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Bongo comments on Punishing future crimes - Less Wrong
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And the for the case of punishing past crimes:
I suppose you oppose that too?
Not necessarily -- see the last part of my comment. Punishing past crimes often does serve to deter future crime because it provides the general population with evidence that people will get punished for their crimes. This much, I think, is obvious -- a nation in which modern law is enforced will beget less violence within its borders (all else being equal) than a pure anarchy would.
There's no point in punishing a (past) undesirable act if nobody who could potentially commit that act is going to become aware of the punishment you inflicted.
Prisons are only a deterrent if people know that they exist.
It will prevent infliction of future negative utility (or at least it is intended to).
So will punishing future crimes. If people see that criminals have a history of being punished in their past "for no reason", they won't wan't to become criminals as much.
If it appears to be happening "for no reason", most people will infer a much more plausible causal explanation than time-traveling punishment — for instance, that this type of hardship contributes to people becoming criminals.
Upvoted. If my wallet is stolen, there has got to be an amazing amount of evidence before the hypothesis 'a time traveler is punishing me for future crimes' would even enter my consciousness. I think that this actually might have an Occam prior low enough that I should start seriously doubting my own sanity before I assign a significant probability to it.
Of course it wouldn't be time travel. People who were especially good at predicting other people's life paths would just do so and punish accordingly, or something.
Edit: I accept your point that future consequences don't suffice to justify time-travelling punishment.
Wasn't there some Twilight Zone episode about this, where a Jewish time traveller used a mind-control device to torment Hitler, which caused his anti-semitism?
Of course, this arrangement doesn't even require the ability to predict the future (or travel into the past), as long as you pick people to punish who are deterred from crime solely by the threat of punishment. After all, once they've been punished for a future crime, they might as well commit it.