An effective justice system is supposed to teach people and get them to reform their behavior. But most sentences in the American “justice” system are designed to extract revenge. They are not punishments designed to reform people.
Even though the American people want revenge against people who have wronged other, they don’t believe in obvious torture. That means the punishments can not be the same thing as the criminal did to someone else.
But don’t worry. What we do is far worse. We send them to prison where they are humiliated every day. They live in very dangerous conditions. They have no health care to speak of. Their conditions are as miserable and as despicable as we can make them. We seek to make them even more criminal then before, and then we send them out to commit crimes again, so we can bring them back for more punishment.
Once someone gets in the system, they tend not to get back out. They spend the rest of their lives being punished. This is far worse than giving them a taste of what they gave to someone else.
The problem with conservatives is that they support this kind of wussy idea, thinking they are being tougher on crime. You couldn’t do anything worse to a criminal than to put them in prison. Not even waterboarding offers you as much revenge for your buck.
In case my sarcasm isn’t clear, I think the American idea that revenge equals justice is just totally wrong. I think that prisons are designed to create criminals, not reform them. An idea like the one in this question has to be one of the stupidest and short-sighted ideas I have heard in a very long time. And I’ve heard a lot of stupid ideas.