Moreover, it does not cover the
whole ground. There are crimes which do not excite it, and we
should naturally expect that the most important purposes of
punishment would be coextensive with the whole field of its
application. It remains to be discovered whether such a general
purpose exists, and if so what it is. Different theories still
divide opinion upon the subject.
It has been thought that the purpose of punishment is to reform
the criminal; that it is to deter the criminal and others from
committing similar crimes; and that it is retribution. Few would
now maintain that the first of these purposes was the only one.
If it were, every prisoner should be released as soon as it
appears clear that he will never repeat his offence, and if he is
incurable he should not be punished at all. Of course it would be
hard to reconcile the punishment of death with this doctrine.
The main struggle lies between the other two. On the one side is
the notion that there is a mystic bond between wrong and
punishment; on the other, that the infliction of pain is only a
means to an end. Hegel, one of the great expounders of the former
view, puts it, in his quasi mathematical form, that, wrong being
the negation of right, punishment is the negation of that
negation, or retribution.
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