I was just wondering if you guys could lay out a short-synopsis for what might happen to a criminal in an an-cap society. From arrest, to court, to sentencing, to rehab/reintegration.
Thank you, in advance.
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
See FreeDomainRadio.com.
Podcast #203 or #204 (don't remember) is quick and easy.
It's not an "ancap" society.
It's a "sateless society".
No, cuz that might include anarcho-primitivism, a stateless society.
It is stateless capitalism, i.e. anarcho-capitlism, i.e. an-cap.
@OP: Criminal acts tend to incite retaliation. If you kill my son (or even my dog), I will want to kill you. The urge to retaliatory violence is culturally universal, meaning it is biological. There is a reason we feel like retaliating against people who commit violent crimes against us or our loved ones, and that is so that the cost of violent crimes will be internalized on the actor. I believe that the importance of retaliatory violence is overlooked by almost all libertarian theory to its great detriment.
Punishments - such as fines, expulsion, imprisonment and execution - are all forms of retaliatory violence. I believe that retaliatory violence would exist in a natural order society but the danger of retaliatory violence is that it is unstable toward cyclical violence (feuds). For this reason, I think it would be reserved for only the most heinous crimes that cannot be internalized any other way, such as murder.
Clayton -
I have a question on that (what happens to the petty thief who owns nothing but what he has stolen), but it may have been answered in the links provided, and I have not checked them yet.
Thanks for the response tho :D
@OP (addendum): I've been thinking about punishment and retaliation a lot, lately, since it is the thorniest problem in libertarian legal theory, so I overlooked the rest of your question.
If someone commits a tort ("crime") against someone else, in a natural order society, a dispute may arise. It is a human right for individuals to settle their disputes in any which way they both find mutually agreeable. Hence, if you both want to "take it outside" and duke it out, that's your business. So long as both parties agree to this method of dispute resolution, there are no further legal consequences. This is the basis of the idea of the duel. I term this martial contest.
If one party is disproportionately stronger than the other, the outcome of a martial contest is readily deduced by both parties. This "strongarm effect" creates a default outcome to the dispute... whatever the stronger party dictates. That is, might makes right. In modern law, a crime is not an offense against the victim, it is an offense against the State. By converting the dispute from a dispute between people who are nearly peers into a dispute between the State and an individual, a criminal dispute is transformed into the might-makes-right model - the dispute will be resolved in the manner the State says it will be resolved because the outcome of a martial contest between the accused and the State is certain (the accused will be vanquished). This is the basis of modern State courts or Hobbesian law*.
If, on the other hand, one party is not overwhelmingly more powerful than the other, then the outcome of a martial contest is - from the point of view of both parties - somewhat uncertain. Martial contests are an incredibly costly and unfair way to settle disputes and reasonable people will want to avoid these costs and risks. Arbitrated dispute resolution is far more cost effective, even though it involves negotiation, that is, relinquishing some of your interests in order to avoid a martial contest.
Arbitration is just a means to an end: settlement of a dispute without resort to martial contest. Customary law - or simply, law - emerges from a multitude of successfully arbitrated decisions. Experienced and in-demand arbitrators will utilize the "case record" to help parties see what sorts of settlements are realistically possible and which are not. The problem of incalcitrant parties to an arbitrated disputes is exaggerated... why else would the parties be paying an arbitrator except that they are seriously seeking to avoid martial contest?
As part of the settlement of disputes, the party who has wronged another will likely have to submit to the payment of damages - whether these damages constitute restitution only or retribution, as well, would emerge through precedent in the case record. That is, precedents would emerge over time... if you burn my house down, then you have to pay me the value of the house times two. Or, if you run over my dog, you have to either pay some fine or submit to some sort of public humiliation. And so on. Intent would largely be irrelevant except insomuch as the absence of intent may be a mitigating circumstance that a tortfeasor could put forward to elicit voluntary leniency on the part of the wronged.
*Note that it is only the socialized law and security system that permits the existence of this arbitration agent of overwhelming force