A Modest Proposal

Yesterday, the New York Senate voted to pass “Brittany’s Law,” to create a new public registry of offenders. Think “sex offender” registry, only for anyone convicted of any violent felony. People with a conviction in their past would have to register for ten years or more (under penalty of another felony conviction). Local law enforcement would be notified of who these people are and where they’re living (makes it easier to harass and arrest them and put them back in jail again). If there’s a fear of re-offense (evidenced by such things as being out on parole, or whether the original violent felony involved violence), then the public could be notified with their photo, details of what they did, where they live now, and more.

Why? Because, you know people who were once convicted of a violent crime? Sometimes they commit another one later! Gasp! Think of the children! The public must be informed and protected, so we can protect our children and our neighborhoods and our workplaces from all those people, some of whom might commit another violent crime later perhaps! Who cares if it had just been a domestic dispute, or they’d shouted “fire” in a crowded theater, or they’d defended themselves in a fight by kicking while wearing shoes, or they moved here from another state and brought their gun with them? (All potential violent felonies in NY.) We need to be protected from all violent felons, if the law’s going to protect us from rapists and murderers and terrorists! That’s what this law’s trying to do: protect us.

But some people complain that this is a bad thing.

Some folks say it punishes people all over again, after they’ve already served their time. Some folks say it makes it harder for these people to reintegrate into society, find a place to live, and get a job. Some folks say this only increases the chances that these people will return to crime.

Some people object on the grounds that any law named after a victim is de facto overbroad, unjust, and a nightmare waiting to happen.

Other people, however, point out that some violent criminals do commit subsequent crimes after they’ve done their time. They can pose a threat. We can’t just rely on criminal law to deal with it, because that only punishes people after they’ve committed a crime. We want to prevent those crimes from happening in the first place. Honest to god, think of the children!

Well, if you put it that way, it all makes sense! Let’s punish people — not for what they did do, but for what they might do. We don’t want a law that reacts, we want a law that protects.

When you put it that way, though… The problem is, this new law just doesn’t go far enough.

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The central premise of this law, and others like it, is that rehabilitation doesn’t work. It’s a nice idea, but in reality rehabilitation’s just a pipe dream.

That’s kinda true. Criminal penalties — whether they be jail, prison, probation or what have you — simply don’t prevent recidivism. The vast majority of people who get arrested will never ever commit another offense, regardless of whether their case is prosecuted or dismissed. Either it was a one-off mistake in an otherwise blameless life, or the mere arrest and arraignment was enough to scare them straight. The few who do go on to reoffend don’t seem to stop. At least, their punishment seems to have little measurable effect on whether they stop or not. (Ignoring drug treatment and mental health treatment, which aren’t technically punishment anyway.)

No, nobody with a halfway-decent understanding of our criminal justice system thinks that punishment rehabilitates anybody. It just doesn’t happen.

It doesn’t deter anything, either. Very few criminals decide not to offend after sober reflection of what the consequences might be. Even fewer violent criminals. (Those people who are deterred are those for whom the mere fact that punishment happens is enough to scare them away from contemplating crime. The possibility of a conviction alone is deterrence enough. The nature of the punishment is irrelevant. More importantly, these are not the people we’re worried about.)

If jail doesn’t rehabilitate, if it doesn’t deter, then what good is it?

It’s great for removal — getting the criminals off the streets so they can’t commit further crimes. Inmates can’t mug people on the street. They don’t kill us. They don’t rape… the rest of us. We’re safe from them.

More than that, we know that it works! Crime is down nationwide — violent crime, too — not merely because of demographic shifts but because in recent decades we’ve been locking people up for longer and longer chunks of their lives, keeping them off the streets. The prison population is soaring despite the drop in crime not because we’re shoving more people into prison, but because once there they’re staying longer. Sure we have more people locked up per capita than anywhere else on Earth, but aren’t we safer? Yes, TV shows and the news make people think crime is astronomically more likely than it really is, but you and I aren’t stupid people swayed by that nonsense — we’re the cognoscenti. We know that crime is down, and locking people up is why.

