Why exactly, does the human race have such an infatuation with punishment?
I’m not talking about punishment’s that we mete out in the name of preserving the peace (or inhibiting the violent), such as incarcerating murderers and the like. I’m talking about our will to see people punished, often times very severely, over things that are of trivial importance.
Is there any rationale, other than our religious history and those religions’ ideals of what is right and what is wrong, for passing laws that bring punishment on people for acts that neither breech the peace nor endanger the life, liberty, or property of another?
I’m talking about things where the evil inflicted on the guilty in the name of punishment is a far greater evil than what that person did. Kidnapping is a great evil, I would say that it is a million times more evil than, for example, someone picking up a prostitute, or smoking a joint. Neither one of those actions has any significant effect on me, and while it may defy some moral sensibilities that I still have in me from a religious upbringing, is that really a good enough reason to use government force to kidnap and incarcerate the types of people? Why are we so obsessed with how people live their non-public lives, as if it causes us some sort of injury?
If it is only based in religion, why did we ever come to the conclusion that an almighty God, big enough to create the universe, ever needed human help in meting out whatever punishment he saw fit?
I think any discussion on the points you raise will only be matters of opinion, they don’t seem to lend themselves to scientific research. So here are my opinions.
Many people are unhappy not due to external events but due to their own inner conflicts or shortcomings. These people are not good at fixing (or are afraid of trying to fix) their own issues, so they focus their attention on the behavior of other people. Sometimes they use religion as a framework, sometimes they don’t (there is plenty in the New Testament, for example, that could discourage them from judging other people). In either case they can always find reasons why other people should behave better, and to justify very strict measures to enforce those standards.
So I think it boils down to psychology. When Jesus (I think) asks “why do you focus on the mote in your neighbor’s eye and ignore the beam in your own eye” he is drawing attention to this phenomenon. Unfortunately, he did not really provide useful tools for people to deal with the beams in their own eyes, just the admonition to do it, and shame and guilt if they failed. Because the answer to that “why” is that it is easier, at least in the short term, to ignore your own problems by focusing on other people and their shortcomings.
Roddy
I think a lot of it has to do with black and white thinking.
The reasoning goes as follows:
People who do bad things are bad. It doesn’t matter whether there was a little or a lot of harm, it was a bad thing and only a bad person would do such a thing. We need punishment to deter bad people from doing bad things. The more extreme the punishment that better it is as a deterrent. If someone thinks the punishment is too extreme they just shouldn’t be doing bad things. Only bad people actually suffer the punishment so there is no harm done.
It used to be that there were no police forces, and catching a thief was a matter of luck or mob action, so on the rare occasions they did catch one they made the most of the opportunity and hanged him.
This might have formed a habit of mind that evolved into the attitudes now widespread.
A lot of the resistance to many crimes, and the reason for disproportionate punishment is in many cases, due to ancillary or knock-on effects, not necessarily due to the crime itself, and the desire to eliminate those effects by levying heavy penalties and punishments at the point of consumption, assuming the knock-on/ancillary effects are a big enough deal.
For example, in the case of prostitution, there can be big problems with human trafficking and slavery, and also issues with the spread of STDs. So if you both try and catch the human traffickers and fine the johns heavily, you’re sort of attacking the problem from both sides- lowering demand and cutting off supply.
In the case of marijuana, it’s often not the lone stoner who’s the issue- it’s the network of (often violent) criminal enterprises who sell the weed that are the issue. Same thing here- punishing the stoners is diminishing demand, while going after drug gangs and drug dealers is cutting off the supply.
I think that’s a much more likely reason for a lot of it than simple moralistic crusades.
Hell, catching a thief or other wrongdoer is STILL a matter of luck. And a lot of people would like to do more than just hang the person who steals lunches at work.
Sometimes people disagree about how bad a crime is. There isn’t one master list of “acts that neither breech the peace nor endanger the life, liberty, or property of another.”
