The Judicial Process -Creating the output model

So in order to construct our model we need a pain scale and we need to be able to place a victim's suffering on this pain scale. If this was being done to determine public policy, by a public commission, all sorts experts would be used to do the necessary evaluations, but since the purpose of this model is clarify my understanding of the problem the pain scale will just reflect my judgments and information I can easily gather. I will use a pain scale from zero to twenty. I will anchor the scale in my mind by assigning a value of twenty to the worst pain I can think of, which is losing a child. With this in mind I personally would value the pain of a woman raped at about seventeen. I'm a male so all you women out there feel free to criticize this. Now comes an issue of how complex do we want to make the model. We could consider things like age of the victim and marital status and come up with different pain levels, but I'm going to regard that as beyond the scope of this exercise and stick with the single value of seventeen. I will also arbitrarily use the single pain value of two for the victims of a burglary although various factors could affect the pain level of a burglary. The pain value of an innocent man sent to jail has to be more complex because it will vary with time spent in prison and we have to take this into account in order to examine the length of sentence questions. So I make the following pain assignments with respect to pain for time served. I assign a pain of seventeen to serving twenty years unjustly, twelve to serving ten years unjustly, eight to serving five years unjustly, and six to serving one year unjustly. Any amount of time between two of these anchor points will have pain proportional to the total time between the two points. Sorry for the math. Now we have my scale. Feel free to criticize it and give your own thoughts. In my next post we will begin to discuss how we will use this scale and these judgments to clarify the answers to our questions