Michael Davis Retributive Justice

There are two distinct kinds of retributive justice. The classical definition embraces the idea that the amount of punishment must be proportional to the amount of harm caused by the offense. A more recent version, supported by Michael Davis, discharges this idea and replaces it with the idea that the amount of punishment must be proportional to the amount of unfair advantage gained by the wrongdoer. Davis introduced this version of retributive justice in the early 1980s, at a time when retributive justice was making a recovery within the philosophy of law community, maybe due to the multiple failures of reform theory in the previous years. In the early period of all systems of law the redress of wrongs takes precedence over the enforcement
Its primary goal is to discourage members of society from committing criminal acts out of fear of punishment. The most powerful deterrent would be a criminal justice system that guaranteed with certainty that all persons who broke the law would be apprehended, convicted, and punished, and would receive no personal benefit from their misconduct. United States policy of deterrence during the Cold War underwent significant variations. The early stages of the Cold War were generally characterized by ideology of Containment, an aggressive stance on behalf of the United States especially regarding developing nations under their sphere of
The assumption of rehabilitation is that people are not natively criminal and that it is possible to restore a criminal to a useful life, to a life in which they contribute to themselves and to society. Rather than punishing the harm out of a criminal, rehabilitation would seek, by means of education or therapy, to bring a criminal into a more normal state of mind, or into an attitude which would be helpful to society, rather than be harmful to society. Although the importance of inflicting punishment on those persons who breach the law, so as to maintain social order, is retained, the importance of rehabilitation is also given priority. Humanitarians have, over the years, supported rehabilitation as an alternative, even for capital punishment.

Restoration is to return what has been unjustly taken; to place the owner of a thing in the state in which he formerly was. By restitution is understood not only the return of the thing itself, but all its accessories. It is to return the thing and its fruits. Retributive justice began to replace this system following the Norman invasion of Britain. William the Conqueror's son, Henry I, issued laws detailing offenses against the “king’s peace.” In the 20th century, restorative justice started becoming more