>(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.
You put it much better than I did, I'm afraid.
>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.
Agreed.
>I don't think social causation gets people who make bad choices off the
hook >as far as responsibility goes.
I think I agree. Many choices which are considered "bad" by society at large do not bother me at all, such as the choice to smoke pot or get high on heroin. Similarly, many property crimes are probably justified from a social justice perspective. The left needs to do more than just say, "I believe in responsibility too," which most people will take as conservative position. It needs to clearly articulate what responsibility means in a larger context, and educate people on social justice issues, in order to fully reclaim the concept from the right.
Brett