We often wonder to what extent punishment is vengeance rather than justice.  Glazebrook suggests

Yet punishment cannot undo harm. A jail sentence does not unrape the victim. A better world is not one wherein all crimes are paid for, but one in which harm-generating activities like crime are no longer one’s best option. The impossible, womanly promise of care is of a future wherein people seek to do no harm.  Rather, ethics of care seek to raise consciousness such that perpetrators learn compassion, that is, come to understand that life, whether human or non-human, is to be valued and cherished, and that harm is to be avoided rather than replicated in a dialectical economy of retributive justice.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 255). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Caputo responds:

Rather than giving up on the word “justice” in favor of care, which is for me too high a price to pay—and I think that this is the issue between Glazebrook and me in this matter—I would rather re-describe justice away from Rawls and towards serving the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, which is the older prophetic sense of tsdaqah in the Torah, which has squatter’s right on this word, having long ago beaten Kant and Rawls to the punch.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 262). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Again and again with these writers we see the contrast of a response to evil of, essentially, paying a fine in substitutionary atonement, vs love as treating traditionally undesirables like widow, orphan, stranger and enemy as more important than self – such as the dying Jesus and Stephen praying, not for themselves, but for their persecutors to be forgiven.  It is a question whether we are reactively trying to balance the books, or actively trying to empty oneself (kenosis).