there's also the aspect of punishment as retribution. victims want their abusers to feel a commensurate amount of suffering to compensate the victim's loss. not to say that i agree with this, but it's a political and cultural reality which will make your proposals hard to pass. (see also people's support of the death penalty)
So this is very true, but I feel that what kind of response to crime feels reassuring to the victim is extraordinarily culturally dependent. Like, at one extreme, in a society that executes people for all violent crimes, if someone robs someone else and is merely sentenced to life in prison, the victim is likely going to feel like the wrong against them hasn’t been redressed. And in a way, they’ll be right - this society has decided that “serious wrong” = “execution” and so when they don’t execute someone it feels like they’re saying that no serious wrong was committed, and of course the victim wants society to emphatically denounce the crime in its native language!
The victim of this crime in a society that doesn’t execute people will probably feel vindicated by a swift conviction and five years in prison, because that’s what it looks like when their society takes a crime seriously.
And I think that the victim of this crime in a society that said “no matter how serious the crime, once you make restitution and go on a pilgrimage up the holy mountain with whatever assistive devices you need for mountain-climbing, you are purified and forgiven” would probably feel vindicated by receiving their restitution and seeing the robber off up the holy mountain.
If a society has “if a crime is sufficiently serious, we make the criminal suffer” as its mindset surrounding crime and punishment, then it’s completely understandable that victims will feel dismissed and invalidated by light punishments. But I don’t think this is inherent, and I think it’s self-reinforcing. A society can be rehabilitation-focused and also validating and reassuring to victims - it just has to actually be rehabilitation-focused not just in law but in practice, in a way that affirms that a great wrong is done to crime victims which it is absolutely necessary and just to redress and then offers a path to redress which is also humane and decent and good at preventing future crimes.
This is true, but if applied broadly it’s a fully general argument. If you get to change what people value, then they will…value different things. Maybe they will value more-convenient things. And at the end of that path, they value the speed of light being what it is, and we have a universe tiled with natural-born bliss junkies.
It is usually more useful to talk about what people do value, or at least to focus on how a values-changing program would be enacted –
– which is, presumably, the point towards which @theunitofcaring is leading. But I have less faith in a make-people-not-desire-vengeance-upon-their-enemies program than I do in almost any other variety of social programming. That instinct is built in at a very deep level.
(I am being annoying and pedantic, and I know it, and I am sorry. But this kind of logic gets to me. If we had the right kind of society with the right values, then the tradcon program would work great. Or the radfem program. Or the communist program. Things are difficult precisely because we don’t have good ways of mucking around with this stuff.)