We’re safe from them… For as long as they’re locked up, anyway.

Most of the time, incarceration is sadly temporary.

Which means we’re not safe. And even Brittany’s law can’t protect us. Not really.

Which is why I have a modest proposal:

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Execution.

Punish all violent felonies by death.

Think about it: Removal is the only thing that works. The whole point of Brittany’s Law is to make removal more permanent — to keep them out of our communities and workplaces long after the justice system was forced to release them from custody. Removal’s what we want. The only way to really get that removal is to… you know… remove those people. For good. For once and for all. And execution’s really the only way to go.

Life sentence, you say? But why go to all the expense of feeding and housing and protecting and providing care for a dirty stinking nasty criminal for the rest of his life? First they hurt their victim, and now they’re going to suck our taxes dry for the rest of their days? Don’t forget, most violent offenders are young men between 17 and 30, with a long life ahead of them. And what’s the point of a life sentence, anyway? If you’re going to take away a man’s liberty permanently, if you’re going to remove him from the world permanently, what’s the point of keeping him alive? Death is more certain, efficient, and (if actually carried out instead of jammed up with decades of appeals) cost-effective.

What about exile, you ask? How historically-minded you are. There once was a time when you could ship off your criminals to another land, with a realistic expectation that they’d never get back. Sadly, in these modern times, there aren’t too many countries out there willing to let us ship boatloads of violent criminals to their shores. Plus how expensive would that be? And then they could always escape and sneak back through our borders like any illegal immigrant, and you just did all that for nothing. No, it’s just not workable in this day and age.

Execution is the only way to make sure these people never commit another crime again.

It’s the only way to be sure.

This isn’t an original idea, of course. For hundreds of years, our legal predecessors punished minor crimes with a fine, and major ones with death. (Jail was where you waited until the sentence was handed down, to make sure you didn’t flee in the meantime.) It only became a problem in England when they started criminalizing too many things and people started being killed for stuff that didn’t seem so major. We only invented prison sentences more recently, in an enlightened attempt to match the severity of the penalty to the severity of the crime, taking away a portion of your life that could be measured with scientific exactitude. And also to give you a chance to ponder your misdeeds and make yourself a better person, so you could come out a valuable contributing member of society once more. But now we know that rehabilitation is hogwash, and figuring out how many years a crime is “worth” only heightens the impermanence of the removal. It defeats the whole purpose! No, let’s go back to the tried-and-true. And if there do happen to be a few crimes that shouldn’t be punished with death, it shouldn’t take much time at all to identify and amend them.

Think about all the tax dollars we’d free up from the prisons. Think, liberals, of all those for-profit prisons we’d put out of business, along with the corruption they breed. Think, conservatives, of how low our crime rate would plummet, once we start keeping the bad guys off the street for good. Think, libertarians, of the smaller government we’d enjoy with far fewer agencies and bureaucracies and social programs and social workers and defense lawyers and the rest of the whole long tail of woe that trails behind each of these losers counterproductive members of society. Think, jurists and lawmakers, of the respect for the law we would instill when any potential lawbreaker has a gas chamber waiting for him. Think, everybody, of the children!

It’s a modest proposal, I know. But seriously, if we’re going to give up on every purpose of punishment but removal, then let’s be serious about it and remove them.

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No?

That’s not what you want?

Well, make up your mind. Because it’s exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. Your representatives say so every time they vote for something like this. Obviously it’s what you, their voters, want. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

Tell you what: You figure out why my modest proposal is wrong. Then explain in the comments why your Brittany’s law (or what have you) is somehow, nevertheless, right.

Go ahead. Just don’t forget to think of the children.

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[Inspired by reading the back-and-forth after this tweet by Scott Greenfield]