highly amusing!
though I feel I have to take the role of devils advocate, and present an alternative view of our legal/justice system.
A basic distinction that has to be made is the difference between 'real-life' crime and statistical crime. When someone on KB exclaims that all their shit has been stolen, that is real-life, personal crime. It feels good on a personal level to extract 'revenge', and make the 'criminal' suffer and pay as much as humanly possible. It's natural, and entirely understood.
However, on a larger scale, excessively punishing 'criminals' (there is after all not always a black and white area between the 'criminals' and the 'rest of us'), does not have the effect of reducing the actual levels of crime. In every study I can recall, harsher sentencing of crime does not appreciably reduce crime*, in fact it encourages it strongly in many ways, for example increasing the divide between the 'criminals' and 'the rest of us' as discussed earlier. This has the effect of discouraging their integration into 'regular' society, in short, statistically turning people into lifetime criminals.
As I see it, the modern legal/justice system has the task of balancing the tangible benefits of the public believing that justice and fairness prevails, versus the statistical reality that letting our primal need for 'justice' influence our legal/justice system has the consequence of actually increasing crime, to the detriment of society as a whole.
whew! that's enough thinking for one day (I already had a @#%!@&*$ 3 hour maths exam!)
*the one way in which it does, is that it physically keeps the offenders off the streets, but this is not an economic course of action.
Bookmarks