Ending political correctness and reforming our justice system

The current establishment dismisses the relevance of any such psychological phenomena with accusations that the victims are merely seeking "revenge" or "retribution." Call it what you like, but these phenomena are real and cause great suffering. Indeed the more egregious followers of the current politically-correct cult make victims feel guilty for having such "primitive" responses.

Recent peer reviewed work has highlighted the need to conceptualise injustice in terms of the physical damage that it causes to the brain. Regardless of the suffering that the initial crime causes, inadequate punishment of the criminal causes a secondary brain injury to the victim.

We accept that a blow to the head may cause a brain injury. A mild injury might, for example, cause some weakness of the leg and some minor problems with remembering names. Would you rather have those symptoms or a lifetime of miserable intrusive thoughts, despair, lack of sleep and total loss of ability to function. Both are representative of brain injury. That is simply the reality of the science. To argue otherwise would be to repudiate the accumulated knowledge of neuroscience. Whether or not to inflict such a brain injury on a victim by handing down an inappropriately light sentence is, however, a matter of opinion. We therefore have to put in perspective the reality of sentences that don't punish the criminal. When a judge who is intoxicated with this trendy political-correctness gives a criminal a free pass with an inadequate sentence, they are doing the equivalent of getting off their bench, walking up to the victim and hitting them over the head with a baseball bat...whack... take that! Adequate justice CAN restore some of the damage that the original crime has caused. We have to repudiate the tired old cliché that the crime can't be undone so punishing the criminal won't help.

Violent crime especially causes an affront to the senses. Some non-violent crimes can also cause extreme feelings of violation for which justice needs to be served (such as crimes which take a person's life savings from them). On the other hand, so called victimless crimes do not produce an obvious immediate victim in the same psychological sense. Therefore the rationale for giving someone a long prison sentence for a random sadistic knife attack is not relevant for non-violent personal use of, say, marijuana. Now I realise that I may have turned a lot of people off at this time by not being tough on, for example, drugs and prostitution the same way that I have argued that we need to be tough on violent crime. That is a separate debate about personal responsibility. But from a neuropsychological perspective there seems to be a difference between victimless crime and other crime.

In summary, we need to challenge the fashionable cult that has established control over the criminal system and to consign the prevailing ideology to the dustbin of history before countless more victims and their families are tortured by lack of justice.