Reddit reviews The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society

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I agree our system is a majority punitive. We've many years of politicians falling over each other to be "tough on crime", with punitive jails and prisons and sentencing severity that much of the rest of the rest of the world rolls their eyes at.

I think the major reason is an incorrect folk view of human nature, where some people are bad people by nature who are different than us. We as Americans have an overstrong view of free will and our ability to overcome adversity, and believe if we grew up in the same situation as most offenders we would never do such a thing: The truth is we probably would do no different. Because of this we're able to label them as bad people, and try to design an incentive structure where crimes have the worst possible outcome believing this will stop offenders. The truth is in the moment of most crimes, the severity of the potential punishment has much less to do than we think with whether the crime will occur or not. It's just not how the human mind processes things.

Personally, I believe acceptance of either the lack of or limits of our free will demands an overhaul to our justice system towards a rehabilitative and restorative model rather than a punitive one. We need to set up a system that lets prisoners make choices that mold moral behavior, rather than one that just blames them as bad people who need to suffer, which doesn't stop when they've left prison.

There's lots of interesting work on the subject, like this one that examines lots of our societal choices in view of modern neuroscience, and this one particularly focued on incarceration.

Also, FWIW, if you didn't say the ONLY thing it does is encourage offending, I'd agree. For instance, jails removing people from their situation for short periods of time can fulfill a number of useful goals.