crime and punishment

What purpose does a long imprisonment serve? A person who serves 30 or 40 years -- or even just 10 years -- of his life behind bars is a person who is going to have an incredibly difficult time returning to life outside jail. Part of that's because of the lesser structure outside the prison environment, but the difficulty also is due differences in the culture inside and outside jail. Longtime inmates often are hardened by their experiences and in the case of violent offenders usually emerge even more violent.

The penal code expressed in the Bible makes no allowance for incarceration. That might be because there was no way to incarcerate a person back then -- although I doubt it, since Ahab imprisoned the prophet Micah when he refused to prophesy victory for Israel -- or it might be because a long and drawn-out punishment for sin is not what God wants us to mete out.

Looking at the Torah, the punishment for a crime was quick, personal and set to match the crime: murder a person, you get killed. Build a house it falls down, your own house is knocked down. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blow for blow, burn for burn. The idea was that a crime was not committed against society as much as it was against a person. Locking someone up for 30 years might keep them from committing a crime during that time -- or maybe not, if you're familiar with the crimes committed from inside a jail -- but it fails to redress the pain of the victim, which has helped to give rise to lawsuits, and it's also led to some pretty ludicrous jail terms in our criminal justice system.

Lesser crimes were punished by slavery -- not slavery as we understand it in culture, but something more akin to indentured servitude. The offender would serve the person whom he the crime against, as restitution. As a result, most of the laws provided in the Tanakh about slaves are meant to protect those slaves. There were undoubtedly some benefits: Like modern prisoners in jails, slaves were guaranteed three meals a day and a place to sleep. Unlike jail, thee slave would work not only to pay for room and board, but also to pay for the crime committed.

Unlike jail, there is no long-term cost to society at large. Commit a serious crime, like murder, and the punishment was death. Commit a violent crime and suffer the same as your victim. Even incorrigible criminals wouldn't survive very many such convictions; think of it as an Iron-Age "three strikes out." Commit fraud, embezzlement or go bankrupt and you have the privilege of actually working off your debt in the midst of those whose lives were hurt by your sin.

I did think it was confusing the first time I read the provision in Exodus 2:16 that allowed a slave to choose to remain in his master's household when his term of servitude was up, but a friend of mine pointed something out that actually makes sense: In a worst-case scenario, the offender would have gainful employment until the debt is paid. In a best-case scenario, he could gain a family and a permanent job and home.