Be careful, though, with the natural swing the other way, towards the medicalization of deviance. Although there are no shortage of people who do terrible thin

Be careful, though, with the natural swing the other way, towards the medicalization of deviance. Although there are no shortage of people who do terrible things due to impaired capacity, there are plenty of healthy people who cognizantly do make choices negative to others. They're fully rational and logical, but from the external view, terrible. These choices may be grounded in emotional or intellectual "idiosyncrasies", but you can't quite call them medical, and the "oh that poor dear" narrative isn't helpful. You can treat illness, but you can't treat worldview and behavior. The other problem with this train of thought is that then, other "amoral" choices become medical. For instance, when many believed homosexuality was a terrible horrible amoral sin, there was a push to consider it a "disorder" (with the complicity of the psychological community), which merited psychological or other medical interventions. This lead to the idea of "conversion therapy", because an "illness" can usually be "cured". Similar views have been proposed for other socially unacceptable behaviors, and later discredited when the wider moral viewpoint shifted. When this decade's "morality" crisis is treated as medical, you open the door to medical (mis)treatment of anything society doesn't care for, and that's, in many ways, worse than the current approaches. You can release somebody from jail when we realize a law is stupid, but 10 years of Psychiatry's Favorite Hot New Substance in a small padded room runs the risk of depriving people of far more than just time. I agree that the motive of the legal system should be less about revenge, but a "people who do bad things are all mentally ill" narrative doesn't fix that. If done poorly, it mostly means that people doing things we don't like will spend their lives drugged out of their heads in padded rooms, rather than sober in concrete ones. So, we need to keep a strong line between "people making bad choices" (which requires behavioral interventions) and "people unable to make choices in reality" (which requires medical or psychiatric ones). These are two different situations, and as our current system proves, neither intervention suffices for both.