Restitution and Retaliation

In the property based stateless society, justice is more likely to be based on the idea of restitution rather than punishment for retaliations sake, or punishment for the sake of deterrence (to deter other people from committing that crime, or deter repeat offending).

In the current system, the provision of criminal justice happens in a collective sense. It isn’t a matter between the victim and the alleged wrongdoer, it is treated as a matter between the government (which claims to represent society) and the alleged person. It seems like the victim’s claim to some type of recompensation such as from an insurance company is treated independently of the court case. This leads me to believe that the focus in the current system is weighted too heavily towards punishment for the sake of either retaliation or deterrence.

When the government prosecutes on behalf of the victim, the rights of the individual are nationalised and this notion of a “crime against society” is introduced. With this, the door is left wide open for abuse of the power to dictate who is and who is not a criminal. There’s nothing really stopping the government from outlawing any kind of activity, even if instead of harming an actual person, it merely harms somebody’s sensibilities. This kind of thinking results in ‘crimes’ like drug use/possession/sale (which can only harm the people who choose to take drugs, much like anything else in life that we choose) or the ‘crime’ of operating in a given industry without state sanction/license (which is merely the government helping to entrench established businesses by making it more expensive for smaller and new competitors to enter the market).

I think it’s important to stress that as a general rule, nobody has the right to impose punishments on other people.  Given this, can punishment exist for non-restitution type reasons? Well it can certainly exist, but only where that individual has agreed to such a punishment in advance. An example of this would be a society where the rules are stipulated before potential members join. A prospective member might have to agree to abide by these rules because the inhabitants of the society feel safer in the knowledge that wrongdoers are punished. This is contrasted with the current model for provision of justice, where the government can simply change the rules whenever it wants to without any form of individual consent and people are born into the system somehow implicitly agreeing to be bound by thousands of government rules and regulations.

One example of the difference between market based stateless societies and governments might be the way criminals are punished. Rather than being put into jails where they are intended to just do work that is meaningless and degrades them, their abilities and knowledge might be put to better use by making them work in a field they have skills in, in order to repay the debt they owe. 

So ultimately, the reason the stateless society cares less about punishment for the sake of retaliation is the increased focus on individual property rights. This indicates that the justice system in a stateless society based on property would generally care more about recompensation and preventing the person from reoffending.