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Retributive justice is a legal concept whereby the criminal offender receives punishment proportional or similar to the crime.As opposed to revenge, retribution—and thus retributive justice—is not personal, is directed only at wrongdoing, has inherent limits, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others (i.e., schadenfreude, sadism), and employs procedural standards.
Retributive justice is perhaps best captured by the phrase lex talionis (the principle of "an eye for an eye"), which traces back to the Code of Hammurabi. Criminal law generally falls under retributive justice, a theory of justice that considers proportionate punishment a morally acceptable response to crime.
It can be an application of the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”), but is not always proportional justice, as a similar method may be used to produce a worse or milder effect than the crime it "retaliates". The simplest method of mirror punishment is to enact the same action upon the criminal as the criminal perpetrated upon the victim.
Alternatives can take the form of fines, restorative justice, transformative justice or no punishment at all. Capital punishment, corporal punishment and electronic monitoring are also alternatives to imprisonment, but are not promoted by modern prison reform movements for decarceration due to them being carceral in nature.
There are two main goals of deterrence theory. Individual deterrence is the aim of punishment to discourage the offender from criminal acts in the future. The belief is that when punished, offenders recognise the unpleasant consequences of their actions on themselves and will change their behaviour accordingly.
Community sentence [1] [2] or alternative sentencing or non-custodial sentence is a collective name in criminal justice for all the different ways in which courts can punish a defendant who has been convicted of committing an offense, other than through a custodial sentence (serving a jail or prison term) or capital punishment (death).
"In essence, this money has been stolen from all of us for all these years," said an 84-year-old woman whose late husband's Social Security benefits were slashed. "It's not fair."
However the reciprocal justice applies across social boundaries: the "eye for eye" principle is directly followed by the proclamation "You are to have one law for the alien and the citizen." [31] This shows a much more meaningful principle for social justice, in that the marginalized in society were given the same rights under the social structure.