Resolved: Rehabilitation Should Be Valued Above Retribution

I will keep this round short and quick. FairnessI thought the claim that rehab never works would be pretty contentious in this debate. Instead pro has said nothing about it. I'll take the point as conceeded. Why value a failed system? Indeed, since he claims that retribution is best when rehab is impossible, he has more or less conceeded that outside of his ideological conception (in this place I like to call "reality") retribution is more valuable. Errm . .. thanks. Retributive justice and rehab are both forms of deterrance and can contribute to (but not effectively substitute for) preventative justice. For that matter, the existence of justice is itself deterrance. This debate is about those not deterred - that's why I distinguished last round between this debate and preventative justice. My opponent did not seem to understand this - parking tickets may deter as all punishments do, but that doesn't stop the punishments from being rehabilatory or retributive when delivered. Given that an offender has not been deterred, what is the warden supposed to do? Fine them (retributive), or teach them (rehab)? Both might deter somebody, but only one is a fair alternative both to the victims and the offender - that is, neither side makes a total loss. You'll notice my opponent doesn't actually address the issue of fairness at all in his "fairness" rebuttal, and in his conclusion he mislabels it "deterrance". Having said that, rehabilitation is a worse deterrant if it is not so fair, which it isn't. Nobody is going to be deterred by a system of "justice" where you get free aid in return for doing crimes (in this case, in the form of education). That the degree of punishment should correlate to the degree of the crime is the essential premise of retributive justice. If you look back to the definitions pro gave of retributive and rehabilitory justice in round one, you'll see that retribution is all about giving deserved punishment, while rehabilitation is all about creating a positive future state, with no express connection to the crime other than to undo its effects on the offender. Not only is that not fair to the others involved in the crime, especially the victim, the amount of effort required to reform an individual might not necessarily be at all proportional to the damage that individual did. Perhaps a serial murderer can be truly reformed in a week while a fraudster takes years. That would be OK under rehab but totally unacceptable under retribution. ResponsibilityI'd like my opponent to tell us how exactly his R2 argument affirmed rehab outside of rejecting retribution. But anyway. .. If the hate the nature and not its product, then its product (in this case, the person involved) is not who we are holding responsible for their crimes, hence, no responsibility is required on the part of the person involved. But just because you punish a person doesn't mean you hate them either. You can punish them because of a part of their nature, giving THEM responsibility for changing who they are. The point is whether we should be personally responsible for our actions, or whether we should blame others. My opponent does not argue and seems to have conceded that personal moral culpability is important. Nothing is done to encourage offenders to show any responsibility towards their victims, and that's the problem. A responsible justice system recognises the transactional nature of crime, something pro ignores. This is the "value" pro doesn't see in retribution outside of itself - he cannot see the value in a fair, responsible and evidence-based justice system, despite my analysis in the last round as to why this is. This is why retribution is not for its own sake. By contrast, rehab doesn't work, and even if it did work it wouldn't be fair or good. The value pro sees in it - valuing human life - makes me wonder why pro values a murderer's life so highly as to give them a chance at a decent future, while pro values a victim's life so lowly as to actually make their descendants pay money to the murderer to educate them (via taxes), and get nothing back. The fact that the punishment pro advocates for rapists is mostly retributive and less reformative in nature (segregation, exile etc being a retributive end as it does not inherently reform somebody) only helps my case, because that supports the idea that rehab is not always appropriate, if ever. The point is - even if rehab changes people, it only changes people after they've done the crime. The no-blame nature of the system fails precisely for the same reason no-blame anti-bullying policies that were once popular don't work in schoolyards - bullies can get away with absolutely anything at least once and they're not held responsible. It might not have been the point of the policy, but that would be to ignore the policy's seriously scary side-effects. We don't know the futureAs I've said before, rehab has nothing to do with punishment, and retribution has everything to do with it. My opponent's claims that I am strawmanning him are in fact a tacit admission that his conception of a good justice system uses retributive methods to seek rehabilatory goals. I agree that it would be nice if all people who go to prison just turn out good afterwards. But the fact that you're using prison rather than, say, the "Clockwork Orange Style Center For Murderers" implies that rehab has significiantly less value in achieving the outcomes it itself professes than retribution. At best, this means my opponent's argument therefore implies both create positive outcomes and should be valued. He still needs to tell us why rehab should be more valued instead. I want to look at the past because that's when the crime was done, that's where the evidence is, and that's the reason that we have justice at all. The future matters, and the present matters, but only because of the past. If we had no past, we could not understand the future or present. That's why it's important to use the past as a frame of reference in justice, not some idealistic future. All justice is a risk. Rehab can work too successfully, insufficiently successfully, it can encourage more crime (ie only training criminals to hide their crimes better) etc. I gave only one example of the specific possibilities last round, but the broader principle is the most important. Even if retribution has no effects on the offender, it does help the victims. Rehab, at best, helps only the offender - at worst, it helps nobody and in fact creates a big mess. The fact that people sometimes get the past wrong and put innocents away is regrettable, but it's a much surer bet than any than judges can make about the future. At least we have artifacts from the past that hint at what in all likelihood happened. This is also why the guilty must usually be held to a standard of "beyond reasonable doubt", one that I think both of us support in this debate. This is the biggest problem with retributive justice that pro has come up with so far, so I hope he's got something big planned for the final round. If that's good for guilt, why not for sentencing? I look forward to the final round.