[ExI] What is Grace?

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>    4) removal
>
>>> At least in western societies, criminal sentences serve somewhat
>>> unofficially an additional purpose, namely the more or less temporary
>>> elimination of people who are perceived as dangerous or asocial from
>>> society.
>>>
>>> This is of course hypocritical...
>
> Not really any worse than sending children to their rooms
> as punishment---

My point is that traditionally one thing was criminal punishment,
another prevention of asocial behaviours, which used to lead to an
altogether different set of remedies, called in civil "security
measures".

Think in modern times of the internment of dangerously deranged
psychopaths, or of aliens in wartime, or the expulsion of unwanted
immigrants, or the order to stay away from a given area or person,
which does not require evidence of any actual "guilt" of anything, nor
is aimed per se at any "punishment".

Now, the entire notion has become distinctly unfashionable in western
democracies, especially after the sixties, and this makes for a
distorsive use of criminal remedies "to keep them out of the street",
little else being legally available to concerned people.

> But far more importantly---a point steadfastly and absurdly ignored
> by our present system---is the hideous relative injustice inflicted
> on the weaker of the prisoners by the stronger.

This again is hypocritical. We refrain from inflicting any kind of
punishment other than mere detention, so we delegate... other inmates
to make prison life a hellish nightmare. Needless to say, "severe but
just" are not the first words who come time as its description...

> Often I think that the best solution is solitary confinement. It
> seemed to work out okay for Edmund Dantes, so far as I could tell
> when I read the Dumas book. Severe, yes, but not inhuman.

I was just mentioning the same example!

Great minds continue working alike... :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj