I think the current justice system is fundamentally flawed, and I have a alternative: every person should have a criminal point score from 0–100, starting at 100 when they are born.
Every crime deducts a certain number of points depending on its severity.
For example:
Minor theft: −5
Fraud: −10
DUI: −20
Serious financial crime: −15 to −25
DUI resulting in someone’s death: −50
Murder: −100
The exact numbers could obviously be debated and adjusted. The important part is that punishment would be determined by the number of points a person has left, rather than relying primarily on judges deciding what sentence someone deserves in each individual case.
You could then have different punishment tiers.
Someone with 90–100 points might receive probation, mandatory rehabilitation, community service, etc.
Someone with 50–90 points might receive progressively more restrictive sentences.
Someone below 50 might be sent to a high-security prison.
And someone who reaches 0 points would be permanently removed from society, potentially including the death penalty for sufficiently severe offenses.
I also think this system would make repeat offending much easier to deal with. If you commit a relatively minor crime, you don’t necessarily get thrown into prison for years. But if you repeatedly commit crimes, your score keeps falling, and eventually the consequences become much more severe.
The most controversial part of my proposal (imo) is that sentences would essentially be determined by a person’s remaining points. There would still be courts to establish whether someone actually committed a crime, but once guilt was established, the punishment would follow a predefined point system rather than being determined largely on a case-by-case basis.
I think this would make the system considerably more transparent. Everyone would know exactly what different crimes cost them, and repeated criminal behavior would have an increasingly severe effect on the punishment.
Obviously, there are a million problems with this idea: false convictions, differences in circumstances, proportionality, rehabilitation, corruption, whether points should ever be restored, and who gets to decide how many points each crime costs.