Amazingly, a huge portion of people believe, like this person, that the role of the legal system is to punish people rather than to produce a just and safe society. A huge amount of abuse in policing, courts, and prisons suddenly starts to make sense when you realize that people want people they perceive as low caste to suffer and they see crime not as a chronic condition but as an immutable property of one's soul.

The roles of sentencing in a criminal justice system are:

* Prevention * Deterrence * Veangance

The least-useful of these is veangance. Legislators think it is needed to forestall private acts of veangance. But in itself it serves no purpose.

To deter crime, people have to believe that the likelihood of their being caught and punished is high; without that belief, it doesn't matter how severe the penalties are set.

Prevention by detention is an extreme sanction, and extremely costly. It's only appropriate for incorrigible psychopaths. "Prevention" by court-ordered medical treatment (e.g. rehab, chemical castration) is a human-rights violation. Prevention by supervision, harm-reduction, or education are evidence-based responses that actually have a chance of improving things.

When the punishment is too harsh the rational response is increased hostility towards the society responsible for the punishment. People are not stupid. They know life is short, treat them like pariahs that don’t belong to your society and they will surprise you with their despise for the rules of the society that made clear they are not welcome in it.