Crime and Punishment*
It is a grim fact that, although black males aged 14-24 constitute but one percent of the population, they make up 17 percent of the homicide victims and 30 percent of the homicide offenders. The devaluation of the mind—man’s tool of survival—is the reason that so many young males from welfare families do not survive. This war on the mind is the most evil of all the welfare state’s legacies. When the mind is viewed as unnecessary for survival, it is scornfully rejected. The rise of brutality and criminal violence is then a certainty.
Researchers June O’Neill and Anne Hill found that growing up in a single-parent family in a neighborhood with numerous such families on welfare triples a young man’s probability of committing criminal actions. The message implicit in paternalism is that human beings do not require the mind as a means of survival. Because many individuals get the government’s message and repudiate their rational faculties, tragic results follow.
Government reaction to social misbehavior generally results in ineffective programs implemented at great expense to the taxpayers. Since it is the politicians' reasoning that their constituents will pay for what is needed, cost-efficiency is not high on their priority list. Their solution is to pass legislation allocating public funds for a federal project named for the cause in the hope that they will receive credit for it at the next election. Typically they will appoint a welfare specialist to head the program, which usually means an agenda based on the philosophy that irresponsibility and antisocial behavior are symptoms of "mental sickness"—a disease that has no known medical or physiological cause. The liberals who preach this theory tend to be intellectual profligates who lobby for sweeping changes in what they like to call our "repressive society". Ever ready to turn such theories into practice are a host of self-styled reformers who would treat the criminal and homicidal, appease the violent and incorrigible, and "liberate" the downtrodden and deranged members of society.
In the minds of the early modern Germans honor was part of a social capital. It was, so to say, one’s passport to the community. Each individual inherited a certain amount of honor, depending on one's social class, wealth and family reputation. This was a completely natural order in a world with a strict hierarchy created by God. However, a man could also lose his honor, or a part of it, if he committed a crime or engaged in an unfortunate marriage. The latter was quite certain, if he married to a lower class or to a family with a bad reputation. In that case shame would take the place of the lost honor. So, when honor decreased, shame increased.
Without honor there could not be any normal participation in the everyday life. Shame was also contagious. That is why one could not touch the executioner, not even sit in the same table in the tavern. A special law protected craftsmen building the gallows, so the shame of the gallows could not contaminate them. When gallows were built every carpenter in the town had to help in the process. The more carpenters the less shame on each of them. Indeed, a crime committed by one person caused shame on the whole community. Therefore punishment was important not only in the sense of re-compensating the crime but also in repairing the damage done to the honor of the community. Crime and punishment had to be equal so that they could neutralize each other. The idea was not, however, to improve the criminal and make him a better person, who could take part in the normal life of the society after he had expiated his crime. It was more to make a warning example of him. The punishments were both deterrent and repayment.
No industrial democracy has been as successful as Japan in dealing with crime. Over the past four decades, Japan has reduced crime substantially in all categories except traffic-related offenses. Japanese authorities have learned from experience that offender correction and restoration to the community are essential elements of an approach that has proven to be effective in correcting socially deviant behavior. From the initial police interrogation to the final judicial hearing for sentencing, the vast majority of those accused of criminal offenses confess, display repentance, negotiate for their victims' forgiveness, and submit to the mercy of the authorities. In return they are treated with extraordinary leniency; they gain at least the prospect of absolution by having their case dropped from the formal process altogether.
The statistics are compelling. The police are estimated not to report up to 40 percent of all apprehended offenders, and prosecutors suspend prosecution of possible convicts in nearly a third of the reported cases. Despite conviction rates that hover at 99.5 percent, judges consistently suspend sentences in nearly 60 percent of adjudicated cases; only a small fraction of all offenders ever see the inside of a jail or prison.
To justify such leniency, Japanese law enforcement officials must be satisfied that the offender and community are working together to compensate the victim and restore peace. The offender's acknowledgment of guilt, expression of remorse, and willingness to compensate any victims are not enough. The family and the community must also come forward and accept responsibility to ensure that steps will be taken to prevent future misconduct and provide some means of control. In addition, it has become standard practice in Japan for offenders to seek a letter of forgiveness from the victim. A formal letter to the police, the prosecutors, or the judge states that the victim has been adequately compensated and has pardoned the offender. The letter may include a request that the authorities not report, prosecute, or punish the offender. Japanese law enforcement officials consider such letters evidence of victim compensation and an essential element in their decision about whether to proceed with the case or, for judges, suspend the sentence.
The Japanese have not abandoned incarceration or capital punishment as a means to incapacitate or to deter deviancy. They recognize that some offenders cannot be corrected through confession, remorse, and pardon. What the Japanese experience shows, however, is that for many offenders, pardon is a corrective response and in combination with other preventative and re-integrative community efforts, victim-negotiated restitution and forgiveness are significant factors in crime control. And the process works. The most recent studies of recidivism in Japan confirm previous research in showing that the more lenient the treatment of offenders by the authorities, the less likely the offender is to commit another offense within three years.
