I’m not sure if GQ is the place for this, but I’ve been wondering why we bother. If some violent criminal flees the country, is there really any tangible benefit in bringing him or her back?
The idea that someone could get away with some heinous crime offends the sensibilities of most of us, but in my mind, it’s like a mouse that invades my basement, gnaws through my stuff, and then moves on to the neighbor’s house when my cat becomes aware of his presence. In other words, it’s someone else’s problem now. So why are we eager to bring this troublesome person back among us?
Didn’t societies once use exile as a form of punishment? When did that start disappearing, and why?
I tried to Google search this question, and all I found was a bunch of legal advice about the procedures involved.
Because people generally find the idea that some murdered a small child and ended up living in a villa in the south of France as a distasteful situation. They want punishment. And in general if you knew you could commit a crime, flee the jurisdiction and face no punishment, more people would do so.
Some of it is closure - for the victims, their families, neighbors, cops and everyone else touched by the crime. Second is prevention - keeping said criminal from returning and repeating at a future date and jump the border again. Lastly would be lour general sense of “justice” and desire to see it practiced even when beyond our border.
Also, don’t forget the reverse of the coin - the new country to which the crimilnal fled generally doesn’t want to accept as a citizen someone guilty of heinous crimes, no matter where they were committed. Would you want as a new neighbour a guy who raped and murdered back home?
You answered it right here. Civilization is generally the imposition of laws to assuage the sensibilities. This isn’t absolute, and sensibilities change over time - homosexuality is more accepted and getting away with murdering your wife’s lover is not - but the more heinous the crime, the more likely society will demand proper retribution.
Exile is not a historic parallel, especially for murder. The criminals that England sent to Australia were all petty criminals. There were several hundred offenses that could warrant the death penalty and the rest couldn’t easily be coped with. This was a society before huge institutional prisons for petty criminals. (Debt prisons were a different category.) The upper classes wanted these people out of their community; they were thought of less than human in the first place. Exiling them, though officially for seven years, was basically a way of street sweeping and manure dumping.
The other end of exile was for deposed rulers, like Napoleon. He wasn’t killed because they didn’t want to make him into a martyr. But most heinous criminals aren’t going to be deified if hanged.
No society ever willingly allowed their major criminals to escape into freedom. Extradition began because it became possible to negotiate their return, and has spread almost everywhere because we live in a global society and everybody sees the problem in the same light.
Actually I think that the overwhelming majority of the time someone commits a crime we don’t–that it is only for quite serious offenses that the criminal justice system bothers to.
I suspect if the child you adored were murdered, your feelings towards the mouse that gnawed might be different. It is a mouse when the stakes are so low personally and I am not meaning any of that in a snarky way.
And there is that whole thing of actually deterring people from committing crimes. If I think I can rob a bank, or murder someone, and get away free and clear if only I can get across the border before they catch up with me, I will be a lot more likely to do the robbery or murder that I am tempted by.
The answer to this is pretty much the same as the answer to any criminal proceeding: one part justice/retribution and one part prevention. People want a sense that justice has been done, even if it can’t restore what was lost. People want penalties that will hopefully prevent other people from committing that crime in the first place.
When you look at historical punishments, including exile, you have to take into account how different the environment was back then. The idea of sending someone to jail is a pretty recent one. Punishments once upon a time were all things that could be carried out quickly, whether that’s execution, a whipping, the pillory, mutilation, etc. There was simply no place and no resources to store a bunch of people who had broken the law. There was also very little-enough charity even for law-abiding citizens.
Exile worked as a punishment in part because you weren’t being sent somewhere nice. At certain times in history, exile literally meant being on your own until you starved or until someone else enslaved or killed you. You didn’t just move to the neighboring tribe and pick up where you left off. In more recent times, like being sentenced to Australia, it’s because there used to be parts of the world that were wild. Once there, you basically had a choice between backbreaking work, starvation and being eaten by wild animals. The backbreaking work was useful to the powers-that-be, and if you worked hard enough, you eventually had some land (or something) that could make you a productive citizen again. Nowadays, we simply don’t have anywhere that would work as an exile.
In some situations, the second country cannot legally remove the criminal unless the first country tries to extradite. If I barely make it to mexico ahead of a convoy of police cars chasing me, odds are I’m in Mexico illegally and they will toss me out if they don’t like what I did. If I’m a citizen of the UK (via parents, say) and skip bail to end up there, then they cannot expel me (as a citizen) unless there’s a legal reason.
By the same logic, why bother prosecuting anyone (unless they have the money to pay a hefty fine)? It costs money to put someone in jail, why not ignore crimes instead of prosecuting?
if a crime is serious enough, the desire for punishment, deterrence, revenge, etc. is sufficient to motivate prosecution no matter what the effort required.
As a side note - not exactly the OP but close - there was an article a few years ago complaining about this situation between Ontario and the west - BC and Alberta. In Canada, crimes are federal, so no extradition is necessary between provinces; but the court system is run by the rpovinces, as are jails for entences less than 2 years (?). A warrant is issued, and the person is arrested where they are and transported (the cliche shackled and accompanied by a police officer on a commercial flight).
It turned out that Ontario was ignoring minor criminals who had left the province. If Joe Schmoe gets into a bar fight and injures someone, or is caught breaking into a home or business, then while awaiting trial, he skips the province - if the crime is small enough, the effect is exile. The Ontario government would not bother hauling him back for trial.
Criminals knew this, and the BC police were getting frustrated. they’d arrest someone, find he had an overdue warrant in Ontario, but Ontario woul decline to pay to transport him back. It was getting to feel like BC was the dumping ground for Ontario criminals. IIRC, BC was getting to the point where they would pay the transport costs to get rid of the guys.
yeah, if it was a minor crime, Onario would pay to keep them in jail after apying transport costs back. So the perps would avoid being in Ontario from then on. If they committed crimes in BC afterwards, then they couldn’t run to Ontario… So Ontario got rid of them for years, whereas if they collected them and sentenced them, paid for the 2 years in provincial jail, when these guys finished their sentence they would likely stay in Ontario and cause more trouble.
So very much like the OP’s question - works for minor crimes. Why spend $100,000-plus to process a petty break-in artist or mean drunk, when you could effectively get rid of them for years, for free?