For the government the punishment is based on how much profit it cost them. That is why the drug war is number one on their list of things to punish people for, the u s government has the world’s largest covert drug operation.
I think it’s fairly obvious, if you give it some thought. If someone smokes a joint in the privacy of his own home, what does it do to you? Does this action deprive you of the enjoyment of your property? Does this action put you in any danger? Does this action in any way infringe upon your liberties?
Maybe there is not a conclusive list of acts that don’t do those things, but there is a pretty conclusive list of acts that do. I would say that only the things that do should be illegal.
Even smoking tobacco in public doesn’t really rise beyond the level of a nuisance. I’m not against imposing minor fines for annoying behavior, but I don’t know how something that I can’t see, smell, or in any way be affected by even rises to the level of being a nuisance.
One poster mentioned the (often violent) crime that goes along with the drug trade. The question that I think must be asked is this: prior to our government’s prohibiting the sale or possession of marijuana, was any such violent crime associated with it?
Some say it is a harm to society as a whole, as if we have some sort of collective consciousness about us that is even capable of being harmed. But even if I bought into that premise, I fail to see how the whole can be harmed without some part of it being harmed.
Our sensibilities can be offended, but in the case of a guy puffing away on a joint, only if we find out about it! And why do we even care to know in the first place?
Except that if you don’t make the stuff illegal to begin with, there are no “often violent criminal enterprises who sell the weed”, there are just regular companies importing or producing stuff that is sold in regular shops to regular customers. This criminality is the result, not the cause, of the ban.
Well sure, I was just pointing out a lot of the reasons for the heavy punishments, not opining on the validity of the actual actions being punished, or whether I agree with them or not.
I was unaware that the Anti-Smoking Nazis were inflicting “harsh punishments” for violating antismoking laws. Mostly they work as deterrents. We do not have any mini-Guantanamos for unrepentant public smokers.
As to the not “in any way affected by” secondhand smoke, I think you know better than that, but I will not revisit the subject here.
Here’s a timely story for you about the drug trade. Seems some folks in your neck of the woods are being considerably harmed and others are concerned.
Kidnapping IS punished far greater than picking up a prostitute or smoking a joint. Unless someone has a long rap sheet, the prison sentence for the first is infinitely longer than the non-existent prison time for the other two.
As for the evil, when you kidnap someone you are definitely doing evil, whereas with the other two, you might be.
If the marijuana was grown by yourself that’s different than if your purchase is going to fund the Mexican drug war. And if the prostitute is controlled by a pimp, your purchase there is funding slavery. With marijuana, there’s the consideration that if was legal in the US, it wouldn’t fund the Mexican drug war. So there are a lot of reasons why the greater penalty for kidnapping does exist and is reasonable.
A better question might be why we put people in prison who are unlikely to do it again. If the kidnapper is paralyzed by a police bullet during the shootout he was captured in, there’s far less reason to punish that guy than someone who is funding the trafficking of women on a continuing basis. There also are a lot of wasteful white collar incarcerations. Take those Illinois politicians they keep on throwing in prison. It would be just as effective (or ineffective) to bar them from office for life, and cheaper.
In any legal system, there are borderline cases. The problem in the US isn’t that we fill our prisons with violators of borderline offenses such as pot smoking and funding prostitution. We don’t. The problem, as I see, is that we have the world’s highest incarceration rate due to over-long prison sentences for lots of other offenses.
I’m afraid that at the most basic level human beings like to feel morally superior, like the feeling of righteous indignation, and are unhappy when someone else crosses a line they are unwilling or unable to cross themselves. One has only to watch a bit of daytime talk-show type television to see the truth of this, at least in the US.
And obviously this kind of outrage over things that neither harm the individual nor society in any significant way isn’t confined to punishment of criminals. Think of the internet (even this board) when someone expresses an unpopular opinion or describes doing something of which others disapprove–I remember once on another forum being immolated because I took my nursing baby to the symphony…