Mankind has always had and will likely always have criminals. It does not follow, however, that civilized societies must allow them to terrorize and abuse citizens. It’s time for Americans to throw off the tyranny of the left’s Compassion Industrial Complex. To give up on the death penalty would be to weaken our commitment to punishment in general. Retribution is the heart of justice. It is the principle that wrongs must be met with consequences equal to their gravity. We must uphold that principle in its fullest form by keeping capital punishment available and using it judiciously.
BY AMERICAN THINKER AND TIM HSIAO FOR AMERICAN THINKER / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO AMERICAN THINKER
Mahatma Gandhi has been culturally deified since his death. The same is true of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were brave, and, while preaching peace, compassion, and nonviolence, they literally walked into the batons of those who did not share that peaceful passion. Both men led movements that changed the way their nations functioned and, as a result, became larger-than-life figures.
But here’s the thing that most don’t recognize: They succeeded only because the people against whom they were fighting were moral people. I don’t mean that the people throwing slurs at or using guns or dogs against their followers were angels. Not at all. But the British people, in Gandhi’s case, and white Americans, in MLK’s, were largely moral people.
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And how do we know that? Because Gandhi and King succeeded. The tactics both men employed would never have worked in most circumstances in human history, because the humanity shown by the British and the American whites was anomalous, frankly. The truth is, we’d likely never have known of them had they tried those tactics against the Nazis or the CCP or the Romans or the Mongols or Al Qaeda or the Aztecs…or virtually any other government or civilization in human history.
Such non-violent sentiments, particularly pacifism, may have a place in political discourse, but they’re not appropriate everywhere, and most certainly not at all times. Einstein was famously a pacifist almost his entire life. But even he abandoned that when the Nazis began targeting the Jews in pre-WW II Germany. He quickly reverted to it once the Germans were defeated in Europe, becoming an outspoken advocate for not using the nuclear weapons he had played an indirect role in developing, despite the horrors of the Japanese being at least equal to those of the Germans.
The problem with pacifism/non-violence is that it depends on the goodwill of the people being targeted. That might work if everyone on the planet were Mother Teresa, but most are not.
Which brings me to modern-day American leftists. We see in America today a tangential drive, one for compassion. But it’s compassion not for the victims of horrific crimes, but for the perpetrators. Between “bail reform,” “sentencing reform,” and the movement to replace police with social workers, it’s simply ludicrous. Indeed, wrong-headed “compassion” can be fatal.
Adam Smith famously said, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” We see this no more clearly than with a spate of recent killings, with some of the most well-known being Iryna Zarutska, Nicola Tanzi, and Hunter Simoncic. The thing that one notices is that in every one of these cases, the killers had double-digit interactions with the justice system, often spending years in prison.
And it’s not just the cases that make the headlines that should concern us. It’s the information that doesn’t make the news that’s also concerning: Forty-seven percent of criminals who get sent to prison had at least 10 prior arrests, and fully 80% had at least three. And fully 80% of criminals re-offend within 5 years of release.
The problem is that leftists look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of Gandhi and MLK, but live in a world where the real color isn’t rose, it’s red, as in blood. Gandhi and MLK succeeded because the media in the UK and the United States shocked citizens into living up to their own ideals.
The fact that this worked for them was extraordinary, but the reality is that it doesn’t work for the millions of victims of violent crime every year. For every Timothy Bohler (45 prior arrests) or Sanchez Nicholson (33 arrests) or Courtney Boose (99 priors, never been in prison) who makes the news and outrages communities, there are thousands of other criminals walking the streets robbing, beating, raping, or attempting to murder mostly innocent victims.
Tim Hsiao had a great American Thinker piece last week titled Without Retribution, There Is No Justice. (SEE ARTICLE DIRECTLY BELOW THIS ONE) In it, he makes a compelling argument for capital punishment. He’s 100% right. His most salient point:
If punishment were only about deterrence or rehabilitation, then justice would become secondary to utility. It would mean that whether or not someone deserves punishment depends on how useful punishing him might be for society at large. That view erases the offender’s moral responsibility and reduces him to a means for producing good outcomes.
