No Prisons, No Death Penalty: How would they deal with serious crime?

[Cheong_cool12]

I think that you can have the offender face things like they have to become guards and protect the village for a time as punishment. Basically doing work that no one else wants to do.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I think that you can have the offender face things like they have to become guards and protect the village for a time as punishment. Basically doing work that no one else wants to do.

Guard is a job for a person who can be trusted. These offenders can't be trusted. Making them guards would be, almost literally, the fox guarding the chicken coop.

Making them do nasty jobs could be a part of their punishment, but it would have to come with a very low status, lowest of low, and they would have to be under guard when they're doing it, or otherwise prevented from running away or causing more trouble. The penal slavery idea discussed up thread would fit the bill. I've been working with that one more.

 

[pmmg]

I think, lacking a central authority that would take care of this, the people in the villages would take care of this on their own. If someone needed killin, I suspect they would end up getting killed, and who has to know? Maybe it could be some huge dark secret that spawns new stories.

 

[Saigonnus]

I think, lacking a central authority that would take care of this, the people in the villages would take care of this on their own. If someone needed killin, I suspect they would end up getting killed, and who has to know? Maybe it could be some huge dark secret that spawns new stories.

Yeah like that whole "Your grandfather stole my grandfather's land" (when it was really debt paid by a handshake deal that was forgotten about) type of situation... guy wants to reclaim what was "stolen" and the grandson is unwilling... so he disappears.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I think, lacking a central authority that would take care of this, the people in the villages would take care of this on their own. If someone needed killin, I suspect they would end up getting killed, and who has to know? Maybe it could be some huge dark secret that spawns new stories.

Feel free to write that story. I've gone in a different direction with mine: there is a central authority, although it's only as central as the limits of pre-modern transportation and communication technologies allow. A village might need to bring in provincial officials to hold a full trial, but they would be waited for and their judgment deferred to. If someone were killed because they "needed killin," it wouldn't fly. The killer would be held for murder.

But if someone committed a particularly heinous crime and got sentenced by the law, they might never be allowed to return to the village, even if their sentence in itself didn't take them away forever. And if someone committed a heinous crime and didn't get sentenced? Methinks the disgruntled would be looking for a willing curse caster.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Yeah like that whole "Your grandfather stole my grandfather's land" (when it was really debt paid by a handshake deal that was forgotten about) type of situation... guy wants to reclaim what was "stolen" and the grandson is unwilling... so he disappears.

I do have that kind of stuff in my story, although it doesn't get as drastic as a literal blood feud. It stays at the level of nasty backbiting. And maybe someone threatening to have a curse put on someone (actually doing it is usually too prohibitively difficult, but threats are cheap).

 

[S J Lee]

What about public flogging (scarring damage depends on how many and what type of whip) / a night in the stocks / "minor" mutilation (ear, finger, nose)? Might form a major deterrent...?

You might make a decision as to what people think the purpose of the "penal system" is...revenge? rehabilitiation? simply "to see that crime doesn't pay, but no more than that"? That system can stray from its original goal...I see huge sentences given to prisoners in orange wearing the letters "D O C" which I am told means "Department of Corrections", which implies improvement/rehabilitation...but I do not think a 100+ year sentence is intended to "correct" a person so he/she can function in society....

No punishment is a deterrent if people think A) they will not be caught B) their victim will not dare accuse them C) no jury/judge will convict them D) They simply were not thinking rationally at the time they committed the crime ... sort of Cleon's argument (at least part A)

Mytilenean Debate - Wikipedia

 

[pmmg]

I did not quite say feud. That implies some type of longevity or expansion to the problem. More along the lines of, some dude raped my sister, no one in authority seems to care, and one day dude does not come back from a hunting trip. Stuff happens.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I did not quite say feud. That implies some type of longevity or expansion to the problem. More along the lines of, some dude raped my sister, no one in authority seems to care, and one day dude does not come back from a hunting trip. Stuff happens.

My blood feud comment was a response to Saigonnus's post. "Your grandfather stole my grandfather's land," as the motive for violence generations down the line, does fall into the blood feud category.

