Punishment or rehabilitation and reconciliation?

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Is it better to make people pay for their crimes/sins, or to focus on healing and redirection?

Depends on what the crime is. I'm not sure what your definition of punishment is either beyond already being incarcerated or if it even involves that. Most of the people who are incarcerated are in for drug related crimes which shouldn't be a crime in the first place.

The question supposes that the purposes are mutally exclusive. I don't believe that they are.

Generally, criminal law has six public policy purposes:

Protection of the community, through:

1) Deterrence (both general and specific)
2) Prevention
3) Rehabilitation
4) Denunciation
5) Restoration, and

protection of the offender through procedural safeguards and limits on the exercise of state power.

None of these can effectively exist as independent purposes. The key, therefore, lies in balancing the reactive and the proactive elements of the criminal justice system.

Definitely the second one. I share Bentham's attitude: all punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil - even with regard to most terrible crimes imaginable.

Punishment is not really effective, so I'd have to go for rehabilitation and reconciliation where feasible.

What about permanent exile? The idea is to separate those who cannot behave well from the rest of us.

ruveyn

It all depends. Some people can't be rehabilitated and some people just deserve to be punished.

That is an emotional response to wrong doing. The basic thing is to separate pathological folks from the rest of us. The death penalty is just an extreme form of separation. Jail is an intermediate form. It is of limited time. Exile for life is also separation, but unlike the death penalty it can be undone if evidence is found of a false conviction.

ruveyn

If the murder was witnessed and unjustified, then the death penalty for the murderer is justified.

What that some people can't be rehabilitated successfully? That isn't entirely my opinion although the second part of my comment probably is. When I meant punishment though I didn't mean the death penalty although in some countries that's included. Exile for life to where? Why not just life-imprisonment?

Here's a case of justifiable homicide:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VKdwx5AB5k[/youtube]

Ship them off to Tierra del Fuego which is the a**hole of creation. They are gone from us and will bother us no more. Life imprisonment costs the tax payers a lot of money. Having a penal colony is much cheaper.

ruveyn

Don't you think that the Chileans or the Argentinians might object? There is no terra nullis out there, anymore.

We could buy it from Argentina rather cheaply.

Then we would have a reasonably safe place to put our sociopaths.

ruveyhn

Yeah, don't think Argentina would agree to that. We could try Antartica, though. Or just ship them off to Alaska.

Form the American Foreign Legion like the old French one; anyone can join, your names is what you say it is, every mission is a suicide mission and you get shot if you try to run, but if you survive five years you get a new identity and a fresh start. Perhaps it's just my twisted sense of humor, but I rather like the idea of turning our thugs and gangbangers loose on our enemies abroad, it just feels so dang efficient.