I don't see what the fundamental problem would be in trying to get rid of punishment. Not having punishment doesn't mean the system would, for example, be easier on offenders and less gratifying for victims.

You could in fact create a rather draconian restorative justice system without any punishment at all: instead of prison or death sentences, enforce only full monetary compensation for any damages the offender has caused. If they're rich, well sure they might get away with most things, but if that leaves a bad taste in a victim's mouth then the compensation was simply set too low. It's hard to put a price on some types of damage, for example permanent serious disability, so you might play it safe and make it astronomical.

Seizing and selling all the offender's earthly possessions doesn't cover it? Well, that's the part where you "enforce compensation" by shipping them to a labour camp where they toil indefinitely until it's all been paid for. It would probably feel like a punishment, but that's just happenstance and something which vengefully-minded people would be free to secretly take solace in.

Might be a bit far off in the future as far as practical implementation goes, obviously.

Sounds like a complete nightmare, unjust, punitive, unsafe, inhuman.

Sounds like a complete nightmare, unjust, punitive, unsafe, inhuman. — unenlightened

Indeed, punishmentless doesn't have to mean being soft, idealistic and non-interventionist.

Seizing and selling all the offender's earthly possessions doesn't cover it? Well, that's the part where you "enforce compensation" by shipping them to a labour camp where they toil indefinitely until it's all been paid for. It would probably feel like a punishment, but that's just happenstance and something which vengefully-minded people would be free to secretly take solace in. — zookeeper

You worm! You stole the Revolutionary Re-Education Plans for the wealthiest 5%. Some of them won't be shipped off to labor camps. They will become maids and grooms to the obnoxious riff raff we will house in their former estates. "The first will be last, and the last will be first."

I think that the state sets that standard, that it's sometimes okay to kill people. I think that places with capital punishment will have higher murder rates, and places that have euthanasia will have higher suicide rates.

I think that we should all abandon money, and go for like a bitcoin type virtual money, causing the drastic loss of value of the current currency, and then we can pick up a ton of it for some bitcoin-esque new stuff for cheap, and pay off all of our debts!

If capital punishment leads to more murder, and youth in asia leads to more suicides, what calamity will bitcoin lead to?

unjust, punitive, unsafe, inhuman — unenlightened

The Quartetto Perfecta.

There's no such thing as progress, there are just new problems at the cost of old ones. Lets all hold hands and discover how this will blow up in our faces as well together!

What do you mean, "There's no such thing as progress"? We have more ways than ever before to create messes that blow up in our faces. Once upon a time, it was nothing more complicated than finding a better way of fixing a stone axe to a stick before somebody grabbed the invention and sank the axe in the skull of the inventor. Had she not gotten greedy and grabby, she might also have had a blade attached to a handle. Murderess Cro-Magnon bitch.

These days, we have piles of pretty plutonium just waiting to be pinched and packed into either a nice clean complicated Paris-leveling bomb or a simple dirty NYC-metro-area-contaminating contraption. Either way, bad news all round. They recently discovered a can of Spam at the bottom of the Mariana Trench -- 10 km into the deep. We slobs dump trash everywhere.

Lets all hold hands — Wosret

Just hold hands? Nothing more? It might be the last thing we ever do. If it's The End, let's get naked and see what happens.

It just comes down to which kind of science fiction movie you'd rather live in... Wrath of Khan or Chronicles of Riddick?

Or Babylon 5: mind wipe the criminal and replace it with a new mind. I don't recall where they got the "new" minds from.

The Wrong Assumption
Your statement assumes that 'natural death' is a punishment for a crime, which is a wrong assumption, given all the evidence (that recognizes 'death' as a part of the chaos system that is the universe. Note that we may someday overcome death (for example if it is merely caused by radiation from our proximity to the sun). Your assumption also assumes a conscious 'punisher' making a conscious decision, of which there is no evidence, given the vast amount of verified knowledge we now have (so much so that to continue to argue with it is mere foolishness with regards to our continued survival).