"Some dude raped my sister, no one in authority seems to care" - yep, I expect that could bring on that kind of retribution. The way I'm framing this culture, they would treat rape as a very serious crime, but if it weren't believed... well, then that could happen. And then, probably, the victim or someone close to them would be seeking a magical remedy. A malicious curse would be hard to get away with, but simple protection that could also get the perp out of the picture... that's perfectly legit and wouldn't carry the stigma of murder.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

What about public flogging (scarring damage depends on how many and what type of whip) / a night in the stocks / "minor" mutilation (ear, finger, nose)? Might form a major deterrent...?

You might make a decision as to what people think the purpose of the "penal system" is...revenge? rehabilitiation? simply "to see that crime doesn't pay, but no more than that"? That system can stray from its original goal...I see huge sentences given to prisoners in orange wearing the letters "D O C" which I am told means "Department of Corrections", which implies improvement/rehabilitation...but I do not think a 100+ year sentence is intended to "correct" a person so he/she can function in society....

No punishment is a deterrent if people think A) they will not be caught B) their victim will not dare accuse them C) no jury/judge will convict them D) They simply were not thinking rationally at the time they committed the crime ... sort of Cleon's argument (at least part A)

Mytilenean Debate - Wikipedia

That's already been discussed up thread.

Public flogging would be given for a lesser crime. I'm talking about major ones here.

 

[pmmg]

My mistake, the site said you quoted me and the link took me there. Did not notice it was quoting the other member.

While there are many ways I can imagine individual people reacting in the face of heinous crimes, I find it would hurt my disbelief to have it depicted that such things never happened. It is not without precedent that people were held and jailed waiting for authorities to appear and have a trial—and often for very long periods of time. But, seems you want something different.

From the OP, you propose a world with no prisons and almost no death penalty. And that the close-knit nature of villages would act as such a deterrent that it would become rare. I will go with that for a story, but I find that very unlikely. Crimes of all sorts have happened in many different village circumstances, and imprisonment (and even things leading to death), are low hanging fruit when figuring out how to handle them. I think given a wide set of villages, some would have said--you know what, having a place to hold these people seems like something we should have.

If I was in a world where curses certainly worked, I could see enjoying ways I might want one used. But then...I wonder at what curses would be placed on me

If I could not imprison someone, or kill them, and they were definitely bad and likely to be bad again, cutting off their hands might make repeating crimes hard. Shipping off to the wild lands might also remove them forever from being a local problem. Slavery, or methods to remove aggression such as a lobotomy or castration are other things that I could think of.

I dont think you can escape that when bad things happen, bad things happen back. Its gonna have to be something. When you say any crime that happens is a personal crime, that leads me more along the view that those involved would take care of it themselves--results may vary. If they suck at it, they may start looking for a better system of crime and punishment.

Maybe the perp should be made to pay 2 pigs and a chicken and call everything even.

(And I have no interest in writing such a story.)

 

[Qvadrater]

Tabula Rasa.
Or, in simpler terms: mind wipe.
You could have a philosophical discussion over whether this sort of identity/memory "death" consitutes death (I would argue it does), but it would make for an interesting punishment.
Maybe you could just remove the memories of a certain period, equivalent to a prison sentence of some length.

I'm not sold on the idea of penal slavery/servitude, it seems like it'd be fraught with corruption: if a person could frame someone for a serious crime and get ten years of free work out of them, that'd be a powerful incentive to do so.

Ooh, not for this story, but in a world with place-based magic, exiling a wizard could make for a good story. The wizard can't use magic until they can get back to a magical place.

Something akin to this exists in Trudi Canavan's Millennium's Rule series: mages can hop between worlds, but only if the world they're on has enough magic for it, so mages sometimes get stuck on worlds without enough magic and have to wait for more magic to accumulate; this sort of magical stranding is also one of the primary tactics used in fights between mages.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I'm not sold on the idea of penal slavery/servitude, it seems like it'd be fraught with corruption: if a person could frame someone for a serious crime and get ten years of free work out of them, that'd be a powerful incentive to do so.

