We have a whole justice system for that -- and its not the criminal justice system.
The criminal justice system exist to serve interests that aren't addressed by the compensatory orientation of the civil justice system.
Why would you give the victim of, say, an assault... money ???
I thought the idea was to give that person justice ??? And for that reason, we put the perpetrator in a prison that, of course, we pay for.
What exactly is wrong with that system ???
A person should be in jail if they are proven to be a continuing danger to others. A person should not be put in a cage simply to give the victim an emotional release under the "Eye for an Eye" doctrine.
Monetary compensation to victims is an attempt to make a person whole. Victims of all types of crime suffer actual damages such as medical bills, lost wages, damage to property. There is there are indirect damages for things like victim counseling.
Often times it is simply not possible to fully make a person "whole" again after a crime, however monetary compensation is the best option we have today to ensure the victim can get the needed treatment, or aid they need to at-least move forward with their lives
Locking persons in a cage does not help the victim, or the criminal. Prison should be used to separate persons from society to dangerous to be allowed to walk free... Nothing else.
no. i'm sorry but just no. People are in prison because their actions have proven they are a danger to others and should only be released then they have PROVEN THEY ARE NOT a danger to others.
That's a pretty big assumption given that prosecutors face no professional or personal consequences for wrongful convictions, even if they are particularly egregious.
That takes quite a faith in process that has little remedial feedback.
Unlike say engineering or medicine where there can be a said to be an objectively observable system where all strive towards similar outcomes - and even those disciplines screw up constantly.
"Otherwise that leads to basically letting everyone go free just in case they're actually innocent"
There is a huge category of crime where long term incarceration absolutely does no help to anyone whatsoever.
Do you believe people should be guilty until proven innocent as well? Functionally that is what you are saying
Penal theory is a complex topic. The intellectual heavyweight on this topic from a philosophical standpoint is the late Michel Foucault, who wrote a book called Discipline and Punish studying the origin of the prison. It's not an easy read (I strongly suspect Foucault just banged out his first draft on a typewriter and then browbeat his publisher into printing it without any revisions) but an extremely thought-provoking one.
Basically his thesis is that in earlier times, most work was agricultural and lawbreaking was treated as tantamount to attacking the king of a country, so terrible retributions and tortures would be visited on the body of offenders in a way that was meant to mirror the (metaphorical) injury to the body of the monarch (which was the embodiment of society, law and so on). although such punishments were gruesome (and often had the unintended effect of creating sympathy or notoriety for criminals) they were not actually administered that often and there was actually a lot of wiggle room between what the law said and how it was enforced, which had the purpose of acting as a political safety valve while still making it easy to crack down on real threats (truly awful crimes, or waves of crime by rebellious mobs etc.).
At the dawn of the industrial age, the factors of economic production shifted away from land and towards other forms of capital, and manufacturing shifted away from skilled craftsmen in self-policing guilds towards factories and so on. The division of labor and specialization made organization essential, and first the workplace, then also schools, hospitals, and eventually prisons were reconstituted in the image of military camps, since standardization and deindividuation had long proved their worth in military conflict.
Foucault argues that organizing, quantizing, and generally systematizing the punishment of crimes led to an increasingly impersonal approach based on surveillance and the manufacture of compliant behavior as a social product (note, for example, the oddly anthropomorphic architecture of Pentonville prison, which was heavily influenced by Benthamite concepts of continuous surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice#/media/Fil...). Insofar as this disciplinary approach became the norm across society as the middle class displaced the peasantry as the primary political force, so too it made society more and more neurotic and whole industries sprang up to manage and indeed optimize these neuroses. Further, establishment of prisons as a mainstream social technology practically guaranteed the dissemination of criminal knowledge between inmates, providing society with a way to extract value from criminal enterprises at the same time that expanding the scope of criminalization proved an effective tool for restraining whole sections of the population by channeling criminal energies into fairly predictable and manageable channels.
tl;dr by default, we're actually cogs in a big economic machine that molds our entire perception of reality. Various science fiction films like The Matrix make a similar argument in allegorical terms.
Since society is not actually an entity that can be paid anything, it's not surprising that individuals want to treat ex-cons unfairly.
I think we should scrap the notion of "paying your debt to society" altogether and instead focus on making victims whole. As it stands, victims of crime get minimal remuneration[1], and it varies by state. It's not the criminal who pays the victim, it's the taxpayer. And then the taxpayer gets to pay for the prison term as well.
[1]: http://www.victimsofcrime.org/help-for-crime-victims/get-hel...