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syncope at 12:30pm on 16/02/2008
syncope at 12:30pm on 16/02/2008This comment thread to this blog post about a murdered teen in California I think sums up where Americans so often go wrong with concepts of “law and order” and justice with regards to violent crime.
The inclination to retribution rather than actual justice is very strong in American society, and I think that’s a vestige of the eye for an eye, old fashioned biblical ideals that we are all inheritors of if we want to be or not. For some reason, we are very hesitant to move on to a new model or even really debate the fact that our legal system is anything but a Justice System. How is charging a 14 yr old as an adult justice for anyone involved?
Issues of vengeance need to be separated from the idea of the common good. The common good inclines toward negotiating a way to deal with youthful offenders in a way where they and others who might commit crimes in the future can be educated as to why their crimes are wrong—not locked away with adults to be abused for crimes they may or may not even comprehend the consequences for.
It strikes me as very dissonant that people who go to great lengths to coddle their own children, to infantilize them and claim that a 14 yr old is not old enough for sex or alcohol or operating a motor vehicle are very often the same people who want to toss those children into adult prisons to be raped and beaten and terrorized. Then they turn around and use religious principles to justify that. Is incarcerating children truly the logical outgrowth of Christian theology? I suppose if you approach it from a historical perspective, so-called Christian societies have always done so, but that only means the hypocrisy is long-standing.
Do we really in this day and age want to take the old UK system where children were tried and sentenced in the same manner as adults as a model for our current behavior? The people who sigh and say “bless their hearts” over children in workhouses and children transported to penal colonies need to look in their own backyard and realize that in most states, our own treatment of youth violators is hardly better.
I know that it’s very difficult to separate the emotional outrage over the death of an innocent victim from the system, but if we don’t even *try* that makes us all somewhat complicit in the crumbling façade of our legal system. Murder is indefensible, but we as a collective We The People murder people for their crimes—it’s just that we don’t personally pull the trigger. I’m not even directly talking about capital punishment (for once) but rather the prison system where we lock people away to brutalize each other to the point of death. One (like is claimed in the thread I linked to above) that ultimately a person has to be responsible for one’s own actions, but I tend to think that claim is lobbed to erase the harder truths about civic responsibility and Americans distaste for admitting to collective responsibility. It’s a rhetorical tool to remind us of the triumph of individualism—and that moribund adherence to individualism as the ultimate moral value is what makes real change in America so very difficult.
The inclination to retribution rather than actual justice is very strong in American society, and I think that’s a vestige of the eye for an eye, old fashioned biblical ideals that we are all inheritors of if we want to be or not. For some reason, we are very hesitant to move on to a new model or even really debate the fact that our legal system is anything but a Justice System. How is charging a 14 yr old as an adult justice for anyone involved?
Issues of vengeance need to be separated from the idea of the common good. The common good inclines toward negotiating a way to deal with youthful offenders in a way where they and others who might commit crimes in the future can be educated as to why their crimes are wrong—not locked away with adults to be abused for crimes they may or may not even comprehend the consequences for.
It strikes me as very dissonant that people who go to great lengths to coddle their own children, to infantilize them and claim that a 14 yr old is not old enough for sex or alcohol or operating a motor vehicle are very often the same people who want to toss those children into adult prisons to be raped and beaten and terrorized. Then they turn around and use religious principles to justify that. Is incarcerating children truly the logical outgrowth of Christian theology? I suppose if you approach it from a historical perspective, so-called Christian societies have always done so, but that only means the hypocrisy is long-standing.
Do we really in this day and age want to take the old UK system where children were tried and sentenced in the same manner as adults as a model for our current behavior? The people who sigh and say “bless their hearts” over children in workhouses and children transported to penal colonies need to look in their own backyard and realize that in most states, our own treatment of youth violators is hardly better.
I know that it’s very difficult to separate the emotional outrage over the death of an innocent victim from the system, but if we don’t even *try* that makes us all somewhat complicit in the crumbling façade of our legal system. Murder is indefensible, but we as a collective We The People murder people for their crimes—it’s just that we don’t personally pull the trigger. I’m not even directly talking about capital punishment (for once) but rather the prison system where we lock people away to brutalize each other to the point of death. One (like is claimed in the thread I linked to above) that ultimately a person has to be responsible for one’s own actions, but I tend to think that claim is lobbed to erase the harder truths about civic responsibility and Americans distaste for admitting to collective responsibility. It’s a rhetorical tool to remind us of the triumph of individualism—and that moribund adherence to individualism as the ultimate moral value is what makes real change in America so very difficult.
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