We Want Them Punished

Punishment is often just, and good for the maintenance of society. We have had the discussion before about the Christian understanding that mercy is superior, though I always provide the qualifier that mercy does not exist except upon a foundation of justice. We should not try to be more merciful than God.

But that is not today's subject. I want to contrast justice not with mercy, but with practicality and usefulness. When I worked with sexual offenders (or supposed sexual offenders) one of the difficulties was getting the staff to keep focus. Staff would want to punish them, or as the prisons do, allow them to be punished by the conditions and other inmates, because they were horrifying people who deserved no better. One difficulty of this is that when one staff member moves to punish, another will move to rescue. That will in turn set off balance/counterbalance effects, especially with personality disorders. From this comes shift wars, department competition, challenges to authority and other ills.

A speaker at a conference described the more important problem succinctly. Your first job is to protect the public. He went on to point out that if we punish offenders until we are bored or spent, and some rescuer intervenes to give them added freedom or even discharge and they reoffend, then we have failed in our primary task. I have heard nurses mutter about castration for child molesters.  But even the castrated can still molest. The desire to punish may be just, but it may not be the best choice.

I am seeing a lot of this on the right in politics and culture these days. I understand it, and it is often just. People who deceived us, got rich off us corruptly, or insulted us deserve punishment. But the more important task is to get those agencies functioning correctly, so they do not do further damage.  If we punish all the bad guys at the DOJ, the CDC, the ATF, and EPA but they just just lay low and start again - or their replacements capsize the boat on the other side, we will feel deeply satisfied for a while, but we are not better off. Sometimes punishment is the best choice.  Sometimes not.

Keep focus.  This is a Keep Your Eye on the Prize era now.