Incarceration: Rehabiliate and Protect? Or Punish?

[Borodog]

"Justice" doesn't have a bloody thing to do with rehabilitation, or deterence, or punishment, or confinement, or any of the idiot crap that our current justice system is geared toward.

Justice consists of making the victim of aggression whole, or as near to whole as possible, plus compensation proportional to the ordeal they have endured because of the aggression against them. I.e. justice is about restitution.

A prison is a ridiculous thing. Not only does it not make the victim whole (the aggressor's property might be seized all right, but it goes to the state, not his victims), but it doubly harms his victim at the hands of the state, who not only does not receive restitution, but is forced to pay for the housing, feeding, and clothing of his aggressor through taxes, along with the rest of society.

Aggressors should have to make their victims whole and compensate them for their ordeals, and suffer the consequences of economic ostracism. Multiple recidivist offenders should simply be excluded for civilized society.

In those cases where the victim cannot be made whole, for example murder, then justice defaults to vengeance rather than restitution (or perhaps some combination). And that justice should be proportional. If you murder someone, you forfeit your right to life, and a member of your victim's family, or their estate, or perhaps even a charitable vengeance organization (welcome to my world) should be able to hunt you down and kill you.

I can't predict the norms that would actually develop on the market in a free society of course. I can't predict what the response would be to rape, for example. It's not as though a woman who is raped being allowed to rape her rapist is somehow justice, or being made whole. However, I'm sure some social norm would develop. Perhaps representatives of the victim would be allowed to castrate and bullwhip the rapist. Who knows. I bet rapes would go down.