What’s wrong with punishment

The day before the execution of Saddam Hussein, I remember hearing a newscaster say something that I don’t think I can ever forget. I have a terrible memory for events and for quotes, but when I heard her say this, it chilled me.

She said: “There will be full justice. Not just partial justice, but full justice.” She was referring to the fact that he was to be executed, not just jailed. I was squirming in my seat after I heard that. I wish I could say she is wrong– but I can’t, because I don’t know that she is wrong; I can only say what I think.

I don’t think an execution can ever be justice. For one thing, people are prone to saying “well, he killed others, so now we’ll kill him.” But even in that eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth system, it’s not justice and never will be– he killed too many people for that, and we can only take one life from him; it’s not enough, nor is the suffering of anyone who would mourn him enough, to make up for what he’s done. That’s more like “a tooth for a mouthful of teeth.” That’s not justice; there’s no way that taking his life would ever equal the things he did; there’s no justice ever to be had, in that sense, towards a person who’s done as much as he’s done.

But quite aside from that, and compounding it, there’s also the issue that I can’t imagine an execution being a fair thing to do to anyone. I think an execution is the worst thing I can imagine. Counting the days, the minutes, the seconds of life, I could only imagine the sorrow as each last thing passes. What would you do when you’d never see night again, when you’d never see sun, when you knew that this meal was your last? How could you stand that knowledge? How hard could you possibly focus on each thing you did, the amount of smiles or breaths you had left in you before you died? I would hyperventilate feeling each breath, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t see more. I would fall apart at the last minute just knowing I’d never again see a kittycat or a tree, never taste strawberry or read a book, never again. Even the amount of suffering and fear I’d feel just from the anticipation, that alone is more than I could fairly wish on any human being no matter what they’d done. I just can’t stand the fact that executions happen. And to hear someone call it justice, as if it were a matter of fact– someone like a newscaster who is well-spoken and authoritative enough that many people may find themselves nodding their heads, thinking, that makes sense, without really thinking it over carefully– made me sad.

I don’t see how anyone could ever equate Saddam’s crimes with his execution and call that fair and just. Regardless of whether they’re viewing things as tit-for-tat, or as “a non-cruel-and-unusual punishment fitting the crime”, I can’t imagine any scenario, any worldview, any definition of “justice,” in which an execution is a fair and fitting end that corresponds with the crime. Calling it “justice” seems to me like writing it all off: writing off the horror of causing another thinking, feeling creature to cease to be, and writing off that there is never, has never been, and will never be a punishment that fits this crime, except perhaps to make him understand the horror of what he’s done, which we can’t make happen.

But I suppose what tops it all off the most is that I don’t think punishment itself is right. Confining people so that they can’t commit a crime again, that I can consent to, to keep things safe. But doing so with a view to punishing people, that I can’t consent to, and never will. If we put someone in jail, it shouldn’t be a punishment, it should be a safety measure. If we had to execute someone, it should be a safety measure. It should never be a punishment. There is no such thing as “just deserts.” People do things for their own reasons, and we might all agree that they’re bad reasons, and even the people who did those things might agree that they did it for bad reasons and that they were wrong and that they should never have done those things, but even if so, even if people intentionally commit atrocities, punishing them isn’t the answer. Hurting someone does not take away all the hurt and wrong they’ve caused. I don’t think that a punishment is an appropriate response to anything. Stopping the wrongdoing is appropriate; punishing is not. We, as human beings, should all try our hardest to make life better for everyone, collectively, and that means stopping the wrongdoing, but it doesn’t mean causing even a tad more suffering than we have to in order to make things safe for others. When we try to “punish” people, that’s causing suffering for the purpose of causing suffering, and that to me is wrong.

Punishment is a socially acceptable way of expressing how deeply we were hurt by something, and I think we want to express it, especially to the criminal, because we do feel that the most appropriate thing is to show criminals what they’ve done so clearly that they can’t help but feel guilt and remorse. That is why “an eye for an eye” makes sense to people; that is why when people are outraged they want to hurt whoever was responsible in equal measure, out of hope that the criminal will finally realise the gravity of what they’ve done. Part of the problem with this is that it’s not very logical; we can’t know that the criminal will feel at all the same as the injured party did. There’s really no way to make someone feel the guilt that they should feel. But the other problem is that we are inflicting something other than guilt; we are inflicting injury, and it is no more fair for us to injure someone else just to make them understand what they’ve done than it was for them to injure others in the first place. After all, those who commit crimes already feel subjectively wounded. Anger and hate aren’t pleasant things to feel, and they are denying themselves the peace that they need.

Since I’m trying to think positively in this blog and elsewhere in my life, since I’m trying not to be cynical and hopeless about anything when I can help it, I’m going to try to find something good in all of this: at least my hearing about the execution provided me a chance to review and clarify my feelings about punishment and crime. Until I started refining my thoughts with respect to this incident, I knew that I was not in favour of severe punishment in general, but I did not realise how strongly I felt that it was wrong to harm another person unnecessarily, even in the name of “justice”. I have been able to sort out my feelings on the matter a little more clearly since then, and I understand my feelings that the idea that people ought to be punished springs from a social agreement that we can express our anger about what’s happened to us by inflicting harm on the criminal. I think I understand some of the logic behind why people insist on punishment, even though the logic that I can understand seems twisted and invalid. Knowing what my own views are and how they differ from other common viewpoints is always a useful thing, and so at least one bit of good, however small, has come out of the situation– something good of which I am the beneficiary, so I myself had better contemplate and enjoy it, in order that it not be lost.

