I see people say “well, if Eric Garner had cooperated, he wouldn’t be dead”. That is likely true. It is CERTAINLY true that if those 5 cops had not decided he needed to go to jail for selling cigarettes he would be alive.
In my own view, we need a whole lot less things you go to jail for. In particular, I think we need to legalize substantially all drugs. A great deal of petty crime–like petty theft, and robbery–is related to drugs. Make the drugs easier to get, and you reduce the crime. Have an intelligent long term vision, such as helping addicts heal their emotional wounds, as Portugal did, and you get even better returns on investment.
I really think we need to move beyond simple moralisms, where if you stay on one side of a line you are “good”, and if you cross to the other you are “bad”. Who you ARE is what you think and feel most of the time, most of the day, and particularly what you choose to feed and what you choose to starve.
There are many awful human beings who have never broken or even contemplated breaking a law their entire lives. Heinrich Himmler, as one example, was very scrupulous about everything. He kept the receipts for his hair cuts. I don’t know why I remember that, but it was the sort of detail that reveals the man.
And many people who break the law–even major laws, such as those prohibiting car theft and robbery and even murder–are actually good people who exercised bad judgement over a very short period of time.
I am not arguing for moral relativism. Some things are clearly wrong, but the public policy question, the practical question, is how we build a better society. We cannot assume that punishment, per se, works to do that. In fact, I think it manifestly does not. We cannot and should not assume that visiting hatred and pain and humiliation on people who enter the world traumatized does anything but reinforce all their worst existing impulses. We can of course jail such people for life, but it is expensive, and it is a waste of life. It is unnecessary, if in at least some cases those people might have contributed to society, rather than being forced by a court of law to spend their lives taking from society.
People operate according to knowable psychological principles. They have reasons for what they do, and most of the time those reasons are ex post facto justifications for feelings which preceded them. Those feelings, in turn, arise from primitive sufferings which they do not know how to bring to awareness, and whose existence they don’t even suspect.
I would stipulate, for example, that the feeling of shame causes behavior which justifies it.
And it is a truism that cops are psychologically very similar to the criminals they jail, just as most fire-fighters have more than a little in common with arsonists. Among other things, they like breaking stuff.
My point is that if we are to survive, we all need to be more psychologically sophisticated. We need to bring what we know about human mental health into the public domain. This does not mean going easy on psychopathic killers and rapists, but it does mean asking basic questions about motivation, figuring out who people are and why they do what they do, and making intelligent decisions on that basis. Sometimes, that decision might be a course of psychological treatment, of a sort that can over some period of time prove itself effective, something which must be continually measured, and changes made regularly. In my own view, virtually everything starts with trauma, and the fact that most therapies have not address trauma is the reason most of them fucking suck.