The community also plays a role in this assessment. In his book, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, John Braithwaite emphasizes the role of community disapproval—which he labels "shaming"—as the primary mechanism of social control and crime prevention in communitarian societies. He distinguishes, however, "reintegrative" disapproval from various forms of "stigmatizing shaming" in arguing that effective crime control requires reintegration of the offender into the community. Says Braithwaite: "A critical feature of communitarian societies is that they are both more capable of potent shaming which amounts to stigmatization and less willing to cast out their deviants."
Like other social morés, the use of shame as a deterrent to offensive behavior has lost its value in Western Society. Shaming is discouraged as "politically incorrect" in our egalitarian culture, and the honor that it once upheld is no longer considered the virtue that it once was. If the process of shaming an offender were to be applied today, it would first have to be demonstrated to have a rehabilitative effect, and then determined whether the measure has any legitimate purpose other than to impose punishment. Inasmuch as such an analysis would be both time-consuming and tedious in our courts of law, shaming is unlikely to see a revival in contemporary society and we are left with only two alternatives: prison or rehabilitation.
The purpose of imprisonment is mainly containment of offenders, their treatment and re-training. However, prison authorities have concluded that training and treatment are no longer important priorities and achievable aims. These days imprisonment is seen more as the protection it offers to society, rather than as an environment which can change the individual's criminal lifestyle. Numerous studies have been conducted to determine why prisons are ineffective in changing behavior and which methods appear to be more effective in deterring further criminal behavior. There are many reasons why prisons are largely ineffective in preventing recidivism, two of the main ones being that 95 percent of those who commit crimes are not convicted, and those who are punished are sentenced months if not years after they have committed the crime.
Not surprisingly, overwhelming evidence demonstrates that keeping criminals locked up reduces crime. British academic Donald E. Lewis's comprehensive 1986 examination of studies on the correlation between sentence length and crime rates (published in the British Journal of Criminology) concludes that doubling the length of the sentence for a crime will cut the likelihood that criminals will commit that crime almost 50 percent. While nearly every other developed country has too few local police agencies, the United States has too many: More law enforcement agencies patrol Washington, D.C., with a population of 572,000, than all of the United Kingdom (population 59.6 million). And the crime picture isn't entirely copesthetic: although murder rates have fallen sharply in the United States even as they rise elsewhere, ours still remains second only to South Africa's among wealthy nations.
Americans kill each other at high rates in their homes and streets, and most murder victims have some connection to the drug trade or other organized crime. Although keeping thugs locked up helps society, prison conditions remain abysmal: Black and white supremacist gangs run many correctional facilities, guards receive too little training, and male inmates face a constant threat of rape. Efforts to reintegrate prisoners into mainstream society, likewise, border on negligent. Per-inmate funding for rehabilitation has fallen steadily even as more people are sentenced to imprisonment.
Since 1980, thanks primarily to the so-called "war on drugs," the prison population in the United States has quadrupled. Today, there are more than 2 million people in jails or prisons and another 3.6 million on parole. In the states of California and Texas alone, there are more people behind bars than in all of western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined. Alvin J. Bronstein, former Executive Director of the National Prison Project, cites a recent British study estimating that there are 8 million people incarcerated worldwide. "You do the math. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States incarcerates nearly 25 percent of the world's prison population."
Approximately 87 percent of the U.S. prison population are incarcerated for non-violent offenses such as drug possession, theft, forgery, vandalism, burglary, disorderly conduct and alcohol-related offenses such as DUI. Of the 13 percent incarcerated for violent offenses, only 3 percent of these cases involved injury or death to others. Overall, the crime rate has been dropping and violent crime is at a 25-year low.
Most efforts at reducing crime have been directed towards incarceration, relying on its deterrent and incapacitative effects. The number of Americans in local jail or state or federal prison grew from just over 500,000 in 1980 to slightly under 2,000,000 in 2001. In the United States alone, approximately $100 billion is spent on the criminal justice system each year. Incarceration costs an average of $25,000 per person annually and each prison cell costs $75,000 to $100,000 to build. Since incarceration does nothing to address the fundamental causes of crime or to rehabilitate people, a person who has served a five-year sentence for drug possession might be a greater threat to the community after having experienced life in prison.
In 2002 the British journal The Economist was able to sum up the general situation in the USA as follows: "Rehabilitation has become something of a dirty word in American debates about crime. …To begin with, some rehabilitation projects—particularly drug treatment—seem to work. Yet America has slashed money for such schemes, often to pay for new prisons. One advantage of leaving some degree of discretion over sentencing to parole boards was that it obliged prisoners to prove that they were ready for outside life. This incentive has now gone. Outside prison, the aftercare system is even weaker. Many ex-cons are simply presented with a one-way bus ticket. The number of prisoners for each parole officer has risen by 50%".
Yet, despite these seeming injustices, recidivism rates have not changed noticeably over the years. A study of prisoners released in 1983 found that 62 percent of them had re-offended within three years. A similar study of prisoners released in 1994 found the number up slightly at 67 percent, but easily within the bounds of random variation. Things are not exactly going to the dogs in terms of prisoners becoming more savage by their experiences inside, although as there are far more prisoners now than there were previously, there will therefore be that many more re-offenses.
