If retribution was so effective, the US prison system would be the best in the western world. Yet repeat offenders are common because most prisoners don’t receive the help they need to become productive members of society. The programs that do exist to help them gain life skills and provide mental counseling give them a much better chance at living a better life when they’re released.
The main value of punishment is to provide a disincentive to committing the act. People tend not to learn from the punishment itself, but from the knowledge that it’s genuine and not an empty promise. This is the real reason why cops chase down most people who refuses to be pulled over. Those chases endanger everyone, including the cops, but they do it anyways to make sure people know that cops must be obeyed or else.
However, another method for reducing behavior is to make alternatives more appealing. Poverty increases crime in large part due to it being the easiest way to make money. Why study and possibly get a well paying job in the future when you can sell drugs and have more money than anyone else in the neighborhood? Why slave away for shit wages to make capital owners richer when you can steal catalytic converters?
Retribution only works at getting people to behave when their brains make the connection between the behavior and the consequences. If someone directly applies punishment, it risks causing the punished person to connect the punisher and the punishment together, rather than the behavior and the punishment. This is why corporeal punishment of children often doesn’t lead to well behaved children. In fact, beating your kids can cause them to hate you and probably carry on the behavior when you’re not looking.
So what’s the alternative to cold hard punishment? Getting them to understand that bad behavior will lead to bad consequences, and that good behavior will lead to good consequences. This will work for most people, but there are exceptions: People with clinical personality disorders who are a danger to those around them through no fault of their own. Unfortunately, our society does a poor job of not rewarding some of these people with power, especially thanks to capitalism. Unfortunately, some level of coercive power must be employed to safeguard against these threats.
If retribution was so effective, the US prison system would be the best in the western world. Yet repeat offenders are common because most prisoners don’t receive the help they need to become productive members of society. The programs that do exist to help them gain life skills and provide mental counseling give them a much better chance at living a better life when they’re released.
The main value of punishment is to provide a disincentive to committing the act. People tend not to learn from the punishment itself, but from the knowledge that it’s genuine and not an empty promise. This is the real reason why cops chase down most people who refuses to be pulled over. Those chases endanger everyone, including the cops, but they do it anyways to make sure people know that cops must be obeyed or else.
However, another method for reducing behavior is to make alternatives more appealing. Poverty increases crime in large part due to it being the easiest way to make money. Why study and possibly get a well paying job in the future when you can sell drugs and have more money than anyone else in the neighborhood? Why slave away for shit wages to make capital owners richer when you can steal catalytic converters?
Retribution only works at getting people to behave when their brains make the connection between the behavior and the consequences. If someone directly applies punishment, it risks causing the punished person to connect the punisher and the punishment together, rather than the behavior and the punishment. This is why corporeal punishment of children often doesn’t lead to well behaved children. In fact, beating your kids can cause them to hate you and probably carry on the behavior when you’re not looking.
So what’s the alternative to cold hard punishment? Getting them to understand that bad behavior will lead to bad consequences, and that good behavior will lead to good consequences. This will work for most people, but there are exceptions: People with clinical personality disorders who are a danger to those around them through no fault of their own. Unfortunately, our society does a poor job of not rewarding some of these people with power, especially thanks to capitalism. Unfortunately, some level of coercive power must be employed to safeguard against these threats.