories overlap).
People like @Axemusica are going to keep on doing what they are doing until they decide to stop. Threatening to cut their balls off or otherwise brutalizing them has absolutely no effect. When you throw them in prison, it only pisses them off and makes them worse. Once you’ve been to prison, no matter how bad it is, you are no longer scared of it—and once you’re no longer scared of prison, you’re going to keep on doing what you want to do, and nothing is going to stop you.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
