It’s not a question of why the death penalty is absent from western law, but why so many in the U.S. want it. Again, we have to go back to the perverse, almost schizophrenic, American attitude about sex. Our deeply puritanical and emotional reaction to it exhalts the sex act (and, strangely enough, women) more than any other society; at the same time, we are deeply ashamed of our fascination and even preoccupation with sex. Americans have never, as a society, been nearly as open about sex as Europeans. Why is workplace sexual harrassment a problem in the U.S. but not in France, Italy or Germany? (At least, according to the French, German and Italian colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, it isn’t – they think the whole concept of sexual harrassment is silly.) There are dozens of reasons, but primary among them is the American attitude about sex.
Are there more rapes per thousand people in the U.S. than in Europe? I dunno, but if so, I’d sure take a hard look at the prevailing oppressive attitudes. And if not, then why do Americans clamor so for the killing of rapists? I blame a bad case of arrested societal development.
That sort of thing bothers me, too. Like when something happens to a high school or college student, if they were an honor student, that always gets mentioned somewhere in articles about it. Crimes against less likeable, intelligent, or “good” people aren’t somehow more heinous than other crimes.
Not to mention if the perpetrator is black, or “scary looking”, or doesn’t manage to project the proper demeanor in the courtroom.
It seems after 100-plus years of failure, we would have figured out the “get tough on crime with harsher sentences” concept has massively failed. But the American people love it. A politician can almost instantly score points by taking a hard-line stance on the Moral Panic of the day. Crack had its turn, street gangs had theirs, and now it’s sex offenders. The first step in successful politics is to make the people afraid of something, then suggest you have the solution to it. Sexual offenses are a serious problem, but legislation has done nothing but make things worse, in my not-so-humble opinion.
I’ll give you an example of a problem my husband recently had. A sex offender had served his sentence and was being released. He was put on the offender registry and now had to find a place to live. Therein lay the problem. Current law said he could not live anywhere within 1000 feet of a school, preschool, daycare, playground, etc. It’s hard to find a place in a city which isn’t. Hubby was concerned, because the inmate was getting frustrated-- these are the kind of things which push an offender to go “underground” and flout the registry.
Politicians love to pound the podium and roar that they’re tough on crime, but then they turn around and cut the budgets of correctional facilites. (The prison at which my husband works currently has inmates sleeping on cots in hallways for lack of anywhere else to put them.) The registry enforcement and parole authority are not immune from these cuts, either.
Well, if you were to approach criminal law from a strictly retributive POV, you would dish out punishment based upon the effects of an assault (physical, economic, and psychological), rather than the nature of an assault (sexual or nonsexual).
But we don’t. We also consider the (for want of a better term) outrage the nature of the crime engenders in us, as a society. We punish a cat burgler who steals $5000 bucks more than an embezzler of the same amount, because we are outraged at the idea of the violation of one’s home.
The real question is, is it right for us to be more outraged by a rape than by an assault that causes the same injury? I personally feel more outraged by the concept of rape, but I’m not sure that that outrage is based in logic.
I think it’s reasonable to do that, but we have to be careful. People aren’t always more outraged by a crime for a good reason. You could probably still find some white people who’d be more outraged at a white woman being raped by a black man than by a black woman being raped by a black man. Or some people would be more outraged by a “good kid” being raped than by, say, a prostitute being raped. Or might think being assaulted by a “scary looking” person was worse than being assaulted by a non-scary-looking person (as Lissa points out). Those distinctions, as far as I am concerned, are just plain wrong to make.
The “cat burglar” example isn’t a great one- the cat burglar has committed at least one more crime than the embezzler, namely, breaking and entering (or at least trespassing, even if he/she came in through an unlocked door). Sexual assault is a decent example, though- should we let our emotional reaction to that make it a worse crime than a nonsexual assault resulting in the same injuries? I think we should because rape often has a much stronger emotional effect on the victim. But we have to be very careful- you can make that same argument and say that raping a virgin honor student is worse than raping a prostitute, which is wrong.
Here’s another example of unbalanced sentencing: In most states, the penalty for posession or sale of crack cocaine is much harsher than that which a person would get for having or selling powdered cocaine, though the two are vitually identical substances.
Crack was the boogeyman of the late eighties and early nineties, and because of increased media attention and thus a Moral Panic, politicians got “tough on crime.” Of course, it helped that the substance was associated with poor, urban blacks. (Whereas powdered cocaine is a “yuppie” drug.)
