I am a retributivist and if provoked will give an elaborate explaantion of why retribution is justice. It's not blood lust. It's also not going away.
I agree, and I guess as a sometime criminal defense lawyer that I am person who has a fair amount of contact with the criminal injustice system. I agree that it is seriously broke. It does not often, and then generally accidentally, provide real retribution. It does seem to provide real deterrence. Index crime rates have been falling like a stone since the start of the Reagan era.
Oddly enough for all the humane opponents of irrational retribution, a pretty good case can be made that the savagely disproportionate (thus nonretributive) penalties we inflict are pretty effective at deterrence, and it's a concern that proportionate retribution, an eye for an eye, would not be nearly as effect as a deterrent because the penalties would be much lighter on average.
But pay no mind to me, I'm irrational, right?
--- On Mon, 4/6/09, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Prisons and The Left
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, April 6, 2009, 7:04 PM
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Chuck Grimes
> <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> > For the intelligencia here who have had no contact
> with prison-industrial
> > complex it is impossible to see how those of us who
> want it torn down can
> > justify our position. Our skeptics may follow the
> theoretical idea of a
> > psycho-social construct of identity (criminal
> identity), but they haven't
> > seen it in practice or felt it themselves. Well, use a
> thought experiment.
> > If you are a parent, then it should be pretty easy to
> imagine how your child
> > can get into trouble with the cops, teachers, or other
> kids. In fact most of
> > your methods for dealing with your kids in potentially
> hostile circumstances
> > are all attempts to prevent a social construct from
> taking place, i.e the
> > bad boy, bad girl syndrome.
>
> Great post Chuck. I understand that the desire for
> retribution is
> pretty strong in the population as a whole, and it's a
> legitimate
> emotion that's not easy to reason with (though I am
> surprised Doug
> wants to see someone in jail for stealing a car). But
> things have
> become pretty warped, at least in the Anglo societies, when
> given
> economic circumstances that generate a certain level of
> property and
> violent crime, a political logic feeds and feeds off that
> emotion to
> keep toughening sentences. You don't have to take an
> absolutist
> position, or think there a perfect crime-free society is
> possible, to
> think the crime and punishment system as it is today is
> completely
> rotten.
>
> Mike Beggs
> scandalum.wordpress.com
>
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