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.

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
Multiple recidivist offenders should simply be excluded for civilized society.


[/ QUOTE ]
What does this entail?

chez

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Multiple recidivist offenders should simply be excluded for civilized society.


[/ QUOTE ]
What does this entail?

chez

[/ QUOTE ]

You'll probably scoff, but basically, things like ruining their credit.

Economic ostracism has always been a devastatingly effective social punishment. Cutting someone off from the benefits of the division of labor has enormous consequences.

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Multiple recidivist offenders should simply be excluded for civilized society.


[/ QUOTE ]
What does this entail?

chez

[/ QUOTE ]

You'll probably scoff, but basically, things like ruining their credit.

Economic ostracism has always been a devastatingly effective social punishment. Cutting someone off from the benefits of the division of labor has enormous consequences.

[/ QUOTE ]
I wont scoff. Although I totally disagree with your views on this subject, in my opinion its a matter of opinion.

but what about multiple recidivists who have alreday lost their line of credit etc. e.g a mugger with nothing except proceeds of the last mugging.

edit: if it makes a difference make that a non-violent burglar.

chez

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Multiple recidivist offenders should simply be excluded for civilized society.


[/ QUOTE ]
What does this entail?

chez

[/ QUOTE ]

You'll probably scoff, but basically, things like ruining their credit.

Economic ostracism has always been a devastatingly effective social punishment. Cutting someone off from the benefits of the division of labor has enormous consequences.

[/ QUOTE ]
I wont scoff. Although I totally disagree with your views on this subject, in my opinion its a matter of opinion.

but what about multiple recidivists who have alreday lost their line of credit etc. e.g a mugger with nothing except proceeds of the last mugging.

edit: if it makes a difference make that a non-violent burglar.

chez

[/ QUOTE ]

Rothbard offers one possibility:

[ QUOTE ]
Suppose that, as in most cases, the thief has already spent the money. In that case, the first step of proper libertarian punishment is to force the thief to work, and to allocate the ensuing income to the victim until the victim has been repaid. The ideal situation, then, puts the criminal frankly into a state of enslavement to his victim, the criminal continuing in that condition of just slavery until he has redressed the grievance of the man he has wronged. -- Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, ch. 13, Punishment & Proportionality.

[/ QUOTE ]

Perhaps they would be removed to the frontiers of civilization by charitable organizations; like the artic circle. I can't predict.

Or it's entirely possible some for of prison might exist; I can't say it won't. Again, from Rothbard:

[ QUOTE ]
The idea of primacy for restitution to the victim has great precedent in law; indeed, it is an ancient principle of law which has been allowed to wither away as the State has aggrandized and monopolized the institutions of justice. In medieval Ireland, for example, a king was not the head of State but rather a crime-insurer; if someone committed a crime, the first thing that happened was that the king paid the "insurance" benefit to the victim, and then proceeded to force the criminal to pay the king in turn (restitution to the victim's insurance company being completely derived from the idea of restitution to the victim). In many parts of colonial America, which were too poor to afford the dubious luxury of prisons, the thief was indentured out by the courts to his victim, there to be forced to work for his victim until his "debt" was paid. This does not necessarily mean that prisons would disappear in the libertarian society, but they would undoubtedly change drastically, since their major goal would be to force the criminals to provide restitution to their victim.

[/ QUOTE ]

[andyfox]

Wouldn't such a punishment lead to continued recidivism?

[andyfox]

"I'm sure some social norm would develop."

Have most (or some) current punishments for lawbreakers derived from some previous social norm?

[andyfox]

I wonder what some of the posters here think of this, from your essay in that book:

"We should realize that those criminals who commit crimes that are clearly "bad plays" (by the poker risk vs. reward criteria) are more sick than evil. The truly evil person is the one who would, for instance, rape women were it not for the punishment he fears. (And the fact that there are men like this out there is demonstrated periodically when there is a conquering army and some of the soldiers take advantage of the fact that they can rape with impunity.) Those who rape anyway, in spite of the obvious probable severe consequences, may need to be put away but probably shouldn't be reviled. Rather those who walk among us who are law abiding only because of the consequences of crime are the ones to be considered the most despicable (as well as those few in prison who got unluck while committing a "good play" crime). [emphasis in original]

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
Rather those who walk among us who are law abiding only because of the consequences of crime are the ones to be considered the most despicable

[/ QUOTE ]
So if on-line poker was illegal punishable by death then those who didn't play only because of the consequences of the crime would be despicable?

chez

[RJT]

Bdog,

[ QUOTE ]
Multiple recidivist offenders should simply be excluded for civilized society.

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Perhaps representatives of the victim would be allowed to castrate and bullwhip the rapist. Who knows. I bet rapes would go down.

[/ QUOTE ]

These two statements are hard to reconcile with the word “civilized” included.

RJT