Do People Who Commit Crimes Deserve Punishment or Rehabilitation?
When someone does wrong, should justice punish them, rehabilitate them, or repair the harm? One card, one car ride, and a question I still can't settle.
I've been thinking a lot about justice recently. Specifically, I've been wondering: what should happen when one person wrongs another? What does justice look like when a crime occurs? My impulse is to say, "PUNISH THE CRIMINAL!" But the more I think and talk about it, the more I realize that punishment might not be the whole story.
What does justice actually mean?
In the most general sense, justice is about fairness. Ask what's fair in society and you're talking about social justice. Ask what's fair in the courts and it's legal or procedural justice. In the economy, it's economic justice.
Justice is one of those slippery, catch-all concepts that seems to change depending on who you're talking to. What makes it even more confusing is that there seem to be a hundred different types: social justice, restorative justice, criminal justice, procedural justice. There's justice served, poetic justice, the Justice League, and the French electronic duo Justice, who made that banger "D.A.N.C.E." back in 2007.
What ties them together is fairness. That's the core of every kind of justice.
Distributive vs. corrective justice
Distributive justice is about how rights, resources and opportunities are shared across a society. Corrective justice is about what happens after someone does wrong: how the harm gets set right.
The split goes back to Aristotle. Distributive justice is what people mean by "social justice" or "a just society." It's concerned with how a society and all its parts are structured to be fair.
Corrective justice is what people mean when they shout, "We want justice!" And that, I realized, was the kind I'd been thinking about. How are wrongs properly righted? What's the right response when a crime happens? It matters beyond the dinner table, because the answer shapes how courts and prisons work.
Three answers: punish, rehabilitate, or repair
Ask what should happen after a crime and you'll usually get one of three answers:
- Retributive justice: the wrongdoer deserves punishment, in proportion to what they did.
- Rehabilitative justice: the goal is to change the person, so they don't do it again.
- Restorative justice: start with the person who was harmed. Bring them, the person responsible and often the community together to work out how to repair the damage.
Most justice systems mix all three. The disagreement is about which one comes first.
The case for rehabilitation
I was in the car with my wife and a friend when this came up. We were talking through one of the cards in THINK., a conversation deck I made, and the card asked this exact question. My friend, who sees this differently than I do, insisted that criminals need to be rehabilitated. In fact, she said rehabilitation should be the only focus.
Her main point was that rehabilitation, done well, drastically reduces reoffending. She pointed to Finland, where open prisons let inmates shop for groceries, hold jobs and even keep their own phones. Instead of punishment, prisoners get classes, connection and a real chance to rejoin society. The payoff, and the point she kept coming back to, is less crime over time, because the traumas and destructive patterns that drive crime get dealt with at the root.
Nobody's against less crime. If rehabilitation leads to less crime, it has to be part of corrective justice.
The case for punishment
I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing, though. If someone close to me were murdered, would I be satisfied with the murderer only being rehabilitated? Would I feel that justice had been served if I knew that person was in an open prison somewhere, holding a job and taking phone calls every night? If the worst they suffered for their crime was an anger management class? The answer I kept coming back to was a resounding no.
Maybe that's a moral failing on my part. Maybe if I were more compassionate, more understanding and more forgiving, I'd accept rehabilitation instead of punishment. My friend suggested the urge to punish comes from the way we dehumanize criminals here in America. Maybe it's a matter of how I was taught to see them.
But I don't think it's just me, and it isn't just America. When people around the world shout, "We want justice!", they don't typically mean, "We want those criminals to get better!" They mean consequences, and those usually involve some loss of freedom: a not-so-cozy cell and, at the very least, no phone. So while rehabilitation looks like an essential part of corrective justice (and maybe a part we don't focus on enough in America), it doesn't seem to be the whole picture. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
Punishment, or "retribution" in fancy terms, does two jobs. It deters future crime. And it answers the wrong that's already been done: the person who caused suffering endures some in return, which levels the scales. (It also satisfies an impulse humans seem to share across time and place, which hints at roots in evolutionary psychology. That's a topic for another post.)
What about the person who was hurt?
When I first wrote this, I had two options: punish or rehabilitate. I left out the third, and it's the one that starts with the person who was wronged.
Restorative justice asks a different question. Not "What does the offender deserve?" or "How do we fix the offender?" but "What does the person who was harmed need, and who owes it to them?" Sometimes that's an apology. Sometimes it's restitution. Sometimes it's the person responsible having to hear, face to face, what they did.
I'm not sure it changes my answer. But it changes the question. Punishment and rehabilitation are both about the wrongdoer. Neither one, on its own, asks what the victim needs.
The card that started it
Here's the card from that car ride, exactly as it appears in the deck: the question on the front, the three follow-ups on the back.
Do people who commit crimes deserve punishment or rehabilitation?
On the back
- Does your answer change if a criminal expresses genuine remorse?
- Do people lose their rights when they commit crimes, or should some rights be guaranteed no matter what?
- If you were found guilty of a serious crime, would you want a chance at rehabilitation?
The front is where most people stop. The follow-ups are where it gets harder. Remorse doesn't sit neatly on either side. Neither do rights. And the third one turns the whole question around.
Where I've landed, for now
Punish the wrongdoer, and help them get better so they don't do it again.
But that third question keeps me from getting comfortable: If you were found guilty of a serious crime, would you want a chance at rehabilitation? I would. Which makes me wonder whether my answer is about justice, or about who I picture on the other side of it.
I haven't figured that one out. Ask the people at your table and see where they land.
More questions about justice
If that one got you talking, these come from the same deck:
- Would you be more forgiving if the person causing harm was someone you loved rather than a stranger?
- Should people receive lighter punishments, like shorter jail times, if they had good intentions?
- If a deepfake damages your reputation permanently, what does justice realistically look like?
- A parent loses their job and begins stealing food to feed their children. Is this kind of stealing excusable?
For fifty more about right and wrong, see 50 moral and ethical questions to ask." And if you'd rather leave right and wrong behind, try these thought-provoking questions."
Quick questions
What's the difference between punishment and rehabilitation?
Punishment looks back at the wrong and asks what the person deserves for it. Rehabilitation looks forward and asks how to stop it happening again. Most justice systems try to do both. The disagreement is about the balance.
What is retributive justice?
It's the idea that people who do wrong deserve punishment in proportion to what they did. On this view the punishment is justified by the wrong itself, not only by the crimes it might prevent.
What is restorative justice?
It's an approach that centers the person who was harmed. It brings them, the person responsible and often the wider community together to agree on how the harm should be repaired, whether through an apology, restitution or some other way of making things right.
What is corrective justice?
It's Aristotle's term for justice that sets right a wrong between two parties. Its counterpart, distributive justice, is about how goods and burdens are shared across a society. Punishment, rehabilitation and restoration are all answers to the corrective question.
Is punishment vs. rehabilitation a good question for a classroom?
Yes. Almost everyone has an instinct about it, and few people have looked at where that instinct comes from. Have everyone write down "punishment," "rehabilitation" or "both" before anyone speaks. Then use the follow-ups on the card to push on the reasons. If you want more like it, there's a full list of ethical questions that work the same way.
Where does this question come from?
It's a card in THINK., a conversation deck I made. It has 120 cards across eight categories, with one question on the front of each card and three follow-ups on the back: 480 questions in all. The card on this page is complete, front and back, exactly as it ships. (I wrote about how THINK. differs from feelings-first and party decks in this comparison of conversation card decks.)
If this is the kind of question you'd want to spend an evening on, that's what THINK. is: 120 cards, eight categories, one question on the front of each card and three follow-ups on the back. See the THINK. conversation card deck →