Hear, hear! Disciplining a child who steals cookies from the cookie jar may be as simple as slapping his hands and scolding him – it’s a teaching process. A rapist isn’t (usually) a child, and the victim’s body isn’t a cookie jar, and dealing with rape isn’t a teaching process. Criminals are people who didn’t learn the lessons the rest of us did as children. You can’t teach them by punishing them, you only make them more determined to get even, or to get what they illogically view as rightfully theirs.
This is exactly why sex offender registries, in an enlightened society, make no sense. For one thing, they put an onerous burden on the “rehabilitated” offender. Besides, if he’s rehabilitated by prison, there’s no need to be afraid of him. If there’s a reason to fear him, then he’s not rehabilitated and the prison system has failed.
Don’t tell me – your husband works for the Colorado Department of Corrections, which gets three times the funding of the K-12 education system and *still * can’t accommodate the General Assembly’s mandated sentencing, can’t afford adequate training, and hasn’t given its corrections officers a pay raise in three years!
No, we’re not in Colorado, but we face the same problems. Our officers haven’t gotten pay raises in three years, either, nor can they afford to fill all of the administrative positions that are vacant because people can’t take the stress of the enormous workload.
Add to this that every now and then the guys appointed by the governor in the central office get a Bright Idea. Last time, they came to Hubby with it (he was in charge of programming at the time.) “We evision a system for offenders to be sorted into categories according to what sort of programs they need, and then have some kind of system to make sure that they get the programs. We’ll grade you in six months to see how you’ve done.”
With no other guidance than that (and I’m not exaggerating) Hubby had to design a system to determine what sort of things inmates needed (i.e, anger management, job skills, etc.) and then find programs designed for prisons, train his staff to deliver them, and design a system to check to see that the inmates were recieving them. I was astounded he managed to pull it off on top of his already-staggering duties. It required nearly super-human effort. (His was the only prison in the state that managed to do it, so they started sending him around to other prisons to show them how.)
Seeing these fine results, they then added a Bright Idea that inmates should meet with their program coordinator twice a month to discuss their progress. Hubby tried to tell them that it was literally impossible. (Each meeting was supposed to be five minutes long. The math showed plainly that X-number of coordinators meeting five minutes with x-number of inmates twice a month would require each coordinator to work quadruple overtime.) They insisted he had to find a way, oh, and without hiring anyone else or paying any overtime.
This is why sex offender treatment programs, as they now are, can never be effective. They are generally run by a undertrained, harried employee who’s cramming in the session between other reams of work. They give the inmates workbooks, and the employee reads from a “teacher’s guide.”
It could be effective, if it was done by trained professionals in an intensive one-on-one therapy-style setting, but this would be monstrously expensive, and the public doesn’t want to pay for it.
If there are studies that demonstrate that, on average, a sexual assault causes greater physical/economic/psychological injury than the equivalent nonsexual assault, then there is no problem - it is perfectly acceptable for the law to make generalities, rather than requiring us to make the far greater expenditure of effort and money to make an individualized assessment in each case. (BTW, this eliminates the prostitute/honor student problem; when the law generalizes, it treats both situations equally.)
But I don’t know if any such studies exist and, more to the point, no one cared about the comparison when the laws were passed imposing harsher penalities on rape than on assault.
Well, it’s another crime because we have passed laws making it two separate crimes. If we were only to look to the damage caused by the crime, the cat burglar and embezzler would be treated the same, regardless of what steps were necessary to commit the crime.
Just to be pendantic, embezzlement most certainly can include additional crimes, such as fraud, forgery, etc.
SCOTUS ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute someone for the rape of an adult woman (presumbly the same would apply for an adult man). Whether its constitutional to execute someone for raping a child is unclear. Also doesn’t the UCMJ list death a a punishment for rape?
I know it wasn’t your intention to justify civilian executions by comparing civilian and military law, but I still think it’s worth pointing out the differences. For example, in the civilian world, one can walk off his or her job without notice and suffer fairly minor consequences. If one did so in the military, it’s labeled “desertion” and can definitely be a capital offense.
Militaries need to be controlled, since throughout history they’ve been one of the greater sources of misery for those whom they target. Raping and looting are two staples of the “barbarian conqueror,” and I would argue that it’s necessary to have very harsh punishments if one wants to curtail the excesses of the armed forces.
Unfortunatally rape is rather meaningless now as it has been so diluted as to range as forceful penetration at gunpoint to having regrets a few weeks after, to haivng consentual sex with someone one day younger then you.