I was reading the newspaper today, during a quick little break and decided to delve into the comments for a few moments. Mostly because the teaser is so damned intriguing. The article is about three men who were shot in Seattle. The long and short of it is that someone shot them, and the victims knew the assailant. The police hadn’t quite found the assailant, but were looking.
Why I looked into the comments, I don’t know. But I found a few gems.
Harsher penalties is the answer. These gangsters are worthless liabilities to society and if they can’t understand what is expected of them then it is our duty to show them what is expected of them. The prisons are a cake walk for these habitual criminals. We have to turn our prisons into work farms and make these criminals regret being sentenced to “hard” time. Make them suffer through complete exhaustion.
and
And I’m supposed to care, why? Glad to hear they weren’t “innocent bystanders.” As long as they keep taking each other out without picking the rest of us off, let ‘em. Better to decrease the worthless population.
The emphasis in the above quotes is mine.
But statements like “worthless liabilities to society”, “prisons are a cake walk”, and “Make them suffer” aren’t exactly enlightened thoughts.
People might say that the persons leaving these comments are merely being hyperbolic – but I’d refute that. We have a myriad of proof that shows that people who are poor, minorities, and/or somehow not in the current mainstream are seen as worth-less. Unfortunately, the gentleman is right – when we stop viewing our neighbors and citizens as assets and truly expecting them to contribute to society as opposed to giving up hope and losing respect for them as humans – people become liabilities to society, liabilities that our strained society cannot afford to pay for.
Companies are laying off people at a breakneck pace – jobs are drying up, markets are shifting and terrified – and I’d say that a large part of the reason is because of our value system. We’ve forgotten how to value people. We’ve forgotten as a society to respect our neighbors.
Sentiments like “make them suffer through hard work” aren’t productive. They don’t do anything to enhance the person, or society. Hard work can be incredibly rewarding. Hard work IS incredibly rewarding. Ensuring that someone, who has already shown proclivities towards violence has a terrible time in prison isn’t going to stop crime. Rather it only “hardens” criminals. Forcing people to act like animals to survive isn’t the answer to eliminating crime. Forcing people to act like human beings is.
Prison is a necessary punishment. I agree that the person(s) responsible for the shooting should if convicted after a fair and impartial trial, should go to prison.
But lets’ actually ensure that the people in prison (yes, people) are productive to society. Let’s make sure that they have the skills, both technical and affective, to succeed in the general population once they are out of prison. Let’s make sure they never want to go back because they view prison as beneath them – not because they are rationally afraid of an irrationally brutal system.
We’ve added year after year to minimum sentences. We’ve added firearms enhancements to criminal penalties, we’ve cut back on the vocational and educational opportunities for incarcerated people for decades, fearful of being soft on crime – and all its’ done has made ex-convicts more desperate and fearful of going back to prison.
That translates directly into police having to deal with more desperate and hopeless people. People who act irrationally and in unexpected ways.
I remember sometime ago when I was working with the Fire Department. We went to a motor vehicle accident and upon arrival found a car, flipped over onto it roof, with bullet holes in random parts of the underside of the car. Shell casings littered the ground.
The people in the car were okay – two women and their three children. The youngest child was about 15 months old.
The bullet holes they reported, came from the man who after hitting them broadside and thinking he had hurt them badly, feared going back to prison – “Fuck that, I’m not going back” he was reported to have said multiple times, as he emptied a clip of bullets into their car.
Yes he should be in prison. But it’s wrong to ignore that fear – that fear that leads to more irrational violence.
They were lucky their car was a late model one with actual steel protecting them from the bullets. But others haven’t been.
Our criminal justice system woefully needs repair. You can’t rehabilitate people when they haven’t been habilitated in the first place. You can’t teach civics lessons in the colliseum with gladiators all around. You can’t learn peace if you constantly fear violence.
The only way we’re going to be able to truly be “tough on crime” is if we can figure out how to instill in inmates the true value of the wasted potential that unfortunately characterizes the lives of most of their lives…
We have to figure out how to value their humanity in order to get them to value others…
Without doing that, we’re doomed to repeating the same mistakes and expecting something different.
Didn’t somebody say that was the definition of insanity?
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