Thoughts on societal punishment

Looking at America, I have a difficult time discerning the intended purpose of the judicial system, namely the courts that deal specifically with prosecuting criminal activity and imposing penalties. I might presume the purpose is to “bring about the rule of righteousness in the land … so that the strong shall not harm the weak,” or some snobbery of that sort, whatever that means. My question is how? Is it by instilling fear of retribution? Is the retribution itself, as many grieving victims would profess, the entire point of it? Is it merely by separating the bad lot from the good lot?

Try as I may, I can’t find a morally consistent argument for the status and practices of America’s justice system. It seems that if they’re not trying to correct a wrong with another wrong, then they’re merely acting out of a sadistic disregard for the innate value of the people they punish and subject to violence, psychological torture and death.

They simply don’t seem to be doing anything particularly helpful or in alignment with their own goals. If their objective is to instill fear of retribution, then they’re doing an abysmal job at it; America's prison system's ability to attract people back, or draw them there in the first place, is evidence enough of that. If their goal is to issue damage for damage, then their goal is morally corrupt and self defeating. A moral imperative does not invert simply for moving to the other side of a courtroom. If human life and dignity were of innate value to the courts, then they wouldn’t be so eager to put an end to them. If their goal was to attain compensation for damages to society, I could understand that. Fines and compensatory debt have moral justification in that someone is returning what they have taken, but there are no labor camps and no output to society from prisons; they’re not factories, they’re cages. If the goal of prisons is simply to remove the negative element from mainstream society, then one must question why criminals are not simply relocated, but are stripped of all rights and dignity and are subject to execution, and they themselves are no longer guaranteed safety. There is a retributional element here, but I can’t find the justification for it.

I am advocating the notion that there should be only three general actions that a legal system should impose upon criminals. They are fines, rehabilitation, or segregation if the first two are unviable for specific individuals. Currently, the fines are not acted upon to their fullest potential, rehabilitation is nearly a nonfactor, and segregation is issued in such excess as to approach stupidity, involves more elements than it needs to, and is corrupted with a host of superfluous and unjustifiable penalties.

It seems to me that this country’s judicial system has changed little since the time of its inception, and rather than adapt new systems to an ever changing society and value structure, it’s still applying the frameworks applied in the middle ages.