Brazil's Prison Debate: Becker, Rothbard and the Ritual of Punishment

That explains why neither Becker nor Rothbard gains traction with a society that applauds candidates shouting that "a good criminal is a dead criminal." Those voters buy exemplary punishment as the price of social peace. Society left the archaic period but replaced the rituals. Calling the new ritual "justice" is the modern version of calling the sacrifice the will of the gods.

Go back to the 2016 kidnapping. The ritual worked halfway. The pre-dawn cordon, the negotiation, the surrender, the press footage. That was the day's catharsis. But the release by the courts prevented full consummation. Girard has a name for that: sacrificial crisis.

When the rite fails to discharge society's tension, the violence does not disappear. It spreads. A country that treats sacrifice as mere spectacle and fails to punish its scapegoats reaps both plagues at once: the victim goes without the restitution Rothbard preached, and the crowd goes without the catharsis Girard described. So the crowd seeks the sacrifice on its own. Lynching. Vigilante killings. Expanding militias. A cult of police violence.

Before anyone concludes the answer is to consummate the sacrifice properly, the author points to the United States. It holds the largest prison population on the planet. Did it buy peace? No. Did it restitute a cent to victims? Also no. Impunity and mass incarceration, he argues, are not opposites. They are the two failure modes of the same sacrificial game.

The social tension of crime is born of an open account. Someone took and did not pay. Punishment closes that account symbolically, which is why it must repeat forever. The audience is never sated. Restitution closes the account for real. The offender himself pays his own victim, in public, which carries the ritual aspect of sacrifice.

Before the state monopolized justice, the legal orders that contained vengeance were restitution systems. The Anglo-Saxon weregild. The customary law Bruce Benson documents in "To Serve and Protect." Public compensatory payment was the meeting point between Rothbard's restitutive thesis and Girard's sacrificial one. It replaced blood with money to end a feud. Vengeance thrives where the account does not close. Punitivism burns the debtor. Impunity tears up the debt. The victim is left with the loss either way, and that feeling of injustice is the perfect recipe for violence and populist votes.

The author offers an honest objection from the street. Restitution is elegant on paper. Most criminals he arrested could not have restituted a bus fare to their victims. A 19-year-old with no assets does not create assets because a court ordered him to pay double. He carried that objection for years and saw libertarians as dreamers who had never met cruel criminals.

The objection was aimed at the wrong target, he says. It does not disqualify restitution. It rests on the fantasy that restitution means writing a check. Rothbard admitted restitution could be paid off with work over time. Benson documented practical mechanisms. Hard to implement? Yes. But do the math nobody does. Society already spends fortunes to cage thousands of insolvent criminals for years. A society willing to fund that fortune in cages would also be willing to fund supervised work that pays down the debt to the victims. The obstacle is not fiscal. It is liturgical.

The defense of a victim-centered legal order keeps losing. It does not lose for lack of a better argument. It loses to a ritual need, the oldest social technology our species owns. It will keep losing, election after election, until someone names the mechanism out loud. The real product of the penal system is collective catharsis, and the bill is still paid by the victim.

Becker proved the altar is expensive. Rothbard proved it is unjust. Girard explains why it is still standing. Restitution as public ritual, the author concludes, is the only proposal that passes all three tests. Cheap enough for Becker. Just enough for Rothbard. Satisfying the sacrificial desire the altar never sates. And somewhere in Brazil, a couple who was driving home from their daughter's birthday party still waits for some institution of their country to treat what was taken from them as the point of it all.