Nurturing The Suffering of Innocents

A hypothetical situation:

If we could corral all of the dysfunctional people who have earned the label of “criminal” into a confined space, one that—for whatever reason you can imagine—is only temporarily sustainable as a facility of confinement, and then considered with all appropriate urgency what must we accomplish before the viability of this structure expired, how might we approach this situation.

We might, for instance, set aside the fact that as a society we are angry at these men and women and children. I think we could all agree that our anger will not serve us once those walls come down and the maladjusted lot is free roam among us again.

Many people may want retribution, but there again, hastily enacting retribution based on the passions of the aggrieved and equal to each criminal’s offense might compel us to become perpetrators of impulsive and violent acts ourselves. Even if retribution is a considerable element of our response to criminal behavior, the process of justly enacting it is time-consuming, and given our hypothetical conundrum, the clock is ticking.

Acting sensibly, given that our mechanism of containment is only temporary, would we not first do everything in our power to ensure that those dysfunctional people do not cause further suffering once they are free? Surely, we could all agree that preventing the further suffering of innocents should be foremost on our minds, even if retribution and expressing our anger run a close second and third.

And yet, preventing the future suffering of innocents is not a true functional underpinning of our penal system; it is merely a stated one. Our penal system is founded on principles of social anger and retribution. The temporary protection of the community is only a side effect, and a counterproductive one at that. It’s the equivalent of turning up your car stereo so you can no longer hear that troubling sound your engine is making.

Considering that over 95% of the people who are incarcerated in the United States will one day be coming home, the temporary facility of containment suggested above resembles our penal institutions fairly accurately. So until we close that fundamental philosophical breach, in spite of which our penal system functions, we must all, individually and as a society, except our own complicity in the predictable future suffering of innocents.