In 1996, only 6 percent of state prison budgets were allocated to support rehabilitative prison programs—i.e., vocational, educational and treatment programs—while 94 percent of prison budgets were spent on staffing, new prison construction, and on maintaining and housing prisoners. When one considers that 65 percent of all prisoners re-entering the community will be re-arrested within three years, it becomes clear that the prison system would rather warehouse prisoners than make an honest effort to rehabilitate them.
In a report he prepared for the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, D.C., Iain Murray, a British Director of Research, concluded:
Successful rehabilitation exercises recognize the whole of the offender’s set of needs, and proceed to address them as best they can. The individual is not sacrificed to a big idea, and so the individual emerges better equipped to make necessary choices. It is worth mentioning here that there is one "big idea" that does seem to have had noticeable effect in prisons. Faith
For those who have committed violent crimes and need to be incarcerated, every effort should be made to treat, counsel, and rehabilitate them. No matter what they have done, they should be treated humanely, with access to health care, visitation, exercise, schooling, work schedules, and reading materials. Warehousing inmates, or using them as a cheap labor pool for private corporations, is wasteful spending and bad public policy. On the other hand, convicted criminals have violated their rights as free citizens and, for the period of their incarceration, should be denied voting privileges, credit card accounts, or opportunities to gain wealth or celebrity status by publishing their biographies for the trade market. The primary objective should be restitution for crimes committed, and income from the prisoner's labor should be deducted to pay for the medical or burial expenses of the victims, including property loss or damage, court costs, and any wage losses due to psychological trauma.
In light of the frequently cyclic nature of sexual offenses, the question whether the perpetrator should be forever publicly labeled as a sex offender or pedophile requires a study of the impact such labeling has on the rehabilitation of the offender. It should also be determined whether public notices have any rehabilitative effect or, like jailing, are merely a continued attempt at protection by constraint. Public shaming via posted notices of adult sexual offenders may still be an effective deterrent in Western society, but psychological or psychiatric intervention is always advised to address the causal makeup of the offender, and remote monitoring of released offenders is critical for public protection. Where the offender is a juvenile, personal rehabilitation has been shown to be a more effective treatment than public shaming.
As states expand prison rehabilitative programs to reduce the prison population, they should focus on keeping people out of prison in the first place. Communities can help reduce the jail population by seeking alternative sanctions, rather than jail sentences, for individuals who commit non
-violent crimes. For example, a person convicted of vandalism might be sentenced to clean city sidewalks and shovel snow for three months to pay the community back; a person convicted of burglary might be sentenced to a construction crew, perhaps building or refurbishing homes in an urban project.Murder eventually revokes the full array of citizenship rights. Some defend the murderer with the claim that he/she, like anyone else, has certain rights, including the right to life, which can never be taken away. This is true, prior to conviction. In this country where individual freedom is guaranteed under the law, we assume a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Therefore, the accused has the same rights in the legal system as anyone else: i.e., the right to know the crime for which he is being charged, the right to a speedy and public trial, the right to counsel, the right to face his accusers, the right to trial before a jury of his peers, the right against forced self-incrimination, the right not to be tried twice for the same capital crime (if declared innocent the first time around), and the right to appeal.
The legitimate role of government involves the protection of life, liberty and property. Just as it is government's constitutional responsibility to raise an armed force and rain down deadly force upon a bloodthirsty invading army, so also the government is duty-bound to inflict death upon the man who chooses to slaughter fellow citizens in their own backyards. Few, if any, object to the use of deadly force against an invading army. Yet those invading soldiers, ordered to fight and likely whipped up by propaganda to go into battle, are far less deserving of death than the assailant who has been proven guilty and convicted in a court of law, by a jury of his peers, of shedding the innocent blood of his neighbor—and this of his own free will. By humanistic standards the taking of life is always immoral, whether in defense of the nation or for protection of its citizens. At the same time, America is a nation founded on laws. If we lack the moral fortitude to defend our national sovereignty, we shall ultimately lose it. Likewise, if human life is our most precious asset, we must set the example of exacting the maximum penalty of those who would wantonly destroy it.
Moralistically and metaphysically I am opposed to capital punishment. But the morality of civilized nations is maintained by law; and it is the prevailing law of our free nation that, after all this has taken place and the jury proclaims guilt and the convicted criminal has exhausted all appeals, he forfeits his rights as an American citizen. He has freely chosen to take the life of a fellow citizen; he must not now be free to avoid the consequences of his heinous choice. If the sentence is death, his fate is then sealed, his right to life terminated. The death penalty is not, as social activist lawyer Clarence Darrow once claimed, "an act of revenge"; it is an act of justice.
--HP
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*Substantial portions of this essay were adapted from "Shame as a Means of Punishment" by Satu Lidman, "Prisons need to focus on rehabilitating inmates, not on warehousing them" by Jamie York, "A Spiral of Success: Community support is key to restorative justice in Japan" by John O. Haley, and an article by NewsMax editor Steve Farrell entitled "A Conservative Case for Capital Punishment".