>Also, underlying support of capital punishment and of harsh
>> punishments by the criminal justice system generally is
>> bourgeois individualist ideology. According to this idea
>> we are each masters of our own fates. Each of us bears
>> ultimate responsibility for the choices that we make, for
>> what we make of ourselves whether good or bad.
>
>Do you actually disagree with this proposition? Do you think that if I rob
a bank, or perhaps, since we are on LBO I should say, if I found a bank,
and am hauled in front of Doug's revolutionary tribunal, I should be able
defend myself by saying, I wasn't responsible! I am just a creature of
society! Bourgeois ideology made me do it!
First of all, there is a social dimension to people's actions. For example, can you really blame somebody who has been denied jobs and housing for trying to steal some bread? This is a loaded example, but many people do have the deck stacked against them unfairly, and in such situations you can't expect people to just accept their lot in life. The system does lead people to behave criminally, either by criminalizing things which shouldn't be a crime, or by putting people in desperate conditions where they see no other way out.
(Question: does anyone know what % of crimes are violent? Or, put another way, what % of crimes are against property, such as theft or damage, or "lifestyle" like prostitution or drug use?).
Secondly, although I will grant a large degree of personal responsibility in many, possibly most, crimes (murder out of jealousy, for example), there is still the matter of how to treat the criminal after the fact. How does admitting to individual responsibility, in part or in total, justify punishment of the criminal? Why lock them up in prison or subject them to the death penalty? Why not simply make the criminal repay the victim in some way, i.e., restitution. Or, in the case of violent offenders, simply remove them from society but make their lives comfortable, or at least not miserable.
Sure, everyone has a revenge instinct, and that might be a justification for punishment. But we don't _have_ to succumb to that instinct, and I don't find it compelling.
>> Those
>> who make good or wise choices are thus entitled to
>> rewards commensurate with the wisdom or goodness
>> of those choices and those who make bad or foolish
>> choices are likewise deserving of punishments
>> commensurate with such choices.
>
>Well, it's one thing to say that people are responsible for their choices
and another to say that they should get what their choices deserve. These
are seperate questions.
>
>But even here, although people on the left might not think that bad people
who make bad choices are the root of our problems, we don't have to reject
the idea that if you make bad choices you pay the price. Surely that's waht
we think in the case of, say, Pinochet, or anyway we think he should pay
the price.
Why should the price be prison time or, in some cases, the death penalty? The monstrous miscarriage of justice is the fact that Pinochet has been allowed to profit from the suffering he inflicted on so many people, not that he hasn't languished in prison or been lethally injected. I fail to see how either of these options would do any good, other than to slake many people's thirst for revenge.
>> To the extent that it might be admitted that some
>> people's choices might not be freely made, then
>> the factors that are held responsible are still said
>> to be internal to the individual - perhaps in the form
>> of bad genes, or mental illness conceived of in
>> strictly individualist terms.
>
>But my main point here is that I don't think that the left should buy into
this bad old 60s liberal palaver about the poor widdle cwiminals and their
bad enviwonments that isn't their fault.
This isn't Jim's point. His point is that the elite tries very hard to sell crime as starting and ending with the individual in order to delfect criticism away from the system which should bear some responsibility for these problems. He's not in any way taking the position that people are unaccountable. He's simply saying that a philosophy which claims that bad or criminal behavior is completely a function of the individual (whether because of evil intent or pathology) will always obscure the influence of institutional structures on criminal behavior and similar social problems.
Brett