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How punishments can be a crime

By Brian Holden - posted Thursday, 4 November 2010


It was on February 3, 1967 that the last execution was carried out in this country. Now the punishment for the most horrific crimes is imprisonment with no parole. This was supposed to make us a less brutish and more civilised society, but has it?

I read somewhere of an early 19th century missionary asking an American Indian why his people mutilated their criminals before killing them. The red man's response went something like: "At least we don't put them in a cage for years like the white man does."

How is the morality of any society to be measured? It has to be measured by the efforts a society makes to minimise the unhappiness within it.

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The question this article addresses is what is the most moral way to deal with the psychopathic criminal who needs to be removed permanently from society?

We have only three options for that removal.

The first option is to permanently neutralise the aggression.

The law says that to be evil, you must be rational. If the criminal is judged as being insane he will receive involuntary therapy in an institution for the rest of his life. The heavy sedation so removes one's sense of identity that the victim can even lose interest in complaining about the abuse he may be subjected to.

What makes you human is your mind. Long-term involuntary therapy preserves the physical body but chemically destroys much of what makes the person human. The criminal has had his unhappiness minimised by dehumanising him. This can't be a moral outcome.

The second option is to incarcerate the sane criminal for the term of his natural life.

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Science says that a crime is directed by a neural network in the perpetrator's brain, and that this network is hard-wired from birth, not acquired later. We'd rather not think about that.

On top of "bad" DNA there may be other contributing factors. For example,the violent criminal's mother may have abused her own body while pregnant with him and as a result his brain may not have received the nutrition it needed for normal intellectual development. Or perhaps his mother's de facto regularly hit him about the head as an infant.

These neural networks are hardwired through repeated traumatic experiences (just as an alcoholic's has with repeated ingestions of alcohol). But, for us to confine the criminal to an environment that is empty of all that is good in humanity, we need to believe that he freely chose to commit his awful crime.

It has been known for decades that gardening and pets are calming factors for the violent mentality - and yet no effort is made to introduce these calming influences into a prisoner's life. In an environment of concrete, wire, bars and people in uniform checking one's every move, nobody will look at, speak to or touch the prisoner with affection. He may even live in continual fear of becoming the target of a brutal inmate.  

In this environment, how would you feel to have on your file the words "Never to be released"? As there is no point to reform, no effort will be made to reform. You will be a sane human being who has simply been "put away". When survivors of the concentration camps were asked how they ever survived, the invariable reply was that they never gave up hope. The inmate of a concentration camp dreams of freedom. Our never-to-be-released man can dream of nothing.

If he attempts to suicide, we make his life more miserable by denying him normal prison life by restricting his access to bedding, garments and utensils available to other prisoners, and with which he could make a second attempt. To suffer as we want him to suffer, he must live.

The third option is to put him into a peaceful but deadly sleep with Nembutal (as used by vets).

The reason formally given for the ruling-out of lethal injection as an option is that human life is a sacred God-given gift and an enlightened society is morally bound to preserve it at all times, regardless of the cost - and it does cost. It costs $300,000 per year to keep Ivan Milat alive.

If the five killers of Anita Cobby who are never be released were to live an average of 50 years since their conviction as young men in 1987, and assuming the cost at $100,000 a year per man, the total cost is $25 million. How many dying Sudanese infants could be kept alive and free of pain and hunger until they reached 18 years of age with $25 million? Answer; about 1300.

Plainly, the sanctity-of-human-life claim is a hypocritical as it was when we manipulated over 400,000 naive and bored young Australians into "volunteering" for service in the pointless meat-mincing war of 1914-1918. The value of a human life is not based on logical criteria, but on the prevailing mood as set by the scope of the public's vision.

Our sanctimonious government has the gall to criticize a country trying to manage 1.2 billion people for its executions. We call these actions by China a crime against humanity. China could tell us that in a world where about 30,000 children die each day due to lack of basic nutrition and medical care, the expenditure of $300,000 a year to keep a single man living a worthless life of emptiness is also a crime against humanity.

Psychopaths feel powerful when they are hurting humans or animals. These wretched people who can neither give nor receive love and who have never known the joy of creative work are undeserving of our cruelty. If they cannot be physically let free, then let us release them from their unhappiness with 15 grams of intravenously administered Nembutal.

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About the Author

Brian Holden has been retired since 1988. He advises that if you can keep physically and mentally active, retirement can be the best time of your life.

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