CRIME, PUNISHMENT, AND JUST-U.S. (Part 1 of 2)

How ironic!

While preparing to celebrate Independence Day, America owns the world’s highest prison rate (2.12 million incarcerated with 21% of them unsentenced), has “permanently” striped 5 million citizens of their voting rights.

This  created private/for profit prison opportunities, offers select companies’ contracts for inmate daily essentials (e.g. toothpaste, underwear, cloths, shoes, cheap labor), and even manipulates both the census count and its fund allocations (N.Y.C. inmates are counted residents of the particular town the prison is in).

But, with a 500% crime increase over 40 years, incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety. “The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense for cunning, and the mastery of achieving the unmet desire (Nietzsche); therefore, punishment can tame/break a man, but does not make him better (hearted).” So “Laws and institutions are like clocks that must be occasionally cleaned, rewound, and reset to fit true time (Beecher)” and the nature of a crime.

Emerson hints “crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is the fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower that conceals the pleasure, or urgency, of the crime.” Gibran adds “the murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder nor the robbed not blameless in being robbed. 

The righteous are not innocent of the deeds of the wicked and the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon … to then speak of he who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger and an intruder upon your world.” Right? Wrong! “The weak and the wicked cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.”

And though “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, bad people will find a way around the laws (Plato).” Point! “Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all (Aristotle).” But “any punishment that does not correct but merely rouses rebellion in whoever has to endure it is a greater wrong making those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.”

So, let us put it all into perspective and move on to a conclusion in next month’s issue.