In the criminal justice system, more emphasis should be put on retribution than rehabilitation

1. Yama’s restrictive list of feloniesYama begins his arguments by keeping “crime” to a select list of punishable things, and completely disregards other crime in doing so. For a retributive system, all crimes must be punished. Since he’s restricting himself to his list of crimes, he’s rendering his argument irrelevant.2. Yama’s proposal to fix the recidivism rateIn his argument, he cites the recidivism rate in the US. Yama concedes, here, that retributive incarceration fails, and that it does not reduce recidivism.But, he says that all criminals should be executed. However, since Yama is limiting himself to only eight crimes, he suggests nothing for fixing the recidivism of all others.Then, he goes on to say that in prison, criminals’ behavior is worsened by other criminals, and that prisons are not suitable for rehabilitation. In my argument, I showed two things: that prisoners generally do not use rehabilitative programs while incarcerated, and that alternative methods that stress rehabilitation, such as RSVP, do indeed work in reducing recidivism by a substantial amount.Building on my constructive: if more money were to be put into rehabilitative programs, and prisoners were required to partake in rehabilitative programs: prisoners would be surrounded by an environment designed to better themselves for the future, rather than the current system, which simply them with criminals that can enhance their illegal activity. As I noted, in California, there is no program for rehabilitating convicted sex offenders. With a lack of programs to improve the behavior of criminals, it is predictable that they would repeat their actions. To fix this, an implementation of systems such as the one RSVP used would lower recidivism rates considerably. Such a proposal would be more effective than Yama’s: as he has restricted himself to fixing the recidivism rates of people that committed one of only eight crimes.3. Yama’s morality argumentYama states that if someone kills another or victimizes another person, they (the murderer/victimizer) do not deserve to live. He attempts to pass this off as objective, but does not go into detail about why this should be.Also, all crimes are not equal in regards to severity. Someone who kills ten people is eligible to be given the death penalty, but small-scale marijuana dealer cannot be given the same sentence. Until Yama has given reasoning that they should be given the same sentence, this argument has not been properly proven.He then goes on and questions: if the perpetrator of a violent crime is given the right to live, what stops vengeance, or even a full “purge”? Here, Yama employs the slippery slope fallacy, suggesting that if violent criminals live, society would seek large amounts of vigilante justice [1]. Under US law, killing anyone is murder. If a victim’s family were to kill the murderer, they would be convicted of murder. Thus, vengeance cannot be attained through such means without consequence.4. Yama’s argument on costYama argues that executions should be cheaper, but the argument does not note one crucial thing: executions themselves are not the bulk of the cost of death row. Executions by lethal injection may cost a few thousand dollars per person, but the court cases and the housing of inmates cost far more than the executions themselves. According to research done at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, in Maryland [2]: “An average capital-eligible case with a death notice costs the taxpayers of Maryland about $1.8 million. In other words, each case with a death notice filing costs $670,000 more than a no-death-notice case. Current and forecasted prison costs are about the same ($950,000 per case), but adjudication costs are more than three times greater ($850,000 per case) than in no-death-notice cases.” Thus, becoming cheaper in methods would not mean much in regards to the cost of the death penalty. For this to be implemented on a large scale would mean an unjustifiable cost burdened on the country.If this money were to be used in rehabilitation, recidivism rates would be lowered. As I noted in my constructive, California only spends a bit over $2,000 per prisoner in rehabilitation. If the money were to be used to implement systems similar to RSVP on a large scale, recidivism would be lowered: as such experimental programs showed.5. ConclusionYama’s argument to reduce recidivism isn’t effective from the beginning, as he only is talking about the punishment for eight felonies: that those who commit them ought to be executed. Since his plan apparently does not consider all other offenses, it could not be relied upon to reduce the crime rate. He concedes that incarceration often fails, and says that rehabilitation does as well: but does not give evidence to back this up. However, I did give evidence that those who partake in rehabilitative programs have lower recidivism rates than those who are incarcerated. Yama simply states that rehabilitation is ineffective, where I compared the two with the RSVP argument. Then, in rejecting both retributive incarceration and rehabilitative programs, he backs himself into a corner with justifying the execution of everyone who commits the eight crimes he listed. He does not prove his moral argument, rather simply suggesting things and asserting his idea of objective morality with nothing behind it. And finally, his cost argument fails, as he only suggests fixing an extremely small part of the problem.[1] http://www.logicalfallacies.info...[2] http://www.urban.org...