Criminals have suffered the worst loss there is: Before they can lose fundamental respect for others, they lose it for themselves. Babies have this respect for others hard wired in. Something happens to them as babies. When they should be learning to get along with others, their parents fail to teach them honesty and respect by word and example. This is the worst robbery.
Cigarette addicts have the ability to drop their addiction “cold turkey”, same for other addictions. Habituated drug abuse is a behavior well known to be vastly more difficult to stop than merely not being a criminal. Yet drug users can and do stop their destructive behavior. Clearly, a criminal is capable of stopping his criminal behavior any time he decides to so do.
As for the victim, killing the thief during an armed robbery is legal. Which raises a pertinent question:
“Should those who could legally kill an armed criminal while said criminal was committing a violent crime with said weapon - should that person be fined for not saving society from future crimes and future costs of incarceration?”
As citizens of a Republic of self-regulating and responsible citizens, do we not have a duty to suppress crime when we can so do?
However, as is well known, positive reinforcement works better than punishments. Amazingly, America once had a well developed mechanism providing positive reinforcement for ending criminal behavior. It was nation wide and operated at very low financial cost to the citizens because NO Additional Personnel were hired, nor were they necessary, to operate this successful crime suppression mechanism.
When a criminal was lawfully killed while committing a crime, the local sheriff paid the bounty to the person who killed the criminal.
Note the total lack of overhead in the traditional, historically proven, American bounty system. Tax money, or privately contributed reward money, is distributed to the person who removed the criminal. Local Sheriff posted the Bounty as part of his duties, thereby incurring no extra costs to the taxpayer. Printing costs and accounting costs were minimal to non-existent.
The Bounty System worked because it decentralized and privatized crime suppression.
What we have in place now is in total failure mode.
Bring back the Bounty System.
“Babies have this respect for others hard wired in.”
That is not my experience or observation. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Babies have not respect for others. It is all “me,me,me”. Children have to be taught respect for others. The default is the child’s intrinsic “me, me, me”.
If the respect of respect for others is not taught, we end up with the criminal situation we see in the urban core.
Both Christianity (original sin) and science show that children are intrinsically selfish and have to learn respect for others. Rational self interest shows respect for others, but children have to learn it.