NO SECOND CHANCES
Remember the quaint phrase about ex-cons who have "paid their debt to society"? We haven't really believed that for a while now. I keep seeing articles about how dreadful it is that people with criminal records are working as school bus drivers and nursing home attendants. No doubt the next alarm will be issued over ex-cons who work in restaurant kitchens or construction sites, where the general public, including--omigod!--children, might possibly cross paths with them. (The solution to that problem is actually a no-brainer. If we want a higher quality of people working in those places, all we have to do is increase the wages, so that more respectable people will want to work there. If the compensation and benefits of a particular workplace make it a job of last resort, it will get applicants of last resort. Duh.)
A listfriend of mine once complained that "we seem to think after we put an offender in prison for a while, he's 'cured', and it's okay for him to live next door to me." She's a perfectly nice person, not especially vindictive or judgmental, and I think she echoes the sentiments of a lot of Americans.
Sex offenders are a special category. If by "sex offender" we mean predatory pedophile, the data seem to indicate that it's just about impossible to rehabilitate them. So maybe it's okay to keep passing laws restricting where they can live and work, until they are all segregated into a single neighborhood on the Northeast Side of Chicago, and the Cook County Department of Children and Family Services decides it is per se child neglect to allow anyone under 18 to enter that neighborhood. In fact, we aren't that careful in defining "sex offender," and a lot of people get included who are guilty of nothing worse than being five years older than a teenage girlfriend, or "mooning" a cranky neighbor. More and more local governments are forbidding "sex offenders," whatever they may be, from living or working in, or in some cases driving or walking through, their municipalities.
But your common-or-garden-variety mope, who is increasingly likely to have committed a drug offense, rather than a violent crime, has been caught up in our demand for "safe" neighborhoods and workplaces. No, doing prison time won't "cure" them. In the first place, the US legal system doesn't consider them "sick." In the second place, if it did, prison is the last place in the world to send somebody to "recover" from criminality. In the third place, the US criminal justice system is officially based on the premise that we do not restrict people's freedom because of what they are, but for what they have done.
This is wildly counterintuitive, to any ordinary reasonable person. "Character," says Aristotle, "is fate." What people are determines what they will do and what will happen to them. And we can tell what people are by what they have done in the past. That's pure common sense. A person who has served his prison term may now be an ex-convict (that is, no longer a prisoner), but most people will not regard him as an ex-criminal. He may or may not have "paid his debt to society," but we will, not unreasonably, continue to suspect him of being the same kind of person who incurred that debt in the first place.
Which might be a manageable situation if we were not locking up a higher proportion of our citizenry than any country in the world outside of the Third World, and if so many of those we lock up were not taken from the same ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Which means they return to the same neighborhoods, and the decent citizens in those neighborhoods are deprived of their right to "safe neighborhoods."
On one hand, all of this could be easily resolved by imposing life sentences for all crimes. Indeed, only mere sentimental liberalism stands in the way of executing all petty criminals. It was good enough for our pre-Victorian ancestors.
On the other hand, we aren't quite ready for that, not yet. So if we assume that most of the people now in prison will someday get out, we really do need to accept the fact that everybody needs to live someplace. As a condition of parole, ex-cons are also required to work someplace. So we need to figure out just where they will be allowed to live and work, and how to protect the public without generating hysteria in the process.
Because the alternative is to create a group of second-class citizens, into which it will become all to easy to push all kinds of unpopular people, from racial minorities and poor people to non-Christians and liberals, to thee and me.
A listfriend of mine once complained that "we seem to think after we put an offender in prison for a while, he's 'cured', and it's okay for him to live next door to me." She's a perfectly nice person, not especially vindictive or judgmental, and I think she echoes the sentiments of a lot of Americans.
Sex offenders are a special category. If by "sex offender" we mean predatory pedophile, the data seem to indicate that it's just about impossible to rehabilitate them. So maybe it's okay to keep passing laws restricting where they can live and work, until they are all segregated into a single neighborhood on the Northeast Side of Chicago, and the Cook County Department of Children and Family Services decides it is per se child neglect to allow anyone under 18 to enter that neighborhood. In fact, we aren't that careful in defining "sex offender," and a lot of people get included who are guilty of nothing worse than being five years older than a teenage girlfriend, or "mooning" a cranky neighbor. More and more local governments are forbidding "sex offenders," whatever they may be, from living or working in, or in some cases driving or walking through, their municipalities.
But your common-or-garden-variety mope, who is increasingly likely to have committed a drug offense, rather than a violent crime, has been caught up in our demand for "safe" neighborhoods and workplaces. No, doing prison time won't "cure" them. In the first place, the US legal system doesn't consider them "sick." In the second place, if it did, prison is the last place in the world to send somebody to "recover" from criminality. In the third place, the US criminal justice system is officially based on the premise that we do not restrict people's freedom because of what they are, but for what they have done.
This is wildly counterintuitive, to any ordinary reasonable person. "Character," says Aristotle, "is fate." What people are determines what they will do and what will happen to them. And we can tell what people are by what they have done in the past. That's pure common sense. A person who has served his prison term may now be an ex-convict (that is, no longer a prisoner), but most people will not regard him as an ex-criminal. He may or may not have "paid his debt to society," but we will, not unreasonably, continue to suspect him of being the same kind of person who incurred that debt in the first place.
Which might be a manageable situation if we were not locking up a higher proportion of our citizenry than any country in the world outside of the Third World, and if so many of those we lock up were not taken from the same ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Which means they return to the same neighborhoods, and the decent citizens in those neighborhoods are deprived of their right to "safe neighborhoods."
On one hand, all of this could be easily resolved by imposing life sentences for all crimes. Indeed, only mere sentimental liberalism stands in the way of executing all petty criminals. It was good enough for our pre-Victorian ancestors.
On the other hand, we aren't quite ready for that, not yet. So if we assume that most of the people now in prison will someday get out, we really do need to accept the fact that everybody needs to live someplace. As a condition of parole, ex-cons are also required to work someplace. So we need to figure out just where they will be allowed to live and work, and how to protect the public without generating hysteria in the process.
Because the alternative is to create a group of second-class citizens, into which it will become all to easy to push all kinds of unpopular people, from racial minorities and poor people to non-Christians and liberals, to thee and me.
posted by WiredSisters at 1:31 PM
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