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I disagree there. Excess punitiveness led to the opposite swing of the pendulum which we have now, where in some places crimes are not even prosecuted and instead reclassified as "aw shucks boys will be boys" horseplay. The insurance will pay for your cleaned-out store, why are you even complaining? If you insist on having a car parked in public, of course the window will be smashed so any items that may be inside can be stolen. So why would the police even bother, when they know nothing will come of it? To quote a story from 1909 about the same viewpoint:
But you need the reform and rehabilitation as well as the punishment, otherwise you are just throwing the person back into the same environment from which they came. People starting off with petty crime will continue on the path to more serious crime, the serious criminals will just take 'doing time' as part of the package. There has to be a balance. Some small amount will be truly incorrigible and locking them up for long stretches will be the only way to deal with them, but some will also be willing to change, if they get help on to another path and support to keep them away from falling back into the same neighbourhood, same associates, same situations they were in before they were convicted.
And more convictions. Fewer slaps on the wrist. People plainly gaming the system having to face the consequences of their behaviour. Absolutely I agree with all that. But you can't just beat the crap out of them (though a timely slap round the back of the head for some of the 'youth' might do way more than all the bleeding-heart 'little Johnny can't help it, he's a victim of society' or being thrown into a cell with no food for two days) and leave it at that, for those who can be helped, then we should extend mercy. Mercy does not mean stupid or soft-hearted, though.
What should be the purpose of the criminal justice system? You have given punishment & reform already, and I agree with you on those. But you left off isolation, we also need to keep dangerous people out of society. This is the "leviathan shaped hole in the discourse" that OP is refering to.
I think that hole exists because we have framed the discourse around the criminal, not society. Which is stupid, why should the discourse revolve around the 1% of people who do bad things? Whats best for society is really only considered through the reform lens - i.e. society benefits from reform as we dont have to spend $x to imprison and get $y from every successful reintegrated convict. When you leave out the leviathan lens you miss out on three strikes laws. The idea that "hey the vast majority of violent crime is done by people who have already done violent crime, we can just lock them up and isolate them and cut the occurrence in half." Or whatever large amount. The idea that the state could just uphold the law, actually send people to jail for their full terms, with the enhancements, and not let them out until theyre in their 50s and mostly too old to get into much trouble. The idea that we could actually do that, and in fact we have an obligation to do that. The law is what we legitametly and democratically agreed upon, we could just enforce it. And not have to deal with violent homeless people in the subway.
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We haven’t had excessive cue-response punishment in America for a long time, because what is universally important for deterring animal behavior is that the punishment occur parallel or quickly following the behavior. The association must be intuitive and salient for deterrence to occur for animals, and it’s only different among Civilized Man because he has been trained to constantly self-administer judgment of behavior so that cue-response rewards and punishments are artificially associated with the behavior in the mind. Taking a long time to arrest someone, or placing them on bail, is not sufficient punishment for animals if our intention is to change behavior. You can even ask them why they are being punished and they might say something approximately like “the government” or “racism” or “snitches”, ie they are mentally inculcating a pattern that is only going to produce more criminality in the future.
But in any case, it’s the fault of judges if they don’t follow the rules, not the fault of a given schema. Your 1909 quote is clearly about a specific category of crime that wasn’t considered serious at the time (hitting your wife).
Maybe I wasn’t clear in my post. You do not need any reform or rehab because animal behavior will 100% change provided a behavior is associated with punishment. That is the reform, that is the rehab. It’s how you learn not to touch hot things, not to be mean to others, and even to keep your King defended in Chess. Dog’s do not actually need reward-training to learn not to jump on the counter because you can just pinch their butt and shout, or quickly place them in a cage (if you are one of those progressives who mistakenly believes that isolation and boredom are less painful than brief physical pain). This is all very simple animal psychology that should be common knowledge and taught in schools. An animal can become traumatically afraid of walking on ice simply by falling into a frozen lake, no reform required (I sadly learned this from personal experience: my genetically-evolved Labrador never swam in her life because she escaped the yard and found her way on a frozen lake.)
I say, many more physical slaps on the wrist for young criminality including poor school behavior, which progresses in adulthood to beatings (continued until morality improves).
We seem to have different notions of what a 'slap on the wrist' involves, but in my day we had corporal punishment in school and I agree that a good swipe of the báta wouldn't go amiss with some 😁
My 1909 example is not about the crime, it's about the expectation on the part of the citizen. "Look, a crime is being committed over here!" and expecting the cop to rush to the scene, while the cop knows the complaint won't be pursued (the wife won't bring a charge against her husband, Chesa Boudin when he was still there won't bring a prosecution) so he takes his time and strolls along leisurely, if he even bothers to go.
If the cops know that the wife-beater/crazy guy on the subway will be held and won't be out on bail within five minutes of being arrested, then they have an incentive to do the damn job. And that's on us, who vote in or support the guys who campaign on "I will stop the incarceration pipeline". Mind you, the "tough on crime" lot are not much better; it's no good being 'tough on crime' when the courts are backlogged and the jails are too full to hold the convicted, you need to put resources in there too.
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