Interesting thoughts, but at the same time I'm rather confused in that I feel several lines of thought are opened and left open. The takeaway, I think, is that the 'criminal' should be treated as an individual, that maybe psychologists should honestly try to work with these people to understand them and help them to see their faults, and also work with the victim, and maybe even build bridges between victim and victimizer, maybe a store owner will understand why a poor person would steal from him, the social circumstances that led to it, and the need to change them, thus creating "an opportunity to make things better than then they were before the crime". All these things I understand, and am in favor of.

But I'm also a big fan of good ole revenge! :P Yes revenge isn't going to bring back your murdered child, but it's definitely not a good thing to let a rapist or killer roam about as he searches for his next victim. Revenge, evolutionarily, aims at getting rid of a certain kind of behavior, and is meant as a teaching tool. We may not think of it as revenge, but when mothers teach their children not to hurt each other by inflicting the same hurt on them (child A breaks child B's toy, so the parent takes away child A's toy so they're both toyless now), they're essentially performing an act of revenge. If you think about it, in a perfect world, what would revenge be like? Like, if you were a God, creating the cosmos all over again, how would you make it be? Very simple: every time I kick someone, I feel the kick. Every time I put out a cigarette on someone's flesh, I feel the burn. Pure, instant, revenge. I immediately know what I'm doing is bad. I'm spitting against the wind. I don't know how anyone could find moral fault with that scenario, and so any system that tries to recreate it (in the absence of a God) can't be faulted either.