Every individual has the natural right to punish a criminal.  Especially the one who committed a crime against him.  Waiting for some official to deliver punishment is not a requirement of justice.  It’s a convenience, at best.  A luxury, not a law.  Punishment is a response to aggression.  If someone breaks into your home, you don’t need paperwork to respond.

Governments may offer punishment on your behalf, but they can’t monopolize it.  That would imply your right must first be granted by them.  This reverses the source of the right.  The right comes from you.  The victim.  The human being.  Delegating punishment does not erase your own claim to it.  It doesn’t dissolve your authority over your own life.

Now imagine this: someone assaults you.  You defend yourself.  Then the state punishes you—because you didn’t wait for their officers.  That is no longer justice.  That is control.  The state now decides when and how you may respond to violence against you.  They have become the arbiter not of justice, but of permission.

No rational person believes punishment is owed to the criminal.  Yet somehow, when the government forbids retaliation, they grant the criminal an advantage.  They say: “Let us handle it.” Then sometimes they do.  Often they don’t.  Or worse—they punish you instead.

Justice delayed may be justice denied.  Justice forbidden is no justice at all.  It becomes a license for predators.  If a person has no right to punish the one who wronged him, then he has no right to be protected from crime either.  These two can’t be separated.

Some will argue: “If everyone could punish, there’d be chaos.” What is more chaotic than criminals unchecked and victims restrained?  The fear isn’t really chaos.  The fear is independence.  The state demands its place between you and your attacker.  Not to help.  To command.  If punishment is centralized, it can be weaponized, and it has been.

Would you pay a private judge to let your attacker go free?  Would you pay a punishment agency that tells you to stay quiet while your neighbor is robbed?  Would you be forced to pay it, even if they offered no punishment at all?

Every individual has the natural right to punish.  This includes proportionate, direct response to crime.  To forbid this is to favor the criminal.  No law can turn wrong into right.  Punishment isn’t reserved for men with badges.  It’s the rightful act of a person resisting injustice.  Any system that denies this right is not a protector of justice.

Reference

Lysander Spooner; The Lysander Spooner Reader