Is justice merely a "machine" for punishment?

Justice as a punishment machine

Law is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior.

Retributive justice is a theory of justice which holds that the best response to a crime is a proportionate[1] punishment, inflicted for its own sake rather than to serve an extrinsic social purpose, such as deterrence or rehabilitation of the offender. Retributivists hold that when an offender breaks the law, justice requires that the criminal suffer in return.

The purpose of law is to regulate behavior. Behavior is regulated by distribution of negative consequences in exchange for unwanted behavior. It is a form of operant conditioning, where a criminal is punished. Lines like "she received a slap on the wrist" highlight this line of thinking.

Retributive justice requires society and the state to maintain a capacity to punish, to hurt, to damage those who have been convicted of a crime. The theory called the Broken Window theory highlights the thinking behind harsh punishments for trivial crimes:

The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments to prevent small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking, and toll-jumping helps to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes from happening.

The Broken Window theory is still popular to this day and not alot has changed

Broken windows theory had an enormous impact on police policy throughout the 1990s and remained influential into the 21st century. Perhaps the most notable application of the theory was in New York City under the direction of Police Commissioner William Bratton. He and others were convinced that the aggressive order-maintenance practices of the New York City Police Department were responsible for the dramatic decrease in crime rates within the city during the 1990s.

Don't be an asshole, obey the law to avoid pissing too many people off

While the law may have no purpose besides to distribute "appropriate" punishments for arbitrary socially defined crimes, it does not change the fact that on some level typically public sentiment helped shape these laws in the first place. The law represents how people at some point in time felt about certain behaviors. The smart thing to do is to respect how people feel and avoid the negative consequences of pissing a bunch of people off. In a sense this ties in with social norms as well, and with etiquette, but law is distinctly separate from morality.

Is law amoral and arbitrary?

This might be a case by case basis where some laws may have emerged out of a moral concern while other laws didn't. Overall there is very little if any moral consistency from which to determine what will or will not be considered illegal. There also seems to be no obvious way to predict what the punishments will be as this is determined by the judge in sentencing. The only thing we know for sure is that laws are constraints on behavior, just as social norms are constraints, religious beliefs are constraints, and political ideologies are constraints. These constraints do not always lead to the best possible outcomes, but are there because poplar sentiment or local sentiment agreed to put them in place. In many cases, such as for instance with interracial marriage, there were constraints based on social norms which had nothing to do with producing a good outcome, or utilitarian happiness maximization.

What do you think? How should the social utility of the concept "law" be defined and measured? How should the social utility of "justice" be defined and measured?

References

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(social)
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism
8. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham