Admittedly, you're expressing a common sentiment. I've never been the victim of a violent crime, so I can't speak to the experience of feeling a need for satisfactory vengeance. But it seems to me to be one of the worse aspects of human nature, which we should seek to overcome through enacting laws seeking restorative justice, or at least non-vengeance based punishment systems. Unfortunately, the letter of the law has little to say about the underlying human desire for vengeance when wronged, and instead seems to often start from the axiom that satisfaction must be given. I wish this were more frequently and publicly questioned.
FYI, this is an excellent book on the subject: "Inferno: An Anatomy of American Justice" by Robert Ferguson (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674728684)
Repairing private harms isn't the purpose of the criminal justice system, its the purpose of the civil justice system, where imprisonment and capital punishment aren't even options.
The criminal justice system exist to address (whether in a punitive, restorative, or preventive sense), harms to society as a whole.
> "Hurting criminals" isn't just done to deter future crimes, it's done to satisfy the needs of the victims.
Hurting wrongdoers to "satisfy the needs of the victims" doesn't do much to satisfy actual needs of the victims, but does create a society with a lot more victims and wrongdoers.
Vengeance is a perfectly natural and reasonable expectation of someone in such a situation and an essential element of justice. If the state doesn't provide it, people will take it into their own hands.
Yes, both.
> Vengeance is a perfectly natural and reasonable expectation of someone in such a situation
Natural, obviously (everything that occurs is "natural"; there is nothing but nature.)
Reasonable, no.
> and an essential element of justice.
This is a moral axiom that is far from universally accepted, rather than any kind of statement of verifiable fact.
> If the state doesn't provide it, people will take it into their own hands.
If the state doesn't provide it, some subset of victims will take it into their own hands (and even if the state does provide any particular version of "vengeance", some subset of victims will still take additional or differently-targeted vengeance into their own hands.)
There are lots of things some percentage of people will do on their own if the state doesn't do it for them, but that fact is not, in and of itself, support for the claim that the state doing those things is essential.
I personally do not think that so much importance should be given to the mental state of people affected by trauma. I mean no offense to them, but due to inadequate training in dealing with emotions (which pretty much everyone lacks) their minds are often affected and not kept steady.
I suspect that this is one of the reasons why we don't let victims decide penalties. But judges and especially juries can be affected by outrage, hatred and delusion too. They also cling.
"Hurting criminals" isn't just done to deter future crimes, it's done to satisfy the needs of the victims.