If I'm being completely honest, I dont really believe we have free will. Or we do, but in an almost entirely meaningless way on a civilizational scale. While you might be able to make small choices, material conditions and the flow of history ultimately decide the course of your life. We're all just products of our environment which none of us can change on our own, and as much as we can change our environment as a collective is decided upon by current conditions which are determined by oast conditions, etc. Basically i think the entirity of history was determined at the big bang, and were all just along for the ride.
It doesn't make it pointless. Pushing criminals is de facto changing the environment and can influence what other people do even if they don't have free will.
It's true in theory that punishment for crime affects the environment to some degree, but all studies on the subject show that in practice it has a negligible-to-zero effect on whether people commit crimes.
Really? I always hear people say that probability of the punishment has more effect than its severity.
Interesting, hadn't heard this angle before. I can find a paper theorising via Nash game theory that this should have an effect, but didn't find any studies about this using real-world data. Didn't look too hard, though.