Crime and Punishment: Sickness and Treatment.

People, generally, are highly reactionary. If someone commits a crime, we want to see them receive the appropriate comeuppance. We often disagree about what that should entail, for example I know someone who genuinely, without a hint of irony, believes wholeheartedly that people caught stealing should have their hand chopped off. I know people who think, more reasonably, there should be stiffer custodial sentences for offenders. It’s an attitude which is reinforced almost daily by the press – take the recent example of The Daily Express proclaiming a man a hero after shooting at some people attempting to steal his car. Stealing is a shitty thing to do and should not be without consequences, but this guy was not under attack, not in danger; he happened to notice two people hanging around his car, looking like they were attempting to steal it. He decided that a car, which is a thing, not sentient, not alive and almost certainly insured, was worth more than two lives. He then proceeded to attempt to end those two lives, instead of informing the authorities. Obviously, he’s going to be if not arrested, at the very least questioned. To call these actions heroic is bizarrely twisted, and yet, thanks to our reactionary attitude, most of us share this apparent hero's backwards notions of value. As such it turns out the police found a cannabis farm on his property. Maybe not so much defending his own home as the Express put it (although, at the most, he was defending his car), more defending his illegal drug dealing operation.

The press do it all the time. Upon the death of Gaddafi, the headlines were ones of taunting joy, happily repeating his final words, which were a plea for mercy. The Sun’s headline “That’s for Lockerbie” made it look as though the editor had killed him in person in revenge for the Lockerbie bombing, which no-one is even sure if Gaddafi is directly responsible for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sorry he's dead; like Saddam and Bin Laden he was a cunt of the highest order, but the vengeance-drunk press delighting in his bloody end seemed to forget they weren’t watching The Crow, which left a rather bitter taste in the mouth.

This attitude is extremely prevalent in our stories. In action films, the audience loves nothing more than to see the bad guys die in imaginative ways while the hero murders them with a wisecrack. Vigilantism and vengeance are two of our favourite subject matters in the stories we read and the films we watch. I don’t stand apart in this, before you take that as a criticism; Mad Max and Kill Bill are among my favourite movies. I prefer not to translate that into real life, however.

There seems to be a growing number of people beginning to think slightly less reactionary and slightly more reasonably. This number, it seems to me, is growing in tandem with the increasing number of people who reject religion. (This is merely a personal observation and not based on anything concrete, so I wouldn't be surprised to find this observation to be entirely wrong). Religions, mostly, are full of death and blood and righteous vengeance. Islam often preaches about delivering death to unbelievers, while the very concept of hell is the ultimate form of revenge – an eternity of pain and torment for anyone who doesn’t share in the delusion of the particular religion the believers belong to. As ever, this slow change in attitude (if it is happening at all) is being brought about as a result of patient, exhaustive scientific research. Studies show that in psychopaths the make-up of the brain is physically different to others. A part of it simply doesn’t work. These people may be bastards, but they are not evil, because, as I’ve said before, evil is a word to describe a concept that doesn’t actually exist outside of religion and fiction. These people are brain-damaged. The research also suggests that people with this unfortunate malfunction are not destined to become killers regardless, but those who benefited from a childhood in which they were loved securely and unconditionally tend not to go psycho. This kind of research is becoming increasingly important in criminal court cases, as it can be used to show some killers are damaged and don’t necessarily commit these acts out of malice, but because they are lacking the part of the brain that neutralises these kinds of impulses. This is highly unpopular with those who continue to cling to the familiar concepts of good, evil and righteous vengeance. The criticism usually levelled at left-leaning people by right wing thinkers is along the lines of, to put it very mildly ‘fuzzy soft liberals’. This, I think, is because they tend to be stuck in a mindset that is influenced by their bloodthirsty religions rather than logical and reason-based science.

This automatic negative reaction is also common when confronted with the idea that those who commit crimes and acts of abuse do so because they were themselves abused as children. Having experienced this very thing recently, when the mere suggestion was greeted by frustrated eye-rolling by people who would rather see a wrong-doer punished, preferably painfully, I don’t see why people can’t see the sense in this. Children don’t come into this world instinctively knowing how to be civil, how to act. They have to learn this, and they don’t learn by being told, they learn by being shown. They come to assume that the way to treat people is the way they themselves are treated. This has been brought home in a way I would never have imagined recently when Katie showed signs of inheriting my occasionally short temper. It’s not as simple as punishing the guilty, because in ways many people might not think, offenders aren’t necessarily guilty in the black and white way it appears.

I do concede that I couldn’t possibly say whether I would still have this attitude if any of my loved ones were to fall victim to any of these brain-damaged people who were abused as children. It’s entirely reasonable to expect me to crave bloody revenge against anyone who harmed my family. I only hope I never have to find out.