Should criminals be sentenced to time or to death? It’s a question that cuts to the core of justice systems around the world — and yet, we keep answering it with the same blunt tools: confinement or execution.

“Time” — prison — is framed as rehabilitation. But too often it functions as containment. Prisons warehouse people in conditions that frequently intensify the very harm they were punished for. Add racial bias, economic inequity, and a deeply flawed legal process, and you get a system that punishes vulnerability more often than violence.

Then there’s death — still practised in countries like the United States, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia — offered up as the ultimate deterrent or moral balance. But death is irreversible, susceptible to wrongful conviction (as shown in The National Registry of Exonerations), and often more about satisfying public outrage than ensuring long-term safety or justice.

But here’s the deeper truth: most criminal behaviour doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It stems from intergenerational trauma — the psychological and social damage passed down through families and communities exposed to colonisation, poverty, abuse, addiction, and systemic neglect. Prisons don’t stop that cycle. Executions certainly don’t. They just silence it.

Take the United States, for example. Nearly 1 in 3 Black men born today can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives — a direct legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and systemic racism (The Sentencing Project). In contrast, Norway, where prison is designed to resemble life on the outside, has one of the world’s lowest recidivism rates — around 20%, compared to over 60% in the US (Norwegian Correctional Service). That’s because their justice model values reintegration, not retribution.

So maybe the real question isn’t time or death, but what do we want justice to do? Punish or repair? Satisfy a thirst for revenge or break cycles of harm?

A just society doesn’t simply ask, “What should we do to this person?” It asks, “What happened to this person — and how can we stop it from happening again?”

Because when we build a justice system that understands trauma, repair, and responsibility — we create the possibility of transformation.

Not just for individuals. For society.