Long before Hammurabi, the ancient king of Babylonia, codified the laws of the lands he ruled, societies approached crime and punishment based on religious beliefs. For example, the “eye for an eye” doctrine is biblical, but it is also present in the Codex of Hammurabi, which is believed to be older than Scripture. This means that ancient societies believed in a form of retribution that was close to retribution. This is not to say that this first strategy of justification fails. It can be said that this obviously does not succeed. The concept of retaliatory justice would be more robust if this justification were supplemented by a theoretical justification of harsh punitive treatment, which links it to a more general set of principles of justice. This would help dispel doubts that retaliatory intuitions are the creeping judgments of a pleated, vindictive, or cruel soul. Others argue that simply punishing criminals does not solve the underlying problems that may have led to the crimes. For example, the imprisonment of petty thieves in depressed neighborhoods where crime is high does little to solve the social causes of theft, such as unemployment and poverty. As the so-called “Broken Windows effect” shows, crime tends to perpetuate itself in these communities despite aggressive policies of arrest and punishment.
Some offenders need treatment rather than punishment; Without treatment, the cycle of crime will continue unabated. This section addresses six questions for those trying to understand retaliatory justice: (1) the nature of the desert claim and the issues it raises; (2) the exact identity of the offender; (3) the normative status of suffering; 4. the importance of proportionality; (5) the strength of the grounds for reprisal; and (6) whether retaliation is to be considered a consequentialist or ethical theory. Therefore, a court order of $7,000 in reparations combined with economic retaliation is a sentence that better fits the crime committed. In this case, the punishment of the accused, both with a prison sentence and with the compulsion to repay every dollar of the stolen money. His employer is cured with a $7,000 refund to replace the money he lost as a result of the defendant`s actions. Another interpretation of Morris` idea is that the relevant advantage is the possibility of living in a relatively safe state, and the bad thing is not the gain of an additional advantage, but the failure to accept the burdens that collectively enable that advantage. Punishment then eliminates the benefit that the wrongdoer cannot fairly claim after evading the burden he or she should carry (see West 2016). This interpretation avoids the first of the problems described above.
But he still struggles to explain the idea that a crime like murder is not fundamentally about stowaways. In addition, he has difficulty in plausibly explaining the proportionate sentence. Presumably, the proportionate degree of punishment would be something like this: the more one evades the duty to accept the burden of restraint, the greater the punishment should be. But how to measure the degree of rejection? By the harm one causes or threatens to cause, by the benefit one receives, or by the extent to which compliance with the avoided burden would have been heavy? Only the first corresponds to a normal retributive notion of punishment, but this alternative reading seems to indicate one of the last two meanings as a measure of an unjust gain. Moreover, this view seems to imply that a person who has entered a safe society from some kind of failed state and who has not yet benefited from the safe state cannot be punished if he commits violent criminal acts in the safe state. This is a rather strange implication, although a social contract theorist may be willing to accept. Retaliatory justice is generally understood to mean that it is good in itself (or not instrumentally) for criminals to be subjected to harsh treatment by offenders. But as Hart said, integrating the current reprisal justice system with a recently developed approach to restorative justice has now shown promise for reducing the severity of contemporary convictions while providing significant relief to victims of crime. Restorative justice aims to assess the harmful effects of a crime on its victims and to determine what can best be done to remedy that harm, while holding the person(s) who caused it accountable for their actions.
Through face-to-face meetings between all parties involved in a crime, the goal of restorative justice is to reach an agreement on what the perpetrator can do to repair the harm caused by his or her crime, rather than simply imposing penalties. Critics of such an approach argue that it can create conflicts between the goal of reconciling restorative justice and the goal of condemning reprisals. The concept of retaliatory justice has been used in various ways, but it is better to understand it as the form of justice attached to the following three principles: it is implausible that these costs can be justified simply by the importance of punishing criminals, as they deserve to be punished. The only plausible way to justify these costs is when the criminal sanction has great instrumental benefits in terms of crime prevention (Husak, 2000; Cahill, 2011; Lippke 2019).