(1) That there is a social dimension to crime, and in general that the environment influences what choices people will make.
(2) That bad environments can lead people who feel desperate to do things that are illegal, whether defensible (hungry Jean Valjean steals bread to feed his children) or less so (the hero of "Clockers" sells crack cocaine on the street).
(3) That even if people do bad things for which they should be punished, that doesn't mean that our current law has the scale of punishments right. In particular we criminalize victimless crimes, overpunish on some (crack possession), underpunish on others (corporate crime), and even have the state kill people.
(4) That the rhetoric of responsibility is used by the right to suggests that claims (1)-(3) above are not true.
No objection to any of this. But we shouldn't let the right have the word "responsibility" any more than we should let them "democracy." We shouldn't let the fact that bad acts have social causes let off the hook either the bad actors _or_ the bad society. We should think harder about what we want done to people who do various kinds of bad acts and whether we should treat them as harshly as we do. In the case of the death penalty, I think certainly not, at least as long as the penalty is administered in a racist way against the poor.
But if I'm getting conservative in my old age, I don't care: I don't think social causation gets people who make bad choices off the hook as far as responsibility goes.
--jks