Calvin Bryant, a seventeen-year old boy, was caught and arrested for selling ecstasy pills. He could have served less than three years yet he was instead sentenced to seventeen years in prison, despite it being his first offense. This is not the first story of a wrongful conviction, and it certainly won’t be the last. But when you dive deeper into the issue, it is more complicated than it seems. 

Even since ancient civilization, the smallest of “crimes” have had unproportionally harsh punishment for women. Isabella Morra, a 25 year old woman, was killed by her family for exchanging poetry with a Spanish nobleman. Laws and codes throughout history also condemn women for adultery while mentioning nothing about men. One of the first examples can be found in Hammurabi’s code which says women would be “tied up and thrown into the river to die” if they cheated on their husbands. At the same time, the code has “no punishment at all for male adulterers”. While adultery is obviously wrong, the unequal penalty for men shows how subjective it was to the times. Women had significantly fewer rights during the time of the Babylonian Empire which was reflected in these laws. The punishments that determine the course of millions of people’s lives are shaped by the values of the people who make them. This makes it impossible to guarantee the right punishment will be given for a crime. 

In the play Othello, Othello suspects his newlywed wife of cheating on him with his former lieutenant. Although he is convinced by Iago, the antagonist in the play, Othello ultimately decides that he should kill both his wife and former lieutenant. During this time period, it seemed like a much more rational response. Then, once Othello discovers Iago has tricked him into killing his wife, Othello attempts to murder Iago. He fails but the discovery sends him into a rage and results in Othello committing suicide. According to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, Iago belongs with the most evil and sinister people in hell for betraying Othello and everyone around him. “Divine Comedy” is a series of poems that describes Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead. Each crime is assigned a punishment such as the greedy who are condemned to pushing rocks and doing useless tasks for the rest of eternity. Iago would fall into the ninth circle of hell. The disaster Iago causes to Othello’s life supposedly puts him with the most sinister and evil human beings to exist. 

But this raises the question of why the punishments exist in the first place. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes says, “There are five main underlying justifications of criminal punishment considered briefly here: retribution; incapacitation; deterrence; rehabilitation and reparation.” These reasons can help people determine the proper punishment. For example, Karl Menninger, an American psychiatrist, advocated the idea that it would be beneficial to replace, “cruel and unusual punishments, such as incarceration and capital punishment, with medical treatments for both physical and mental illnesses”. Under Menninger’s argument, when someone commits a crime, the goal is to prevent them from doing the crime again. You would put them through reform so they would not negatively affect more people. In theory, this type of punishment is ideal. However, in practice, it is apparent that it ignores human behavior and instincts. Consider this question: If someone had murdered a person you loved but there was a way to guarantee they would never commit the crime again and they would walk free forever, would you consider it a fair and just punishment? Many people would not. It does not seem fair that someone who has caused so much harm to your life and the people around you should walk free. Retribution appeals more to this. Retribution is the idea that people who commit wrongdoings should be punished equally for their crimes. But retribution also has its faults because it does not attempt to fix the behavior and mainly focuses on revenge. 

In the end, punishment is necessary to keep an ordered and functioning society. There is no way to guarantee the punishment for crimes since it is dependent on the values of the society during that time. However, there are methods to try and determine the most just punishment for a crime so people like Calvin Bryant receive a fair punishment for their crime.