Benutzer:Woozle/Against Penitentiaries: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

The harm caused by crime is often more complex and more widespread than is usually thought. There is physical, psychic, and/or material damage, but there is also something in a crime that affects the community as such and even the normative structure of the social order. If there is to be an alternative to punishment then this alternative would have to take into account this three-dimensional harm. Any alternative would have to be able to respond to the question how it would deal with the challenge of re-instating the victim in his or her full status as a citizen (materially, emotionally, socially), how it would deal with restoring peace and confidence in a shaken collective, and how it would manage to publicly re-affirm the validity of a broken rule in order to prevent normative erosion. Crimes hurt victims, but they also hurt the law's claim to validity. Whereas victim compensation can do a lot to undo the harm inflicted upon the victim, punishment takes care of the crime's symbolic message in that it publicly and forcefully contradicts the impression that it is easy and okay to disobey the law - and that you can get away with it. Punishment is central to the normative order (and very existence) of society because it is an instrument with which to assure that a crime will not derogate the norm that it disobeys. It serves as the authoritative repudiation of the implicity anti-legal message of every crime that occurs. It is a performative (speech and non-discursive) act restoring the claim that the law - even if broken - has not lost its validity. And as we have seen, this anti-message against the message of crime contains not only a consolation for the victim, but also a relevant lesson to the offender, and a vital reassurance towards the affected community that breaches of the law are not being left acquiesced.  

Even with the safety of the population guaranteed through a responsible system of preventive detention - both drastically smaller and better than present-day prisons-as-punishment - there might remain a need to see a criminal suffer. An example might help. Imagine a young man of 29 years, diagnosed as physically and mentally healthy, an educator in a kindergarten, who is found to have abused and brutally killed three children over the time of five years. Or a cold-blooded professional killer hired by the mafia or a drug cartel for the necessary eliminations of traitors, enemies, and unfair competitors, who, after a number of years on the job, is finally being arrested. In both cases, public security can be regained by ordering the dangerous individuals to be locked up in preventive detention. For questions of safety, that could be it. Even if we know that such a purely instrumental reaction will be seen as unsatisfactory by victims' families and beyond. In the case of a successful insanity defense such an exemption from criminal responsibilization is a long-standing tradition and the victims' discontent is seen as a sad, but unavoidable fact which  the criminal justice system, in those cases, cannot do anything about.