Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
Punishment is a concept that humanity is beginning to outgrow.
He set another parable before them, saying:
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while people slept, his enemy came and sowed darnel weeds also among the wheat, and went away. But when the blade sprang up and produced grain, then the darnel weeds appeared also. The servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where did these darnel weeds come from?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No, lest perhaps while you gather up the darnel weeds, you root up the wheat with them.’”
— Matthew 13:24–29
When a child strikes a surface he had bumped into, it is wholly irrational, but it is as understandable as when a person starts jumping when he stubs himself painfully. It is also understandable when a person who has been struck fights back under the influence of the pain. But to harm a person in cold blood because he had done evil some time in the past and to try to rationalize it would be completely incomprehensible if human beings did not have the capacity and inclination to invent rational explanations for their bad deeds.
People have grown convinced in the justifications they have concocted for their vengefulness to such an extent that they have ascribed vengefulness to God by equating vengefulness with justice and retribution.
A person committed an evil deed. And then, in order to counteract this evil, another person or people can find nothing better than to commit another evil, which they call punishment.
All punishment is based neither on reasoning nor on a sense of justice, but solely on a mean desire to harm the one who had harmed you or someone else.
Punishment applied to education, to social order or to religious understanding has never and will never assist the improvement of children, societies and those who believe in punishment beyond the grave, but it has produced and continues to produce incalculable disasters by embittering children, corrupting society and depriving virtue of its main foundation with the promise of hell.
People had already began to understand the irrationality of punishment many years ago, and they began coming up with the various theories of deterrence, prevention and correction. But all of these theories collapse one after another because their sole foundation is revenge, and their sole aim is to hide this. They concoct a great deal, but they dare not do the one thing that is necessary, namely that nothing should be done, that the one who had committed a sin should be left alone, whether or not he is repenting, whether or not he is correcting himself; and as for those who come up with and apply the theories—they should lead good lives.
Punishment and the whole of criminal law will be as bewildering and surprising to future generations as things like cannibalism and human sacrifice are for us. “How could they not see the senselessness, cruelty and harm of what they were doing?” our descendants will say.
The death penalty is the most obvious proof that our social order is completely alien to Christianity.
To impose a punishment is the same as to stoke a fire. Every crime always carries with it a more severe, rational and acceptable punishment than the one people are capable of imposing.
Most of the people who fill our prisons and die on the gallows are beings made destitute by the very law that claims for itself the right to impose punishment.
— Herbert Bigelow
We must know and remember that the desire to punish is the lowest animal feeling, which needs to be suppressed, not elevated to the rational sphere.