Just Deserts

Just The term just desert comes from the early 16th century according to Gary Martin of Phrases .org (Martin, 2009). In my opinion the term just desert means that you get what is coming to you for something that you have done. I think that if you do something that is wrong then you deserve to get into trouble for it. If you steal something like a loaf of bread then you do not need to be punished for killing someone. This is what Professor Nuyen meant when he stated, "Someone who steals a loaf of bread does not deserve the sentence of life imprisonment" (Nuyen, 1997). I also think that sometimes the punishment does not fit the crime. You have people in the jails today that are doing time for a horrible crime and are only doing a few years.

According to Thielmann & Wenzel, just desert is a philosophy of justice whereby a criminal offense is viewed as lowering the victim or community's status or power relative to the offender, which requires a degradation of the offender to redress the moral balance (Thielmann & Wenzel, 2006). To me that means that the philosophy of justice is going to try to make the victim feel like they are in the wrong for being abused. I think that the justice system needs to be redone to protect the victim from the criminals and from the people that run the show in court.

It seems to me that most of what goes on in the system is wrong in some way. You have people in jail serving multiple life sentences that are using up the money that could be used to hire more police or to fix the overcrowding in the prisons. If it was up to me and I was able to do what I wanted to do, then this is how it would work. The first thing that I would do is to bring back corporal punishment for those that do not have a chance at parole. I would then use the money that would save to redo the prisons that suffer from the most overcrowding.

Not only would the overcrowding be gone, but you would no longer have the drain of the resources from having to...