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The Necessity of Punishment
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10538 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
4,587 Words |
| Author
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Jude P. Dougherty
Jude P. Dougherty is the dean of the Department of Philosophy
at the Catholic University of America. |
Nearly every report or bulletin published by the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, provides material for serious reflection if not cause of alarm. An April 1992 update, reporting on data drawn from 1988, reveals that of prisoners released for the first time from state institutions, those sentenced for homicide served an average term of only forty-two months; those sentenced for rape or sexual assault thirty-six months. Another study surveying the criminal history records in eleven states, covering a period of three years, found that in a sample of prisoners released in 1983, 62.5 percent were rearrested for a new felony or serious misdemeanor.
These studies show that either the penalties attached to homicide and sexual assault are insignificant or that we do not regard the taking of life or assault as serious crimes. They also show, not that anyone needs to be reminded, that prisons do not reform. The recidivism evident from these and other studies suggested that the criminal justice system does not protest the public. A society that cannot bring itself to punish the criminal element within is doomed to insecurity and chaos.
In the mid-decades of this century the conviction that criminals ought to be punished was successfully challenged by many social scientists in both western Europe and North America. For reasons that we intend to explore, punishment was equated with retribution, an attitude that was judged to be psychologically if not morally inappropriate. Social theorists were not reluctant to suggest that those who would punish, be it an individual or social group, were simply deficient in their ability to cope with an unpleasant situation. The perceived need to punish was equated with a desire for revenge and revenge itself was presented as passion in need of control. The moral authority of those who would impose punishment was thereby questioned. Advocates of meaningful sanctions become the guilty ones, the ones in need of therapy. This dark view of the motives of those who seek sanctions is often coupled with a romantic view of the criminal's reformability. The same social scientists present the criminal as an unfortunate victim of a social order on which he has a claim. We can find bodies of legal scholars and even organizations of judges reflecting this outlook as they propose model penal codes for their jurisdictions.
Obviously the issue of whether to punish or not is not simply a problem for social scientists. There is a philosophy of punishment that one explicitly or implicitly brings to the subject and that determines the comprehension and the use of the data uncovered by
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