 Moreover, punishment should be as mild as is consistent with achieving the goal of restraining crime. Prisoners should be treated well and held under humane conditions. Moreover, those prisoners who are physically weak, and therefore pose less danger to society, should be released early. It’s fairly clear that Nāgārjuna would reject retributivist theories of punishment, which hold that prisoners should be punished because they deserve to suffer or in order to take away any unjust advantage they may have gained by their actions. From the point of view of retributivism, the physical strength or weakness of prisoners is irrelevant to how much punishment they deserve. Moreover, some forms of retributivism, especially cruder, popular versions, would endorse harsh conditions of punishment in order to ensure that prisoners have to undergo the degree of suffering that they deserve.