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Notes -
Well, justice is also about coordinating social denunciation, reducing the ability of a criminal to continue his crimes, deterring future crimes by others, providing reparation to victims of crimes, giving criminals an opportunity for expiation so society will reaccept them, giving criminals an opportunity for reform so they can reintegrate with society ... in theory, anyway; I've tried to sort the list above by decreasing order of likelihood / increasing order of hopelessness.
But yeah, formalizing revenge is huge. Let a victim's family or friends take revenge and they're almost certain to go too far, and even if they don't you can bet the perpetrator's family will think they did, and that means it's time for counter-revenge, and maybe this is comedic if you're looking at the Hatfields and McCoys from a century and a half remove but it's horrifying if you're looking at them (or the Crips and the Bloods, whatever) in the moment. If the State takes revenge you get a nice Schelling point for "this is done now" plus a decent incentive not to take further revenge or counter-revenge even if you disagree.
And revenge is the instinctive drive to accomplish those present in all primates at least.
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