When a person does crime, they’ve decided to violate a Social Contact that says we all agree to abide by a body of laws for the benefit of us all. They’ve opted out of that system at some scale, be it stealing a loaf of bread, to fleecing thousands of people out of billions of dollars, to (on an orthogonal dimension) depriving people of their safety, civil rights, and very life. It is an abhorrent notion to many, but to many others, it’s just a way to “get ahead.” To crime is to assault the fabric of modern society.
It’s not an unreasonable response, then, when the abiding party (I.e., those who DIDN’T crime) say “this guy deserves to be treated the way he treated us.” Eye for an Eye is a VERY old code of punishment. Its also effective because it puts things in concrete, unambiguous terms.
But, ostensibly we are modern and cultured now. Now we can discuss where the lines are between where brutality must meet brutality and where compassion must meet intransigence, but really it’s all just academic. Not everyone can be rehabilitated, and not everyone deserves to be dignified when they have so befouled the social contract. Some people are truly, fundamentally broken and just need to be listed from Society for our collective good.
All to ready to pronounce social death, people are squeamish about what to do about the corpus of the Self they’d already damned. Capital punishment is cruel, lifetime incarceration is cruel, and while rehabilitation is preferred, it is intensive, time-consuming and perhaps ultimately fruitless for the most incorrigible among us.
So what do you do? Someone’s will has to be broken here. For the good of us all.