A Civilized State Does Not Take Revenge

A civilized state should not punish. It should not take revenge. It should not imitate the criminal act under the official language of justice.

People may feel anger. Victims and relatives may feel rage, grief, hatred, or the desire for retaliation. These feelings are human and understandable. But the state must not become the legal expression of those emotions. The state is supposed to be a superior form of organization. Its role is not to shout with the crowd. Its role is to protect, to prevent, to repair, and to make sure that the same harm does not happen again.

This is why our whole language around crime must be questioned. We still speak about “correction,” “punishment,” “sentences,” and “years in prison,” as if putting a person in a cage for a period of time were a serious answer to the problem. But prison is ridiculously ineffective. It gathers very different problems into one institution: violence, theft, fraud, addiction, sexual danger, mental illness, organized crime, and social failure. Then society pretends that one answer can solve all of them.

It cannot.

Prison is not civilization. Prison is the place where society hides the problems it has failed to understand.

The state should not ask, “How many years does this person deserve?” That is the language of revenge disguised as law. The real questions should be different: What danger does this person create? What damage was caused? Can the victim be compensated? Can the danger be neutralized? Can this person safely remain inside ordinary society? If not, what form of separation is necessary?

This does not mean softness. On the contrary, it may lead to much stricter and more rational responses than today’s system.

Economic crimes, for example, do not always require physical confinement. Their main damage is the destruction of trust and property. The logical response is full compensation, perhaps even for life if the damage cannot otherwise be repaired. There should also be public transparency, so that people know with whom they are dealing. A person who has abused economic trust may be restricted from managing companies, public money, investments, or other people’s property.

Sexual crimes against children create a completely different danger. The answer cannot be symbolic imprisonment followed by eventual return to ordinary life as if nothing fundamental has happened. The priority must be absolute prevention of access to children. That may mean permanent residence in an adult-only restricted area, electronic monitoring, strict geographical limits, and continuous supervision. The point is not revenge. The point is that children must never again be placed within reach of that danger.

Violent crimes also require their own logic. If someone has shown a deep incompatibility with peaceful coexistence, society has no obligation to keep exposing citizens to that risk. For murder and extreme violence, the appropriate answer may be permanent civic separation. Not torture. Not execution. Not cruelty. But removal from the ordinary social body.

This is not based on the childish idea that “we are moral and they are immoral.” A mature society does not need that arrogance. It is enough to say that some people act according to a morality incompatible with our social contract. If someone’s practical morality permits murder, rape, severe violence, or the destruction of another human being, then that person cannot demand full participation in the society whose basic rules he has rejected.

Let them live, but not among us. Let them have existence, but not access. Let them organize their lives under strict isolation from the society they have proven unable to respect.

This is also why the death penalty must be rejected absolutely. A state should not confront one crime with another crime. The death penalty is a crime committed with procedure, uniforms, documents, and signatures. It is society doing the same irreversible act that it condemns. A civilized state must not kill in order to show that killing is wrong.

The alternative to prison is not chaos. It is a more serious architecture of justice.

The state must educate before crime.
It must prevent where danger is visible.
It must compensate victims when prevention fails.
It must restrict people from the fields where they are dangerous.
It must separate permanently those who cannot coexist with the basic social contract.
And it must never call revenge “justice.”

We also need a much more active society of prevention. With today’s means, it is absurd that we wait passively for tragedies and then perform public shock. Authorities should be able to combine information, identify repeated danger, protect vulnerable people, and intervene before irreversible harm occurs. Society should be educated to recognize warning signs and report serious risks responsibly. The state should not appear only after the dead body. It should be present before the crime.

But this presence must also have limits. Prevention must not become tyranny. Monitoring, restrictions, public records, and separation must be governed by law, evidence, judicial control, and safeguards against abuse. A system that claims to protect society must not become another danger to society.

The central principle remains simple:

A civilized state does not punish.
A civilized state does not take revenge.
A civilized state does not execute.
A civilized state protects, repairs, and prevents repetition.

Prison belongs to an older stage of human imagination. It is the lazy answer of a society that does not want to think carefully. The future of justice should not be built around cages. It should be built around responsibility, compensation, prevention, and, where necessary, permanent separation.

Not revenge. Not execution. Not fake correction.

Protection.