Comments on: More Moral Repugnancy

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:15:01 +0000

One of the most disturbing things about this issue is the message that has been sent to the victim. She was repeatedly raped over a period of four years, and her life will never be the same. What about our responsibility to her? Judge Cushman told her that her suffering is not worth alleviating with justice, and it is almost as if she was raped yet again. To add to Lewis's point (thanks for that Micah) about how punishment treats the one punished like a man who could have chosen otherwise, it also treats the victim like a human who should have been treated otherwise

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 22:41:54 +0000

Interesting material from Lewis, and it makes sense.
I agree that incarceration-producing-criminals is not relevant to the Tookie case. And I also realize that some people take the Durkheim perspective the opposite direction– they say that because punishment is performative for the good people” in society, we should do away with it, and because incarceration produces more thoroughly-criminal criminals, we should make jail and prison nicer or do away with them in favor of therapy.
I don't see it that way.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 17:18:21 +0000

I think that's a good point as far as it goes, but it doesn't do much to the sort of cases discussed here, namely the Williams case and the child molester case. I'm not too concerned that either Tookie or the child molester will become more efficient criminals in prison. And child molesters almost by definition cannot be rehabilitated.
I think Durkheim is onto something, though. While death penalty abolitionists won't find this persuasive, I think it's hard to take seriously a society that does not punish aberrant behavior, and severely punish severely aberrant acts.
Another tidbit could be considered from Lewis, and others, that to punish actually treats the offender with respect because it deals with them as a moral being. They had the moral agency and the dignity to have acted otherwise, and did not. Rehabilitating them treats them as if their crime is a sign of sickness. The patient is a subject to be tinkered with and released on the say-so of experts. Punishing a man for a crime treats him like a man who could have done otherwise, and perhaps one day will choose to do so. (mostly borrowed from Lewis's Humanitarian Theory of Punishment).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 12:19:33 +0000

Durhkheim writes that a society punishes as a way of re-affirming to itself that which is wrong, evil, repugnant. Punishment is a ritual performed primarily for the benefit of the “good people” in society. The worse the crime in the eyes of the society, the worse punishment that must be performed for the benefit of “the good people”.
It's an interesting theory. I don't know if Durkheim is correct, or maybe he's partially correct– one factor among others in why a society punishes.
I'm not sure what the latest data on rehabilitation reveal, but for a long time rehabilitation has been a somewhat uncommon result of our criminal justice system. In fact, the learning that does take place in our system is the opposite- jail (less than a year) and prison (more than a year) are Ivy League caliber in training inmates to become more thoroughly criminal. In GENERAL (not always), those who are incarcerated even for relatively minor offenses become trained criminals for life.