Consider the following comments on punishment.
An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
Anonymous
The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Let the punishment fit the crime.
Proverb
We lock people away to feel safe, then act surprised when cages produce dangerous men.
A society that only punishes has decided it would rather be feared than understood.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Argue that punishment serves several aims at once, deterrence, protection, retribution and reform, and that most disagreement about justice is really disagreement about which of these we secretly prioritise. Open by granting the retributive intuition: serious wrongdoing seems to demand a proportionate response, and a society that shrugs at harm fails its victims. Then complicate it by asking whether punishment that neither deters nor rehabilitates is justice or merely sanctioned revenge dressed in legal language. A useful third move distinguishes what punishment claims to do from what it measurably achieves, since prisons often produce the recidivism they were meant to prevent. Caution: avoid the sentimentality that treats every offender as a victim of circumstance, which can erase the genuine moral agency that makes blame meaningful in the first place.