I take issue with that goal though, I think we should reduce the chance of future crimes from both criminals and people with no prior history in an effort to minimize the harm done to everyone - this is where I see a reason to fully forgive people. If someone could assure you (and be genuine in it, without strange conditions) that they would never commit another crime, then the only reason left to punish them is to demonstrate to society that the crime they committed is unacceptable - and that means you aren't punishing someone to teach them a lesson but to teach everyone else a lesson, if you could make it seem like they were punished but let them live a normal life that would work just as well (assuming they were actually hidden from view)
I think suspect many people see it as neither primarily vindication nor primarily correction.
Rather, they see it as prevention.
The worse the punishment, the less proclivity the population will have toward criminal acts.
Or so the reasoning goes.
I generally refer to American prisons as "penitentiary" for this reason. Of course there are scenarios that require 3 life sentences (e.g. serial/psychopathic killers), but they really are rare.
I agree with you regarding the zeitgeist, but I strongly disagree with the content of it. IMO a person understanding their actions (thanks to reform) and regretting them, for life, seems like a more vicious form of revenge or retribution. I'm not sure how I'd feel if I were a victim, but I'd like to think I could maintain that thought process.
This is mostly a problem with "sentence stacking" in U.S., which I absolutely think is not the "right balance" for punishing someone in a society. Not to mention how much it's been abused by prosecutors who "throw the book" at the people they want to make an example and essentially force them into plea deals, just so the prosecutors can score another "win."
There's a difference between wanting prisons for rational reasons: deterrence and reform are useful. But if you're just wanting bad things to happen to bad people, how much can you really trust your own interpretation of "bad"?
"Hey - this man raped, tortured and then murdered your daughter, just let it go man, no point in hating on that dude!"
Second - proportional punishment is justice.
Some people cannot be reformed. Should they be in jail forever?
Many people who commit crime are in fact not criminal at all. Many, many people are 'caught up in the moment' unlikely to do such a thing ever again.
Should they go totally unpunished just because the likelihood of recidivism is near zero?
I don't think so.
The greater the crime, the greater the punishment, and hopefully we can catch the 'good kids' early enough to steer them clear.
> Some people cannot be reformed. Should they be in jail forever?
With the caveat that it depends on the crime, yes. If someone is shoplifting a candy bar once a month, it's not worth it to lock them up forever. If they're killing someone once a month, then yes. Somewhere in there is a (big) grey area where the cost to society vs their actions have an equal value.
> Many people who commit crime are in fact not criminal at all. Many, many people are 'caught up in the moment' unlikely to do such a thing ever again.
It's not about if they're "criminals" or not. If they cannot control their behavior and are likely to keep losing control (causing damage to society), then they get locked up.
It's worth noting that locking someone up in a place that prevents them from doing damage, but isn't necessarily unpleasant, is reasonable too. Assuming a good mental facility, putting someone in it because they are a danger to society even though they don't want to be... in theory that's how things work now and it's a good one.
More and more I'm starting to believe that crimes are a "disease." Addiction (and locking up of addicts) is a common debate, but a lack of education can be "treated" and "cured" too. So can discipline and motivational problems. There are some problems that cannot be treated (they definitely exist), and those should be dealt with differently.
> and are likely to keep losing control (causing damage to society), then they get locked up.
Exactly, this is the caveat that I briefly mentioned. There are four functions of prisons [according to me]:
1. Penitentiary: execute justice on those who have harmed society. The victims may feel a sense of justice before the perpetrator is released, or executed. I've succeeded at petty revenge in the past and felt worse about the situation, so I really don't think this works.
2. Correctional: rehabilitate those who have harmed society. The perpetrator must feel a sense of remorse before being released.
3. Protective: lock the perpetrator away forever. Ideally figure out how to provide them with a meaningful life behind walls. The perpetrator is too dangerous to other individuals in society.
4. Psychiatric: lock the perpetrator away until some mental/medical condition is resolved. This could be for their own protection (suicide), or the protection of others (insanity). If the medical condition cannot be resolved (i.e. psychopathy) then society needs to be protected from this individual.
Correctional services seem to be foreign to most people, as so few countries implement it. Norway's mostly successful correctional system[1] changed my mind, but at one point correctional services definitely was a foreign concept to me. If others continue to believe that penitentiary is the answer after I've made my point, then I have failed at making my point.
"Living with guilt" vs. "dying/prison as the easy way out" has often worked, so far as getting people to at least think about alternatives, even though I don't exactly feel that way about the situation.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is...
I hate to make arguments like that in a place with so many gray tribe members, but I feel like you could approach the same ideas with utilitarian arguments. It's not hard to make an argument that we should punish recidivism chance = 0 offenders to provide deterrence. But then the goal cannot be lowest crime, but the most efficient society.
While agree that Compassion and Forgiveness is way higher in Christianity than Justice ... Justice is still part of living an orderly and civic life, which I think Christians would be compelled to do.
But yes, it's complicated.
My next question is "what is justice?" but maybe when we're getting this far into philosophy it's time to time to stop.
No, not of course. The concept of multiple life sentences is farcical. The scenarios which warrant them aren't just rare - they're nonexistent.
If you believe someone should be imprisoned for life then fine, you can defend that position. But giving someone multiple life sentences is a mastabutory exercise which has no practical effect.
They're only going to live the rest of their one lifetime. Give them the one life sentence and be done with it. Life sentences are idempotent - there is no effect to adding more of them together, so it's entirely spurious to do so.
The point of multiple life sentences is that they are sentenced individually for each crime. This is such that in the event one of the crimes is overturned/overruled/evidence shows they didn't do it they'll still be serving life for the other two.
It very much has a practical effect.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/why-judges-hand-mult...
That's not necessary true in a system with early release where release eligibility is based on the original sentence.
Heck, even in a system without that, if there is a possibility of one the verdicts later being nullified or the associated sentence altered, there is a potentially signficant practical difference.
If we're being honest about the legal zeitgeist, judges are not piling on multiple life sentences because they're trying to shore up a wall of convictions, like some kind of sentencing severability clause. They do it because it's flashy and the mob likes it. That there exists a kernel of grounded benefit in it after the fact doesn't make it less ridiculous, because it's an absurdly inefficient way to handle nullifications.
> If we're being honest about the legal zeitgeist, judges are not piling on multiple life sentences because they're trying to shore up a wall of convictions, like some kind of sentencing severability clause.
No, they are doing it for a number of reasons, including early release calculations; which is why they aren't doing it in the US federal system which doesn't have early release on parole, and does use holistic sentencing with the aggregate maximum sentence of crimes in the same proceeding as the outer limit, but sentencing usually determined by a complex holistic formula based on various factors surrounding the crimes under the federal sentencing guidelines.
Ok - make 'life sentence' actually 'life' i.e. 80 years, give it out for the most serious crimes, and that might work.
"there is no effect to adding more of them together, so it's entirely spurious to do so."
For mass murdering psychopaths, there may be 'no difference' in 1 or 80 years.
So by your logic 'they won't reform so skip prison'?
No - punishment is a perfectly normal and reasonable reason to put people in jail.
People who have been transgressed understand this usually better than others.
People want to believe that crime has an easy answer -- namely, being "tough on crime" -- and until they realize that their efforts to impede reintegration increase recidivism far more than they discourage crime, the criminal justice system will be about "corrections" in name only.