Criminal punishment is one aspect of More’s utopia that stands out as very beneficial to today’s society. He opines a solution in both sections in Utopia. At the time, there were no life sentence for committing crimes, it was either paying a fine (money or something else) or it was punishable by death. Even today there are still crimes in the US that, depending on the state, are punishable by death. In the US today, life sentences are more frequent than execution. This is seen as a negative by many law abiding citizens, why should they have to pay for the upkeep of criminals with life sentences? Instead they would want execution, but why this alternative? Death will not right the criminal’s wrong doing. If a man steals from another, the only way to solve this is to make him pay some sort of compensation equal in value to what the victim lost. What if the man steals another’s life, via murdering him/her? Killing that man certainly will not bring back the victim’s life, the only result of such an event would be a wasted loss of two lives, instead of one, and a loss in the society’s productive capacity. Life in prison, without the criminal having to fulfill any conditions, leads not only to two wasted lives and the loss in the society’s productive capacity but it also will be a drain on those who have to pay for the upkeep of the prisoners, i.e. the law abiding citizens. More’s solution to this is, to put it bluntly, slavery.
People in the modern condemn slavery as a barbaric practice, but that is because it has not been used in the way that More prescribes. More proposes that the punishment for crimes should be slavery, “…even of the greatest crimes,” (76). More reasons that slavery is a greater punishment than death; in the case of murder it would restore some equilibrium. The condemned would not be a slave for some private owner; instead they would be what one could call a public slave. More says that making criminals slaves benefits the community than the criminal’s death ever would (76). By doing this, instead of having two wasted lives, you only have one and the drop in society’s productive capacity will be small because of the loss of only one life. It is slavery because they would not earn wages they keep, rather those wages would go towards their upkeep at the prison or wherever they are housed. They do not deserve any extra wages, they are supposed to be paying back those who they have wronged, it should not be the other way around. If the slaves are unruly, More says that death is the only option, which can be rationalized. The criminals were given a second chance and decided to waste it. In a way, More is right, there comes a time when you need to draw a line on how many chances you are willing to give. If you are too lenient, then the criminal knows he/she can get away with just about anything. So while More is right about drawing the line on how many chances people deserve, two should not be the rule of thumb, instead it should vary depending on the crime, as should the amount of time spent as a slave. For criminals who have life sentences, More says that there is the chance that if they do their time patiently, their crimes will be pardoned by either the people or the government (in Utopia, More does not say government he says the Prince) (76).