Question: Are you in favour of punishment ?

Ben Kenward answered on 10 Jun 2017:

For my children, hardly ever. There is good evidence that there are much better ways to get children to behave well than punishing them, in most cases. Also, I don’t want to inflict suffering on my children. What this tells you is that I’m in favour of what works, and I’m also in favour of reducing suffering. We can apply this way of thinking to society as a whole. Prison is much worse at reducing crime that people think – many people who come out of prison are more likely to commit crimes than when they went in. And there is no doubt that prison causes a lot of suffering. In the USA, 1% of the adult population is behind bars. I think this is insane – it’s not reducing crime, it’s basically just for revenge. But on the other hand, for keeping people safe if nothing else, we do need to keep some dangerous people locked up.

Personally, as a fairly normal human being, I do have normal human desires to sometimes want bad things to happen to bad people. When Tony Blair was involved in starting the Iraq war, I wanted really bad things to happen to him. But I like to think that if I ever met him in a bar, I would try my hardest to talk to him to understand him better, rather than go with my first impulse of punching him in the nose.

An interesting question: does the human desire for revenge sits so deep that people will never accept that there are usually better ways of reducing crime than prison? Sometimes I fear that the answer is yes.