EXOD598 The Goals of Punishment. Classically, the meting out of punishment in American criminal law is based upon four purposes: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. Not all of these rationales work in every case, but they are the building blocks of criminal law. A simple example will demonstrate how these purposes of punishment are used in sentencing a defendant to prison. 1. Retribution. Imagine a bank robber is charged with threatening a teller with his gun and taking $500 from a bank. He is apprehended and convicted. Why put him in prison? First, we punish him because he broke the rules. In its simplest sense, retribution is encapsulated in the phrase, “You did the crime, now you must do the time.” In other words, the defendant “deserves” to be punished because he violated society's laws. By punishing the defendant, we reaffirm society’s values. While retribution is a key theory of punishment, there are problems with it, just as there are with the other theories behind punishment. At its essence, it is a theory based on the need for vengeance. Even if the defendant promises not to commit any other offences, and we are confident that he will not, we still punish him because he owes a debt to society. Retribution, as a theory, thus assumes that all of society's laws are fair and that, morally, the defendant deserves to be punished. However, what if the bank robber committed the crime because he needed the money to buy food for his children? Are we confident enough in the fairness of society's laws to claim that the defendant deserves to be punished because of his actions? There are many inequities in our society and we are always at risk of punishing people for violating rules they had no say in creating. Additionally, retribution assumes that the defendant can “pay society back” for his crime by being incarcerated. Sending our bank robber to prison will not reimburse the bank for his crime. Neither will capital punishment bring a murder victim back to life or make the victim's family whole again. The Torah’s insistence on an “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth” and “life for life” (Exodus 21:23-27) is a reminder that punishment should be proportional, but it is folly to believe that punishment will make a victim whole. Finally, there are practical reasons why retribution is problematic. America has been on a crusade to incarcerate criminal offenders. Right now, there are over 2.3 million Americans in prison. [Report of Pew Center on the States (Feb. 28, 2008). Available at http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org]. The United States has less than 5% of the world's population, but almost a quarter of the world's prisons. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million of its people in prison. The cost of incarcerating America's defendants in the state and federal prisons is more than $60 billion [U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005), “Direct expenditure for each of the major criminal justice functions.” available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/exptyp.htm] Even if we believe that it is appropriate to punish every person for his or her misconduct, the reality is that we cannot afford to do so. (By Laurie L. Levenson, "Judaism and CriminalJustice"