Friday, October 05, 2012

Punishment and society's scale

While driving away from MiddleDaughter's neighborhood the other day I was relieved to note that the four main drug dealer families(*) in the cul-de-sac were gone. But I couldn't let well enough alone and took to wondering: what became of them? They're not in prison, just evicted. So some other unhappy neighborhood has to deal with them. It's a game of musical houses; who gets stuck with the crooks when the music stops? Or like Greyhound therapy for the mentally ill street people who won't cooperate.

In theory the crooks will eventually make a mistake and wind up in prison, though if assault isn't good enough to do the trick I don't know what will be. Then they will be safely tucked away where they can't harm the general public. Penitentiary was supposed to give them a place to be sorry for their crimes, though in practice it seems to work best as a "keep them away from us for a while" facility.

I'm not going to try to figure out what's ideal.

But centuries ago punishments were much more draconian. There wasn't any prison in the villages, so you were fined or whipped or modified or executed; no sitting in prison for 10 years. You stayed locked up until you were punished. A criminal could run away to another village to escape punishment, and that's presumably one of the reasons people didn't trust strangers very much. (Without someone to vouch for you you might not be permitted to stay in town. An innkeeper might do that for you, if he liked your looks and cash up front.)

So to first order a village had two choices in dealing with a bad actor: expel him and hope he goes somewhere else, or apply some fairly dramatic punishment to encourage him to stop being such a villain. If nothing worked and his actions were still intolerable, you can see that there might be a groundswell of support for a permanent solution. If you can't persuade the guy to stop stealing, make it impossible for him to steal. (IIRC small villages weren't typically authorized to hang or whack off hands. I'm just saying they wouldn't necessarily find the punishment disproportionate.)

Of course if the punishment for theft is loss of hand, that's the punishment, and it is apt to apply to the fellow stealing from hunger as well as the fellow who steals because he won't work. So that punishment's going to be seriously unjust sometimes, as well as cruel. Yes, cruel--would you want to be the man who does the whacking? If so be prepared, nobody wants to be around you except the seriously creepy.

(The rich expanded the number of capital offenses if it suited them.)

In England things started changing around 1800. (Follow the link; a sentence of death didn't mean you died.) England had quite a large list of capital offenses, some of which (as linked earlier) weren't that serious. So they started reforming the laws.

There's a chicken and egg question here that I don't know enough details about to guess the answer to. Did there grow a moral revulsion to having so many death sentences, or was the society large enough that it was now possible to "keep them away from us" and reduce the sense of urgency for harsh punishment? Or was there a bit of both? It might be possible to get some idea by looking at opposition to the reforms as a function of community isolation.

If today every neighborhood was stuck with the handling of its own petty and not-so-petty criminals, what would the punishments look like?

(*) No, we didn't see drugs change hands. But at all hours, she saw "friends" of the four stop over briefly with a bag from MacDonalds and share "food."

Corrected which daughter

3 comments:

Texan99 said...

I think about this often. The notion of keeping a large part of the population in prison long-term is pretty new. My modern conscience is shocked by the number of relatively minor offenses that would end in death not so long ago, in part because I've never had to worry too much about the limited options for keeping dangerous criminals away from my family. Stealing doesn't seem dangerous to me, because all the theft I'm familiar with amounts to taking a small portion of an overabundance, not removing a margin of stored food that will mean the difference between surviving or starving this winter.

We don't have far-flung colonies any more that we can banish people to.

james said...

I only saw a crowd chasing a thief once in Monrovia, and never learned what became of him. But the newspaper reported several times on incidents in which a man was caught stealing and was beaten to death by the crowd who chased him down. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that they got the wrong man now and then.

I don't think there was any distinction between stealing from a poor market woman or stealing from a Lebanese store owner. At least back then.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Two rather contradictory bits: our current criminal population has more than it's share of people who have taken serious knocks on the head as children, and are much less able to control their impulses. That, of course, could also flow in the other direction - that the impulsive are additionally more likely to injure their brains.

OTOH, if parents know that their child is growing up in a world that punishes some offenses severely, they teach their children - by rote if not by insight or moral sensibility - not to do those things. Those that go on to do them anyway in that culture may be a different group than the criminals in ouyr own.