Hi Guys,
It seems to me that the verdict in this trial has exposed two serious problems with our views of crime and punishment, and they are both related. Lose one and you eventually lose the other.
The first is our inability to address crime in moral terms. As a society we are increasingly unwilling to speak of actions in terms of right and wrong, good and evil. Instead, we speak of actions using therapeutic language. People cease to be malefactors and their wrongful actions cease to be evil. Instead people are labeled as sick and they are no longer responsible for what they do because they are sick. This has the added effect of making the criminal "a victim" of their own sickness and thus an object of pity. I was astounded, for instance, that people treated Andrea Yates as the victim, and seemed to forget that the actual victims were the 5 children she murdered. In the end they were almost entirely forgotten, pushed under the carpet, even by their father.
The second problem which flows from the first is a loss of the concepts of justice and punishment. If Andrea's problem is not that she is an evildoer who committed five premeditated murders, but a "sick person" who is not responsible for her actions, then she needs therapy to help her "get better" and not punishment. This eliminates one of the central pillars of law - the concept of retribution or consequences. We punish our kids in part to let them know that there will be a reckoning for evil. We should do this, not as revenge but to teach vital concepts like the difference between right and wrong, the importance of justice, and the critical idea of responsibility. Instead we have moved our response to wrongdoing from the arena of objective retributive justice to the arena of compassionate health care.
It's difficult to know how we can deal with this paradigm shift as individuals, but one of the the simple ways we might be able to positively influence people is by speaking of the actions of people like Andrea Yates or even the Jihadis who barbarically tortured those two American servicemen to death as evil rather than "sick". We can also point out the simple fact that her five victims ultimately did not receive justice at the hands of criminal law system, neither did Yates receive the punishment she had earned. What we saw was a fundamental act of injustice that served neither the victims nor society.
- SEAGOON
BTW - LePaul good to hear from you too, its good to be back.
