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The core philosophy underpinning my criminal justice system is the idea of behaviourism. There is no free will. People do things because their surroundings or their psyches compel them to, not because of their own free will or being naturally moral or immoral. A person robs someone at knifepoint because they either need goods or resources, or feel psychologically nourished from doing such a thing. If it is due to the fact that they need goods or resources, the government can help using their social programmes and as part of the rehabilitation procedure give them training for professions or jobs. This will eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, the need for money to be a motive for crime. Most crimes are committed for subsistence, not to finance lifestyles. If a person does it for any other reason, they are mentally ill, and require treatment. This treatment is provided free of charge and is of a high quality, and after rigorous reviews from parole and psychiatric boards, the person is permitted to leave the institution, under observation. For some, this may never happen. For the majority however, once they have received the initial care, they only require regular sessions with a psychiatrist to keep them in the straight and narrow. What does not make any difference is the existence of harsh punishments. If a person needs goods and services, they would still commit crime as it is the only way for them and their family to survive. The innate need for survival overrides all social factors, therefore even if the punishment was death, life imprisonment or one of your barbaric measures that violate pretty much every piece of international justice legislation ever passed; the crime would still take place. It is in our biology. We have had the need to survive for longer than we have had laws, a criminal justice system and society in general. At every stage of human evolution, we have had the need to survive and acquire resources. If a person is trapped on a desert island with another weaker but fatter person, they may resist cannibalistic urges until their body starts to shut down, in which case their primal instincts would kick in and throw all social construct to one side in favour of survival. In the case of mental illness, a person being mentally ill is another thing that bypasses social constructs. A person does not do something if they do not see it as justified at that point in time. Cognitive Dissonance is the act of justifying a decision made that all humans experience. For example, if a five year old takes a toy from their younger sibling, they would not say to themselves "they had it, I wanted it, therefore I took it", they would say "they have too many toys already", or "I needed it more than them", or "it is more suited to me than to them"; both mentally and verbally when required to explain themselves. The psychopath views themself as superior to others, and therefore their needs override the needs of others, which could explain a robbery on any scale, from a person stealing from a charity, or an investment banker siphoning money from pension funds; it works on any scale. A murder could be justified, at least in their minds, by the view that others merely exist as things for them to toy with, as the psychopath is one who is incapable of empathy or is rather narcissistic. A person who is a kleptomaniac may steal something because their minds told them that it was necessary to steal that, in order to satiate very powerful urges that are, without treatment or medication, impossible to suppress. Employing corporal punishment would not stop a kleptomaniac from stealing; only psychiatric treatment would. Calling a person who commits a violent crime a "monster" only serves to demonise a criminal. Sure, we may look upon them as pieces of dirt, like a paedophile or a serial killer; but we must understand that people do not do those things out of choice. They do not think "Oh, I am ever so bored today; I think I might just rape some children, or possibly strangle some women". They would have a mental condition that prevents them from either seeing the moral implications or social taboo of their actions, or from regarding the consequences of them. Your principle of corporal punishment and torture as deterrents were proven not to work in a series of experiments performed in the mid-20th century, such as Milgram"s compliancy study, Zimbardo"s Stamford Prison Experiment, and others, which proved that behaviour is either learned through interaction with others, or is implemented by environments. I will grant you that in an environment that does not tolerate something, that thing will not breed as much as in one that permits it, as explained by both of the above experiments. Milgram"s showed that the presence of authority figures and a professional surrounding could influence a person to do anything, such as committing war crimes as a result of following orders was an acceptable reason, since in a stressful situation, one is normally motivated to obey figures of authority. In Zimbardo"s experiment, he found that through getting mentally stable Stamford University students to be divided into prisoners and guards in a prison in the basement of the psychology department, the guards were found to brutalise the prisoners extensively, since their surroundings encouraged that behaviour, and in interviews afterwards, the students were shocked at how they had behaved. The current systems of criminal justice throughout the world are primarily based on either tradition, small-mindedness or the lack of funds to direct such programmes. The same principle applies with gun control. You seem to be living in fear that crime will be rife, which in Metropotamia, thanks to the government acting on mass unemployment and deprived areas, it would be virtually non-existent on the social front, while on the mental health front, thanks to the provision of quality psychiatric care, the murder rate would drop significantly; while in your society based on a free market, it would end up like the USA and the UK at the moment, where there has consistently been mass unemployment (In the UK since Thatcher dismantled Atlee and Wilson"s socialism in the early 1980s; and in the USA when Nixon and Reagan dismantled the Bretton Woods Agreement and Keynesian Economics in general in the 1970s and 80s); and whole sections of cities and, in some cases whole cities, such as Sheffield, Belfast, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Bradford, Liverpool and Birmingham in the UK, and Detroit and Chicago (there are probably more examples; these are the ones off the top of my head), have fallen into decay and capital has flown rapidly out of the cities; and psychiatric, and in the case of the USA, healthcare in general, is unavailable to vast portions of the population, which are the reasons for the violent crime rates. An unemployed, mentally unstable population that live in a deprived area are bound to commit violent crimes, and giving citizens the arms necessary to stage a small war is just wiping the water from the floor, rather than fixing the pipe. When you say that group homes are terrible facilities for children to grow up in, the solution is plainly obvious. In Metropotamia, they are integrated with the local communities as much as possible; the only difference is that they live in good quality group homes, with well-trained carers and good resources to live normal and productive lives once they leave. The ironically-titled "FairTax" system is quite obviously something devised by Wall Street fanatics who want to create a low-growth, low-inflation economy that provides minimal services and benefits the rich over the poor. It is perfect for parasitic investment bankers to plunder the country"s wealth and leave the peasants back at the bottom. Applying the most rudimentary modern economics as found in Keynes" theory of consumption (consumption+investment+government spending+exports-imports), "FairTax" would restrict consumer spending on goods that were not exempt from the tax, such as luxury goods, which would reduce long run aggregate demand, therefore economic growth and inflation. Those are the conditions perfect for them to buy stocks, manipulate their values and sell at raised values to make money for themselves without having produced anything. This is the current system, just magnified. I"m not sure about the American figures, but in the UK, 60% of the economy is based on the finance sector. Roughly 5% of that sector is based on trade and long term infrastructural investment, which has a tangible or at least semi-tangible value. The remaining 95% is based on speculation of rising and falling prices of various things, such as shares in companies, commodities such as gold or coffee, and in currency values. This is completely untangible, and creates no real economic growth, since no good or service has been created or provided, they have just magicked up money from the market. This works best in countries with low growth and low inflation, which the Reaganite and Thatcherite economies and their successors have worked tirelessly to achieve. This means that over half of the UK economy does not really exist, and is based on speculation. This is the cause of the current recession, rather than overspending or the poor, since it is overly convenient that a reduction in spending would cause the conditions they favour to arise. Milton Friedmann"s economic theories are widely implemented to obtain these conditions, and when inflation control becomes more important than unemployment control, the world as a whole is in deep trouble. The FairTax system would naturally hit those who consume more as a percentage of their income i.e. the poor, since the rich save most of their income, and therefore do not consume as much proportionate to their income. Any flat rate of tax would proportionately hit the poor more than the rich.