Suppose you live in a house, inside which you enjoy your private space. Maybe you own it or have a mortgage or something. If I defraud you in a spectacular fashion, such as forging loan applications from you and then not paying back the money to the lenders, there's a fair chance you'll end up being pursued by the lenders and going bankrupt and losing your assets including the house effectively losing your private space
No, you shouldn't be as long as this isn't going to help me regain what I've lost and I don't want the government to spend my tax money on maintaining the jail to keep you in where you are going to be useless and miserable.
Perhaps there are people who can be satisfied by the fact the person who has made them struggle is put in struggle but I certainly am not of this kind of irrational, your struggle isn't something I can eat or live in.
I would prefer to force you to return what I have lost + some extra and would even love to help you to find as a well-paid job as you can manage with if you don't have the money so you can earn it and pay me.
Okay, I think I can understand your perspective in the sense that purely punitive "justice" isn't necessarily a particularly good use of resources and lives.
On the other hand, there's still a question of "how do we prevent someone from doing the same thing in future to another victim?"
In this case, the logical thing to do for an amoral actor is simply to defraud people left and right and pay them back if you ever get caught. You're very likely to come out on top.
I mean, you can make a case for that. But you can also make a case that not much else seems to really deter these high net worth people from doing illegal things. What would you propose as an appropriate punishment for willfully breaking tax law?
For example, massive fines, that are larger than their net worth, so that they are forced to pay a portion of their income for a while afterwards.
But, yes, prison should not be used as a punishment, but rather to isolate people who are physically dangerous (note that this does not equal violent crime - it's possible for a person to commit a crime of violence, but not actually be a danger to society afterwards).
If we really want to have a physically punitive justice system, corporal punishment is infinitely better than years in prison: it teaches a lesson, but people can move on quickly from that - it doesn't turn their whole life upside down, and it doesn't put them in an environment where they're more likely to criminalize than rehabilitate.
But ideally, the system should be preventative only where necessary (i.e. isolate the danger), and rehabilitative otherwise.
how about paying x * amount of tax evaded, where x > 1 and the penalty is uncapped? if a significant fraction of tax evasion lead to convictions, it wouldn't be good business to try.
the obvious issue is that we don't see a high conviction rate for tax evasion, but this is an issue regardless of whether the penalty is jail or a fine. no matter how severe the penalty is for a crime, people seem to do it anyway if there is a strong incentive and they don't believe they will be the unlucky individual. sooner or later everyone is doing it, just to keep up, and the only people who actually get hit with the hammer are the lowest-hanging fruit (often small fish) or those who get singled out for political reasons.