It would be if the person sentenced to penal slavery had to serve their victim/accuser. In the direction I've taken the story, all penal slaves are property of the state, similar to the Roman Empire's municipal slaves. Individuals cannot own slaves, penal or otherwise. So nobody's getting free work out of the person who hurt them or their family members. Chances are that if that person is enslaved, the victim won't even get sufficient restitution to really compensate what was done to them, unless the offender had significant resources that could be taken for that.

Now, that could motivate a corrupt state, I suppose, to get free labor, but that's a whole other topic. I suppose I could dodge it by saying the state isn't that corrupt (how realistic is that?) or, more in keeping with the story line, that there are laws in place intended to prevent such an abuse: penal slaves have to be paid wages, say, comparable to what a free person doing the same work would be paid, but their wages are sent to their victim(s), after withholding some to cover the slave's living expenses. The slaves themselves are effectively not paid for their work, since they never see any of it.

This fictional world does, in fact, have a relatively recent (as in last two hundred years) history of reforms being enacted to stop abuses in many of their systems, and it gets talked up a decent amount. One of those reforms was the abolition of all forms of slavery except penal slavery. It makes sense that they'd also put a few checks on the penal slavery system.

 

[Qvadrater]

[. . .] there are laws in place intended to prevent such an abuse: penal slaves have to be paid wages, say, comparable to what a free person doing the same work would be paid, but their wages are sent to their victim(s), after withholding some to cover the slave's living expenses.

This still has the problem of the victim benefitting from the slave's work. Personally I think it would be better to handle corruption on a state level, where more control can be exerted, than on a citizen level (maybe relevant officials have anti-corruption magic cast on them?); Personally I'd be fine with the potential corruption of officials being handwaved away as not being a thing due to a very rigorous selection process ensuring only just people get into those positions, or something along those lines.

I think a fair system for penal slavery could be a portion of the slave's wages going to the victim, but just enough to cover whatever damage they caused, and the rest being divided by the state and the slave. This way the victim gets some restitution and the slave gets punishment in the form of lower wages; and when the slave is released they will have some money to start a new life and not have to resort to more illegal activities just to get by.

Although to some degree the system would still be vulnerable to people committing just the right severity of crime to be guaranteed shelter, food, and a (low-paying) job; but this may be too cynical a take for the kind of fantasy you're going for.

I feel like I might be overthinking this.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

This still has the problem of the victim benefitting from the slave's work. Personally I think it would be better to handle corruption on a state level, where more control can be exerted, than on a citizen level (maybe relevant officials have anti-corruption magic cast on them?); Personally I'd be fine with the potential corruption of officials being handwaved away as not being a thing due to a very rigorous selection process ensuring only just people get into those positions, or something along those lines.

I think a fair system for penal slavery could be a portion of the slave's wages going to the victim, but just enough to cover whatever damage they caused, and the rest being divided by the state and the slave. This way the victim gets some restitution and the slave gets punishment in the form of lower wages; and when the slave is released they will have some money to start a new life and not have to resort to more illegal activities just to get by.

My thought is that in practice, any wages a slave is paid are so low that the victim sees very little compensation. Considering that the crime has to involve very seriously hurting someone in order for penal servitude to be a possible sentence, probably most victims would never see enough restitution to even begin to compensate for the harm done to them. (Maybe slaves are supposed to be paid what free people doing the same labor would be paid, but in practice, it doesn't happen. Or maybe their wages legally can be lower - like prisoners making license plates for pennies per hour.)

Although to some degree the system would still be vulnerable to people committing just the right severity of crime to be guaranteed shelter, food, and a (low-paying) job; but this may be too cynical a take for the kind of fantasy you're going for.

I feel like I might be overthinking this.

Free people would have those needs met too. Most have land or a trade that provides them a living, or, barring that, can get jobs as laborers. In case of real hardship, when even that isn't enough, the temple steps in. They have a tithe/redistribute system, similar to the medieval Church or the Muslim system of zakat.

To be convicted of any crime, let alone anything serious enough to draw a slavery sentence, would mean extreme loss of face and social status. I suppose that wouldn't be a deterrent to someone who really felt they had nothing left to lose, but it doesn't seem likely, as I explore this system, that that would be a very common problem. Loss of face is the last thing anyone wants, worse than pretty much anything else.

