Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Shame on Us
We have also scheduled a lengthy time for discussion about your prisons, which preoccupy your people to an abnormal extent. Unfortunately, your penal system is based on religious notions of penitence and reformation, character emendations which can be evoked only where a sense of shame is present. In a society as mobile as your own, many people are totally anonymous to those around them. They do not care what they do before strangers or to strangers. If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary.
Logically, therefore, your prisons should seek to instill shame, but even if it were possible, it would offend your civil libertarians to do so. "Shaming" others is considered an affront to their dignity. Since shame is essential to remorse, which is the natural punishment for misbehavior--just as gut cramps are the natural punishment for eating unripe thrags--if one cannot evoke shame, then forget about penitence or reformation. It won't happen.
In the place of shame you have substituted a meaningless phrase, "Paying one's debt to society." You send a rapist or murderer to prison for a few years, and then you say he has "paid his debt to society." Of course, he has done no such thing. A term in prison pays for nothing, not if it is for ten years or twenty or fifty! The victim or victims are still violated or dead, and to say that the evil-doer has paid his debt is to denigrate the value of the victim! This, in turn, causes anger among the victim's family or friends, who wonder why a beloved wife is worth five years while someone else's daughter is worth twice that. This , in turn, causes disrespect for the law. As Canthorel has written, "If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law." -Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco
- Molliwogg
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