Retributive justice is a legal concept whereby the criminal offender receives punishment proportional or similar to the crime.
As opposed to revenge, retribution—and thus retributive justice—is not personal, is directed only at wrongdoing, has inherent limits, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others (i.e., schadenfreude, sadism), and employs procedural standards.
[11] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retributive justice is committed to three principles:[12] Proportionality requires that the level of punishment be related to the severity of the offending behaviour.
For utilitarians, punishment is forward-looking, justified by a purported ability to achieve future social benefits, such as crime reduction.
[7] Many jurisdictions that adopt retributive justice, especially in the United States, use mandatory sentencing, where judges impose a penalty for a crime within the range set by the law.
[citation needed] When the punishment involves a fine, the theory does not allow the financial position of an offender to be considered, leading to situations in which a poor individual and a millionaire could be forced to pay the same amount.
[15] Instead of pure retribution, many jurisdictions use variants such as the European Union's emphasis on punitive equality, which base the amount of a fine not just on the offense but also on the offender's income, salary, and ability to pay.
More generally, prioritizing justice for the public over crime control goals has come under criticism as attributable more to the relative ease of writing sentencing guidelines as crime tariffs (as opposed to describing the appropriate influence of situational and personal characteristics on punishment) than to any sound arguments about penological theory.
One libertarian approach to this issue argues that full restitution (in the broad, rather than technical legal, sense) is compatible with both retributivism and a utilitarian degree of deterrence.