 

[Suli]

As I read through all this I keep returning to those who do the crime should directly repay those they stole from, perhaps with interest or double. So it is a sort of temporary slavery only if they do not have enough to immediately repay. The crime and repayment should be totally public so all know what happened and the criminal should be marked in some way that others can see, so if they move on others know when a repeat offender is around. Repeat offenders will of course need to be dealt with in a more vigorous manner and demoted in society as an example to others. A state gaining prisoners and paying them crap wages does not repay the victim, victims need to know the wrong is addressed and be recompensed in order for a system to be just.

Violence is another beast entirely, it cannot really be undone and doing violence to violent people serves only as a show of force that might deter others. A person who beats their child does not deserve that child, but the child still deserves parents - just better ones. If there is a place that the violent people cannot leave, say an island, then exile to that place can work.

The main thing I see is a need for Truth-sayers, ones who can see what really happened so no one can take advantage of the system.

Good luck and I hope we can see what you come up with!

 

[Rosemary Tea]

As I read through all this I keep returning to those who do the crime should directly repay those they stole from, perhaps with interest or double. So it is a sort of temporary slavery only if they do not have enough to immediately repay.

If you're aiming for a just system, this isn't it. That setup would punish people for not having money more than for the crime. Think about it: people who do have enough to immediately repay can just throw the money at the problem and not have to serve any kind of sentence. But people who don't have enough to immediately repay get the actual punishment.

I am envisioning fines and financial restitution as part of this justice system, but if it's anywhere close to being just (or trying to be), then people can't be allowed to buy their way out just because they can, and people who can't buy their way out can't receive harsher sentences for not being able to buy their way out.

Violence is another beast entirely, it cannot really be undone and doing violence to violent people serves only as a show of force that might deter others.

Show of force that might deter others is exactly what penal systems tend to run on. Penal systems that have had reformers tinker with them may tone down the show of force, but it's still there.

I worked judicial flogging into this world building because historically, that was the practice in most places before prison sentences became the main go-to. It seems logical that a society with no real prison system would use corporal punishment. Would that have a detrimental impact overall? Possibly. But so do prisons.

I also have a couple of characters who are very bothered by judicial flogging, if not exactly for the reasons you mentioned (because they're from a different culture, so they don't think quite the same way), but because they just hate the suffering it causes, they can't stand to see that. Just because it exists, doesn't mean everyone's on board with it.

My intention here isn't to create an ideal system, just one that works for the purpose of the story. The story isn't about a utopia, but it isn't dystopian either, so what works for the purpose of the story would be neither.

A person who beats their child does not deserve that child, but the child still deserves parents - just better ones.

Not quite sure what this has to do with it. This topic here is about how adult criminals are punished, not children.

If there is a place that the violent people cannot leave, say an island, then exile to that place can work.

There isn't.

 

[skip.knox]

Is this still in progress for you, or did you get it all worked out?

I haven't Re-read the thread, but what about maiming and branding as options?

 

[pmmg]

Just reading through this again, and having new thoughts on it, but if the problem is already solved, by all means, ignore.

Suppose the opposite of exile. They are marked and not allowed to leave their own village. The mark being a way for other villages to know 'if found in your village, dispose of or send back to us." That would prevent wandering and banding together (somewhat).

Another measures might be, he becomes suitable for military service. If the far away king has something going on somewhere else, maybe these are volunteered for military service. Thus, if they are bad apples, they are bad apples in a way that hurts the enemy and not the locals, and if they did not come back...kind of just fate I guess.

I cant say about everywhere, but underpinning western judicial systems is the basis of reason. We have laws, but we also have courts and the courts are supposed to apply a layer of reason to the procedures that maybe the law cant cover. In your system, you may have the same thing. Maybe less defined than 'the punishment for X is Y' instead...there are a number of crimes we did not code for, but if they come up, we leave it to the Judge to apply his reason and find a suitable punishment. So heinous crimes are left to a trusted authority to find a suitable method for punishing. Which can run the gamut of slaps on the wrist to death. Maybe a three judge panel if you want to add extra safety measures. And if the judge says magical curse...well...wizards may get involved.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Is this still in progress for you, or did you get it all worked out?

I got it worked out, as far as I need it to be for now.