Gongol.com Archives: November 2023
November 25, 2023
There aren't many characters less sympathetic than those who use the vestiges of authority to exact brutality on other people. Thus it is difficult to summon any moral defense for the former police officer who was convicted of killing George Floyd "willfully and in callous and wanton disregard of the consequences". ■ But it is a dangerous thing for anyone to celebrate the news of his reported stabbing while in a Federal prison. The point of a rules-driven criminal justice system is that society decides the penalties for bad behavior dispassionately and through an orderly process. No matter how strong our personal feelings about a convict, we shouldn't count on extrajudicial penalties to restore justice. ■ Some people seemingly salivate at the prospect of convicts suffering some kind of additional penalty while behind bars. That may seem satisfying on an emotional level, but it's contrary to the point. ■ Any society can dole out pain and suffering as retribution for breaking the rules. That's no more than a response to basic human motivations -- most of us seek to avoid pain. Every authoritarian regime uses cruelty to make incarceration into a weapon. ■ The fear of being sent to the Gulag wasn't something the Soviet Union employed out of abstract principle. And when China's government uses "threats of physical violence, forcible drug intake, physical and sexual abuse, and torture" against political and religious prisoners, it's resorting to the same base motivations. The pain is the point. ■ But free societies have something abstract but enormously valuable to take away from those found guilty of violating the law: They can withdraw personal freedom. To be deprived of freedom in a free society ought to be much more painful (at least psychologically and emotionally) than to be similarly deprived in an unfree state. After all, no one is really free under an authoritarian regime. ■ To lose one's freedom ought to hurt much more than to sleep on an uncomfortable bed or to take a cold shower. If it doesn't, then we should examine why we take liberty so cheaply. And all of that is to say nothing of the knowledge that some non-trivial number of innocent people will be wrongly convicted. ■ How much we value personal liberty -- that is, how much we think it ought to hurt when it's taken away -- is an indication of our civic heath. Prisons don't need to be luxury hotels, but they shouldn't have to rely on cruelty, pain, or the threat of violence to be a deterrent. That's even the case when the convicts themselves are guilty of the most heinous crimes. We have to believe enough in both law and liberty to trust the process.
