The suggestion that what matters is pain or suffering as such invites the criticism that neither we nor the state should be in the business of trying to inflict pain or suffering on people.
(Contrasted with Aristotle's view of the state as a natural stage of human development)
A self-imposed moral entity created by humans at the command of natural law as a defensive cooperative scheme against the threat posed by other human beings.
First, punishment involves material impositions or exactions that are in themselves typically unwelcome: they deprive people of things that they value (liberty, money, time); they require people to do things that they would not normally want to do or do voluntarily (to spend time on unpaid community labour, to report to a probation officer regularly, to undertake demanding programmes of various kinds). What distinguishes punishment from other kinds of coercive imposition, such as taxation, is that punishment is precisely intended to …: but to what? Some would say that punishment is intended to...