The best lesson is caring, not scaring.

Let me tell you a tale of two signs.

I’m talking of the sort of signs found outside of churches, with changeable letters– often displaying sermon themes, Bible passages, or invitations to bake sales. Where I live, you can hardly drive down a road for long without seeing one, although the church denominations are at least diverse– and display some quite different angles on religion.

The first sign I want to mention, on a wooden mailbox across the road from a church, stood by a beautifully painted house. Its message: JESUS HAS THE RECIPE SO YOU DON’T BBQ FOREVER. I did a doubletake when I saw this sign. Perhaps it was because of the sinister implication I thought of first: that Jesus had a recipe to make something better than BBQ when he eats you. But aside from that disturbing misreading, there was still something that made me read it as a threat. The full thrust of this sign was fear, making Christians afraid that if they don’t follow the exact steps in the recipe, they would be tortured for all eternity.

I thought: surely this sign is not going to make anyone happier. It can’t be comforting to be reminded that God is judging you and that one false step, one little substitution in the “recipe”, means eternal agony. It brings up the looming threat of hell, by way of mentioning that, oh, if you’re super-careful, it won’t actually happen. Although it talks about how not to go to hell, its only offer of consolation is to perhaps make you a little less afraid of the very thing that it just reminded you about. If it hadn’t reminded you in the first place, you wouldn’t be thinking about hell and you wouldn’t need the consolation. All in all, it’s a pretty scary sign, reminding people of the most negative aspect of their religion, reinforcing their fears.

The second sign was outside a plain brick church, one which frequently updates their sign with optimistic messages about helping one’s community. This sign read: GOD IS MORE POWERFUL THAN YOUR WORST FEAR. Assuming of course a benevolent god, as Christianity does, this is a reassuring sort of message: whatever happens to you, God is still even greater than that. It doesn’t remind you of anything to be afraid of; rather, it tells you that anything you already are afraid of, don’t worry; there’s something bigger and better and more important than it is.

I couldn’t help but think that I wish the person responsible for the BBQ sign would take a lesson from this hope-giving church. I’m not Christian, so perhaps I shouldn’t speak for Christianity, but I was always told as a child that Christians believe in a benevolent, loving, forgiving god; someone to comfort you, not to instil fear. Wouldn’t a good god want you to feel secure and happy, rather than constantly looking over your shoulder for Satan and worrying over whether you’re following all the proper steps to the letter? Wouldn’t he love you and let you trust your judgment a little to know how to do the right thing, instead of giving you a laundry list of “how to stay out of hell”? If anyone in this picture would want you to fear, it would be Satan, who is said to take pleasure in people’s suffering, not God, who is supposed to love you so much.

No matter what you believe about God or Satan or heaven or hell, my question for you is: would it make sense for a kind and caring god to want you to be afraid all the time? I, for one, don’t think so. Even if he has rules, he wouldn’t want you to tiptoe about your life, terrified of the consequences of breaking them. He would want you to follow them cheerfully and gladly, not with paranoia and anxiety. Because surely he wouldn’t want you to spend your life constantly being upset like that, not if he loves you even a little, and Christianity holds that he loves you a lot.

I also don’t think it makes sense to worry about hell nearly as much as people do. If God is indeed loving and kind and good, and if he knows all about you, then surely he knows what the world looks like through your eyes, and understands why you do the things you do. Even if he doesn’t like them, even if he thinks they’re wrong, he’s got to have some empathy for you because he knows your reasons. If he loves you and understands you, and if he is merciful as he is said to be, then surely he would not punish you as severely as that. Surely he would try his hardest to forgive you, and even if he couldn’t forgive, could he really bear to cast someone he loved so much into eternal torment? Why would he want to do that?

So many people seem to have this image of God being both supremely loving and willing to consign people to hell for breaking the rules. I think that anyone remotely as loving as Christians say he is would forgive everybody, easily, gladly, because he would want to, because he loved them. Yet I know a good many people who are less punitive than God is expected to be, people who wouldn’t inflict hell on anyone, let alone someone they cared for at all. It’s hard to imagine a god who is supposed to be completely good and completely loving and yet less merciful than many humans I know.

Regardless, even if you disagree with me on the above points, please remember your neighbour’s feelings, their worries and insecurities, and take care with their hearts. There’s no reason to scare people by reminding them of the possibility of hell all the time; if they believe in it at all, then they are surely doing the best they can, and fear won’t help them become better people. What they need to become better people is love and understanding and reassurance, so that they can come to feel safe and so that they can reflect it back to others. That seems like what a loving god would do, and what he would want humans to do, as well.