Crime and Punishment

Dostoyevsky’s Milieu



A few weeks ago a couple of shoplifters in Alabama were forced to carry out their sentences of wearing sandwich-board signs for four hours on successive Saturdays outside of the store they tried to steal from bearing the message ‘I Am A Thief’. Some onlookers were heard to say that this punishment was ‘cruel’. Now, silly me, but one of the thieves was a 46-year-old woman who carried out the sentence to avoid a prison stint. Most notably, though, she was 46 years old!!! What the hell did she think should happen, and what of that bystander declaring the punishment cruel? One would think that by the age of 46 most reasonable people would have figured out that stealing is wrong and that doing so will result in what we in the thinking sector of the world like to call consequences. And, on the latter, what exactly should punishment be?

These days kids, it seems that the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime, does it? I’ve seen stories on news programs that would make your skin crawl and more often than not, the culprit lives his or her days out in a maximum security prison camp, with three squares a day and while either earning their degree or signing a lucrative book deal with some shyster trying to capitalize on the deaths of innocents.

I’ve got my own take, go figure, on just how fitting a punishment should be. First, I suppose, we should clarify the meanings of both crime and punishment. According to Wikipedia, a crime is an act that violates a political, religious, or moral command considered important in protecting the interests of the State or the welfare of its citizens or subjects. Punishment is the practice of imposing something unpleasant or aversive on a person or animal in response to an unwanted or disobedient behavior.

So if we follow the accepted definition of punishment, its supposed to be unpleasant and since some of these bastards barely rise far enough above the food chain in many instances to qualify as a person I think it should be equitable to the amount of suffering imposed on their victims. An example of this would be that if some piece of shit rapes and desecrates a young woman or worse a child, I’m thinking that the punishment would involve razor blades, salt and this scumbag’s penis, be creative.

So while We are painting ourselves into the proverbial corner with our humanity and civilized behavior. Punishment should not be as civilized as, more often than not, the crime for which the punishment is designed. And unfortunately the criminals we’re dealing with these days don’t follow any of the rules either of civility or of humanity.

We’ve created exuses for their behavior with the endless psychobabble spewed forth from the mouths of well-meaning psychiatrists and trying too hard to understand that for which there is no explanation. If some nutsack goes into a house and kills everyone that’s there, we give them an out with ‘The abuse this person suffered in their childhood has facilitated a behavior that is in direct contrast with what is considered acceptable to general societal norms’. We then send them to a psychiatric ward where they are given optimal care and then released when they are found to be ‘cured’ only to be surprised and appalled when they repeat the same offense for which they were originally incarcerated. Must have slipped back into lunacy.

I hearken back to the days of posses and frontier justice, well, maybe not that far back. Somewhere there is a happy medium between what should be considered equitable and what should be considered cruel and unusual, cruel anyway. The judge that sentenced shoplifters to what can readily be called unusual but that could surely be considered equitable.

Earlier on I alluded to stories that would make your skin crawl; one such story goes as such:

A man kidnapped a young girl and held her in a remote location for several days, repeatedly raping her and forcing her to perform certain acts on him. When he had his fill, he killed her with his bare hands, drenched her in gasoline and set her demeaned and lifeless corpse on fire in a banal attempt to conceal the evidence. As I recall, the man was eventually captured and was given the death penalty. Death, was too civilized a punishment.

With a little imagination and a little less civility, I’m pretty sure I could have come up with something a bit more fitting.