DOES EVIL EXIST? ....... DOES PUNISHMENT WORK?
This month our editorial theme is "Crime and Punishment" - but it's not about the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel per se, but it is about asking ourselves two key questions:
- Does punishment work?
- Does evil exist?
To answer both these questions, we are preparing an interview with Judge Albert Sanguinetti, a very well respected - now retired - criminal judge. We will gain a perspective from his illustrious career presiding over cases of what our society has deemed to be "criminal" behavior, and will hear his thoughts about just these two main questions.
Does Evil Exist?
Wise men, philosophers, thinkers, and even physicists have answered that evil is simply the absence of good just as darkness is the absence of light, or cold is the absence of heat.
What they mean is that goodness, light and heat truly exist in the physical world and that when these things are missing, when we don't take care to always keep these things in our view to help guide our paths, and so when goodness, light and heat are absent, that is when EVIL, darkness and cold become manifest.
Click here for Albert Einstein's answer ...
Does Punishment Work?
In Victor Hugo's magnificent novel Les Miserables (1862) which took him seventeen years to complete (in unabridged form it numbers 1,200 pages) Hugo tells the story of Jean Valjean, a small time crook who is first thrown in prison for stealing some bread to feed his starving family, and thereafter is marked as 'untouchable' - a criminal - and in those days it meant that he would be unable to find honest work for the rest of his life.
Hugo's story illustrates that punishment while able to deter certain types of criminals, cannot deter all. Not all criminals are alike. There are crazy ones who kill because their minds are deeply disturbed. There are sociopaths and criminals driven by greed. And then there are those who resort to crime for less selfish reasons, or because they don't know any better. The truth is, often there are deeper issues of social injustice involved when it comes to criminal behavior, which is what Hugo points out in Les Miserables.
When a man must steal bread to keep his family from starving, this man - by any reasonable measure - cannot be considered a criminal.
And across the pond in England, Charles Dickens had been busy writing novels that were both popular and were also social commentaries so effective at moving their readers that Dickens, like Hugo in France, was able to change public policy on many important issues of the day, these men were able to make clear to an educated thinking public, what it means to do nothing in the face of social injustices.
Hugo's novel also asks the important question, "Does the punishment fit the crime?"
Although there seem to be easy answers to questions like these, and it's easy to take one side or the other, in practice the implementation of any system of governance is always more fraught with ambiguity than at first glance.
If, for example, one believes that punishment deters crime, it makes sense to implement the most severe punishment, as the threat of the severest forms of punishment means that more people will be afraid of the consequences of breaking the law, so a system like 'an eye for an eye', or the Singaporean government's nonnegotiable death penalty for transporting drugs, is clear and firm, and should you choose to break the law, you know the price you will have to pay.
There is even a certain fairness because there won't be a situation where one law breaker is granted special concessions because he is able to afford a better legal defense.
In the final analysis, it all comes back to the questions posed at the start of this editorial:
Do you believe that evil exists, AND do you think that punishment works?
We hope that you'll give these questions some thought, and if interested, please ENTER this month's contest (click here for contest details: http://www.iCUBED.us/node/gallery/981 )
Click here to read "Does Punishment Work?" an Interview with Judge Albert Sanguinetti … by Margaret Chen
|
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