And that phrase “deterrence and rehabilitation” is the language of the left, not what someone deserves. While I applaud the deterrence element of prison and the chair, I’m not so keen on the “rehabilitation” part. The goal of the justice system should be one thing: Keep criminals from harming innocent civilians. Do that enough, and eventually they will learn, and other potential thugs in the making will figure out that crime is not a good career choice.
Now, taken to its extreme, this sentiment could mean executing every criminal every time. That’s clearly neither desirable nor practical—but neither is the system we have today, where criminals can spend practically their entire lives preying on innocents with only the most cursory of stints behind bars.
But “How can that be?” you might ask, given that the United States has the largest number of prisoners and the 5th highest prison rate in the world. Maybe, in contrast to the leftist narrative, the answer isn’t that those numbers are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough, and the death penalty is not meted out enough.
El Salvador, the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1,659 per 100,000 vs. 541 per 100,000 in the United States, saw its murder rate decline by 98% over a decade after implementing effective, albeit admittedly draconian, law enforcement measures. But the result has been a citizenry that feels far safer, and international tourism has skyrocketed. The quality of life—and actual life in many cases—in El Salvador has improved tremendously.
While locking up prisoners can be expensive, what’s not usually counted is the cost to society of not doing so. Citizens being scared to walk around and engage in their communities has both psychological and economic consequences. Then there are the actual costs (ER and hospital care, lost wages, long-term care, disability, trauma, lost productivity, and quality of life) that run into the tens of billions annually.
Leftists focus their compassion on criminals. They pretend they’re champions for men like Gandhi and MLK, but in reality, they’re champions for men like Ted Bundy and Decarlos Brown, who’ve left nothing but blood and misery in their wake. And they use their power in the criminal justice system, the media, and the grifting NGO universe to inflict their fiction on communities across the country. Unlike the people whom Gandhi and MLK faced, those whom leftists force citizens to face are not moral.
Mankind has always had and will likely always have criminals. It does not follow, however, that civilized societies must allow them to terrorize and abuse citizens. It’s time for Americans to throw off the tyranny of the left’s Compassion Industrial Complex.
Compassion has a time and place, but the courtroom and prison are not it. The goal of the system should be to be sufficiently bad that no one ever wants to return to it. Criminals are humans too, and most humans respond rationally to incentives and disincentives.
It’s time for voters to decide which they prefer: To live in crimescapes like St. Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore, or in communities where they can talk to their neighbors, walk their dogs, and pick up their kids at school without worrying about becoming a statistic on a police blotter as their families’ lives are shattered.
Without Retribution, There Is No Justice
One of the priorities of the Trump administration has been to aggressively pursue the death penalty for capital crimes, especially for those involving the murder of a law enforcement officer or capital crimes committed by illegal aliens. In line with this policy, a recent memorandum directed the attorney general to “fully enforce Federal law with respect to capital punishment in the District of Columbia by seeking the death penalty in all appropriate cases.”
This renewed federal push comes at a time when public opinion on the death penalty is shifting. Although a majority of Americans — about 55 percent — still support it, that level of support is the lowest in more than three decades. In 1994, nearly 80 percent of the public backed capital punishment, showing just how much attitudes have changed.
These trends are alarming — not because punishment should track public opinion, but because they suggest that we are forgetting what justice demands. The point of punishment is not to manage behavior or improve character, but to answer the moral debt created by crime. Before we can judge the death penalty, we must first understand this basic truth about punishment.
What Punishment Is Not
Debates about capital punishment often are framed in terms of its future effects. Does it deter crime? Does it reform offenders? These are important questions, but they miss the central point. Punishment is backwards-looking. It is concerned first with answering the wrong that has already been done rather than the benefits that might come later. Thus, deterrence cannot be the core of punishment because it looks only to the future. A crime that has already been committed still needs to be answered, even if no one else is deterred by the response.
