Yes, it definitely hinges on the purpose of incarceration or any type of punishment. Reighn and Galt have weighed in on the punishment=revenge side of the argument. Revenge is a powerful human emotion and there's a huge faction screaming for it. An eye for an eye, or in the admittedly more subdued version I'm seeing here, a life without freedom or dignity for a life taken.
Yet we're overwhelmed with evidence that a culture of revenge doesn't work; it constantly threatens to destroy itself. This isn't a zero-sum game. There's always one more person whose outrage was never taken into consideration. Everybody has somebody who loves them. When the first Hatfield shot the first McCoy it probably seemed like fair retribution for whatever the McCoy did, but it didn't seem that way to the next generation of McCoys who lost their beloved father at the hands of a Hatfield who everybody knows are the scum of the earth. So in order to have peace and closure, they had to go back and kill all the rotten Hatfields so that this would never happen again. Except they missed a few, and those guys were really pissed off now. A hundred years later Hatfields and McCoys are still killing each other on sight, and the only reason any of them knows for it is that one of the other guys killed one of their loved ones.
Yes this is an American legend, I have no idea how much fact is in it. The point is that if you change the names and the country it is dead-on real. Blood feuds are common, even in civilized places like America, even in some of the oldest civilizations on earth like Mesopotamia. Recall that the definition of a "moderate" Mideasterner is one who only holds a grudge for six generations.
I'm sorry, but revenge is not a civilized reason for punishment. In fact it's something that civilization is supposed to help us rise above, by providing laws and courts and cops to prevent us from being able to deal with criminals personally. Revenge is an infinite outward spiral that ends with entire countries trying to destroy each other. I commend you all for not espousing the death penalty, but for a kid to see his father locked up in the Turkish prison you describe for the rest of his life is not going to make the kid think you are a decent human being, especially when, as he learned at his daddy's knee, your father was a nasty man who was going to die a violent death some day.
He was a Marine, for the goddess's sake! A trained professional killer who always obeyed orders without contemplating whether they were honorable! You really believe the man never perpetrated any evil? Have you missed the last few years' worth of news reports on what military personnel can do under the wrong circumstances? Perhaps your daddy really was a fine man and this was all a horrible misunderstanding, but if his killer has a wife, children, parents, teachers, coaches, ministers, therapists, scoutmasters, I very much doubt that they feel that way.
No, dudes. You've all opted to be members of civilization and that means you leave your primitive instincts like revenge, rape, and peeing in the river back in the jungle. The only valid purposes for punishment are: 1. To reduce the probability of similar crimes being committed again, either by the same perp or by others; and 2. To provide restitution to the victims.
Number 2 is something the American system doesn't deal with very well. There are cultures where the killer would have to support your mom for the rest of his life. Our system is finally allowing civil suits in criminal cases, awarding monetary damages. But actuarial calculations show that the average American's life is valued at around seven million dollars. Very few killers carry that much liability insurance and most of them aren't millionaires. If you lock them up for life they'll never earn enough money to make a dent in that obligation. Most of the damage is emotional anyway, and even in a country where economics is the guiding philosophy, it's difficult to put a price on grief.
We need to work on that. But in the meantime that leaves prevention as the only goal of punishment. Most murders are crimes of passion, one-time things. You could not even bother to arrest the killer and he'd still be less likely to kill again than you and I would be to kill our first victim. Recidivism isn't a real issue so incarceration doesn't do anything for the actual killer. Perhaps watching murderers get punished is a slap in the face to all of us, making us think twice before we go out and commit one. In that case imprisonment does lower the murder rate. Personally I don't think it works that way but it's anybody's guess.
So here's what punishment does and does not accomplish in the average murder case:
1. Maybe deters others from committing the same crime.
2. Very unlikley, deters the perp from committing another murder.
3. Does not provide restitution to the victim's family.
4. Satisfies the victim's loved ones' need for revenge.
5. Creates a thirst for revenge in the loved ones of the perpetrator.
The only vector of any consequence here is number 5. And this is the fatal flaw. This alone guarantees that more crimes will be committed.
Sorry.
