Should the Punishment Fit the Crime?

Should the punishment fit the crime? Giving into temptation is of course the biblical crime resulting in man's fall from grace. You may remember back to being a teenager. Then transgression had to do with failing to meet either manifest or subliminal parental demands. Crime and Punishment is  Dostoevsky’s novel of repentance. Raskolnikov pays but he’s rewarded with a new and better life. He rises from the dead. When We Dead Awaken is significantly the title of Ibsen's last play. Back to those teen years. You wore the tight Levis your dad disapproved of and carried a pack of Winston’s in your breast pocket to show they were near and dear to your heart. At no time is sex more exquisitely criminal—nor transgression more pleasurable—than in adolescence. The punishment is maturation, ie the blossoming of the foal into an adult creature. Society is the cruel patent. Criminals are rarely resurrected or reformed. When they're finally freed, they're often prepared for only one thing, recidivism. Prisons are not penitentiaries where one repents for sin.They're finishing school of depravity.

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