I don’t doubt that you think extrajudicial punishment is desirable.
I do doubt that you are a conservative.
Or even a person who is even vaguely interested in justice, our laws and the state of our justice system.
I don’t approve of any prison rapists or prisoner inflicted violence upon other incarcerated prisoners.
I read and hear illogical opinions of people just like you and shake my head, and cry out against you!
Do you really think just punishment is served if we as a society must depend on convicted and incarcerated criminals to meet it out?
Do you even know how to “think” it through, at all?
I don’t doubt that you think extrajudicial punishment is desirable.I do doubt that you are a conservative.
I'm actually not in favor of extra-legal, illegal, vigilante, mob "justice," or other non-judicial punishment, sarasmom.
I lasted five months as a prison guard quite a few years ago. It was far and away the worst, most depressing job of my life, though an eye-opener. One of the many things I hated about it was some of the guards' assumption of authority to do this, that, and much else on whim. If it need be said, part of what they had in mind was to goad inmates into attacking them, which afforded them the perfect excuse to beat the living [fill in the blank] out of them, consign them to isolation cells, et cetera. I expected the worst of the inmates; I didn't expect it of the guards, too.
That said™, the criminal who got his perverse pleasure out of kidnapping a little girl, doubless for horrible purposes, may well find himself helpless as a little girl begging for mercy from men who have children of their own and loathe men who prey on them. There's a weird irony in that: a rough, crude imitation or even parody of justice.
Do I advocate it? No. Do I think it's funny? Ironic, yes, in a grim way, but if funny, only in the same way an uncommonly witty dirty joke can be funny: briefly, with a wince. Do I mean it would serve the predator right to become prey? No, but I have a hunch the predator's best path through the horror he's inflicted upon children may be to experience it himself.
Is that true? I've read a hugely disproportionate number of child predators were themselves youthful victims of child predators, so perhaps there's no chance their being treated as they treated their victims will do them any good. Truth to tell, I don't have a definite answer. Most child predators and sex offenders in general never seem to comprehend their victims are people like themselves, so maybe there's not much hope they'll ever see daylight and move through and beyond their perverse compulsions.
I am sure if young criminals of every stripe and kind knew what jail and prison life is actually like, some would think twice, change their minds, and avoid the suffering. Strange to say, imprisonment is punishment in more ways than are apparent, though it all too often does a poor job of persuading criminals not to return to crime. I suspect what we regard as our "justice system" is less a system than an accumulation of largely failed practices, and the justice an accumulation of notions and traditions that ought to be discarded and reinvented: they don't get the job done, and dissatisfy all parties except lawyers who make their livings working the angles.
Since you wondered about my conservativism, let me confess I am and am not conservative, am and am not libertarian, and don't claim to be a paragon of logic. I'm more a creative type—novelist and painter—than a thinker, and a lifelong atheist rather than a Christian, so I fit the expected mold imperfectly.
Do you really think just punishment is served if we as a society must depend on convicted and incarcerated criminals to meet it out?
Letting criminals mete out "prison justice," perhaps I'll call it, isn't justice at all: it's what we actually have in place of genuine justice. Ironically—grimly ironically, even bitterly ironically—neither what we think of as our "justice system" nor what I've called "prison justice" does the victims half the bittiest part of a speck of good. I've wondered once or twice whether we've mistaken the word "justice" for "punishment."
You read an awful lot into that post, didn’t you? Self-righteous much?