Being Fair

In his book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker writes of the founding fathers of America:

Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters.deters. The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one. Cruel punishments, whether or not they are in some sense “deserved,” are no more effective at deterring harm than moderate but surer punishments, and they desensitize spectators and brutalize the society that implements them.

Reading this made me wonder if this framework leaves the victims feeling they were never vindicated or received closure. In order to keep the balance that Pinker describes, the process must necessarily feel burdensome and often unfair to the victim. Justice is never doled out the the portions "deserved". It falls far short - atleast in the eyes of the less "enlightened" average person. 

How often has it been that we have followed a crime story through news cycles only to be dismayed by how the criminal got away without truly paying their dues. And we were only random bystanders in the situation. When that happens over a period of time, wouldn't everyone that has ever fallen victim start to get jaded, cynical and angry? Would that in any way be a better outcome that having a desensitized and brutalized society?