Rehabilitation also cannot serve as the foundation. Reforming someone’s character is a good thing, but it addresses who the offender may become, not the wrong he has already done. Neither deterrence nor reform alone explains why we punish those who have committed crimes.
If punishment were only about deterrence or rehabilitation, then justice would become secondary to utility. It would mean that whether or not someone deserves punishment depends on how useful punishing him might be for society at large. That view erases the offender’s moral responsibility and reduces him to a means for producing good outcomes. But justice requires more than social engineering. It requires holding people accountable for the wrongs they have actually done, not just for the effects their punishment might have on others.
Punishment Must Be Retributive
The real purpose of punishment is retributive: to answer wrongdoing with a deprivation equal in seriousness to the offense. Crime unsettles the moral order by letting someone place his will above the rules that bind us all. Punishment restores that order by imposing a real loss, forcing the offender back within proper bounds. From this perspective, the death penalty is not mainly about deterrence or correction, but about giving the offender a deserved harm. That harm is a deliberate setback to his interests. It requires taking away something good that cancels the unfair advantage he gave himself and shows that no one is above the standards of justice.
Put another way, the offender must lose something that parallels the severity of his crime. This brings us to the ancient and much misunderstood idea of the lex talionis, often summarized by the phrase “an eye for an eye.” Popular imagination treats it as a crude formula for vengeance: Whatever someone does to you, you do it to him. This reading has been used to dismiss the lex talionis as barbaric and incompatible with “modern justice.” But that is not what the principle means. Properly understood, “an eye for an eye” is about proportionality. It demands that punishment fit the crime in weight and seriousness, not that it mimics the crime in its particulars.
Civilization depends on ordered liberty. To commit a crime is to create an imbalance in this order. The offender elevates himself over his victim, taking what he has no right to take or inflicting harm he has no right to cause. Justice requires restoring this imbalance by imposing a fitting deprivation that answers the wrong. This deprivation must carry a weight equal to the offense. What matters is not that the deprivation resembles the crime in outward appearance, but that it matches it in seriousness.
This distinction helps make sense of why different crimes can be punished in very different ways while still being just. A thief, for example, does not need to be robbed in turn. What is required is that he lose something of comparable value to what he unlawfully gained, whether by fine, community service, imprisonment, or even corporal punishment. Likewise, someone guilty of battery need not be beaten up. The law may impose incarceration, restitution, or some other penalty that expresses the gravity of his violation. In each case, the principle of equivalence, not mimicry, is what counts.
From this we see that the lex talionis is an essential part of punishment. Without proportionality, there is nothing inherently wrong with over-punishing or under-punishing, and punishment collapses into a mere tool for control rather than an act of justice.
Thus, retribution is not vengeance, but justice. Vengeance is personal, driven by anger. Retribution is impartial, restrained, and rooted in the duty to restore justice, not indulge passion. It restores the balance that wrongdoing disturbs. And without restoring that balance, there can be no justice.
Indeed, deterrence and rehabilitation must presuppose retribution. We deter only by threatening what offenders deserve, and we rehabilitate only because they have already earned punishment. Strip away retribution, and deterrence becomes manipulation while rehabilitation becomes therapy. Both are intelligible only in light of deeper truth that crime creates a debt that must be repaid, and only retribution pays it.
The Logic of Execution
Murder stands apart as a crime that warrants the highest penalty. Taking an innocent life destroys the greatest good a person has. By doing so, the murderer acts as if he alone decides who gets to live, placing himself above the most basic rule of justice. Lesser penalties can impose real loss, but they cannot match the gravity of what has been taken. Because death is the greatest deprivation, it remains a fitting option for the greatest wrong. Executing a murderer shows that human life is so valuable that its deliberate destruction deserves the most serious response.
To give up on the death penalty would be to weaken our commitment to punishment in general. Retribution is the heart of justice. It is the principle that wrongs must be met with consequences equal to their gravity. We must uphold that principle in its fullest form by keeping capital punishment available and using it judiciously.
Tim Hsiao is a college professor and law enforcement officer. He is a research fellow at the University of Wyoming Firearms Research Center.
