CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

I remember as a teenager plucking a book off the rack–-something you saw everywhere back in the 70s, almost as ubiquitous as fat James Michener novels. It was called The Prophet. I opened it randomly and felt struck in the face by what it said:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,
And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,
And the white–handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.
Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,
And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for
      the guiltless and unblamed.

Astounded, I’d never heard such an idea expressed before: it tied the criminal and victim together in a way that did not exalt the innocent and separate them from the crime and the criminal committing it. Instead it pointed to how the two were bound together such that even the innocent became culpable for the violation, and therefore…who really was innocent and who guilty? Where did one end and the other begin?

This seemed to have no relation to the theology I’d heard in Catholic elementary school, where they drew a very definite line between those who were good and those who were evil (though I do recall Jesus’ principle of forgiveness, also taught there, which maybe deserved more air time). There’s nothing in this statement that reflects the “law and order” political rhetoric of the 70s and 80s (and continues even now) that gave rise to the gigantic prison-industrial complex we have in America. It certainly has nothing to do with black-and-white conservative condemnations of immigrants and other groups. For that matter, it would be rejected by much of the contemporary Left as not “woke” and “victim-blaming.” It seems as if you must divide your allegiances with great absolutism, and hence, for example, you are either pro-Palestinian and therefore anti-semitic, or vice versa.

Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese-American, 1883-1931), who wrote these words, comes from a much more subtle viewpoint. Rather than insisting on our division, he insists on how we are both bound together and not truly one above the other.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good
      from the wicked;
For they stand together before the face of the sun even as
      the black thread and the white are woven together.

The “face of the sun,” the light of greater wisdom, shines on the black and white threads of the evil and the good, which are unavoidably “woven together.”

As the whole purpose of prisons is to “separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked,” it’s built into the social psychology of incarceration that you become segregated from the rest of a society that no longer accepts you as a valid member. Well, if you steal from people, corrupt them, sexually assault them, wound or kill them, no one does want you around, and most of the time, they want punishment-–and quite possibly, severe punishment-–for your transgressions.

So there’s the rub.

The unjust and the wicked remain unjust and wicked, and so society must respond to that somehow. As you may not know, there does exist in America something called the “abolish prisons” movement. It makes the very good point that many people are in prison because of economic and racial inequities, which could be addressed by putting money into, say, neighborhoods that produce unusual amounts of criminals. It’s not money for policing, mind you, but money that might provide better housing, more employment opportunity, drug rehab, etc. In other words, we could try and attack causative social issues directly vs. the symptomatic treatment provided by carceral punishment.

If all that concerns you depends on how much taxpayer money gets wasted, if you can keep a single person out of prison, you could save anywhere between 20,000-70,000 bucks a year. This is a more wholistic/socialistic and just plain economically sensible view of crime and punishment.

Still, if a man comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man, and he shoots and kills them both, is this a “social issue”? Does that man get to go free? Does he deserve his freedom for his act of passion? You don’t have to be in an impoverished neighborhood to act out this way. You could have every amenity. Do you just give him a lot of therapy? What do you do?

Well, the logic of crime and punishment puts him in prison, taking his freedom from him, since he can’t be trusted to make a civilized choice in the throes of conflicted emotions. He’s now got some time to think more carefully about his choices.

So by whatever logic we choose to establish or not establish prisons, we have to find some way of understanding what crime is. This is precisely where Kahlil Gibran refuses to leave us off the hook. It’s not those people over there who have nothing to do with us, the good people over here. If we recognize ourselves as one society, one nation, or even one Earth, we’re not that simply divided out. If we see ourselves as one family, just as in the case of literal families, then we have some responsibility to one another that’s unavoidable.

That, I would say, starts to get at the root of the problem here. The people we put into prisons nevertheless are part of the larger social family we constitute as a society, and it’s an enormously passive-aggressive stance that we lock them up and hope they’re never heard from again. Let them rot, but those rotting people remain part of our society, even if we prefer to ignore their existence. 95% of the people sent to prison return eventually to the streets.

For myself, I feel like it wouldn’t be that hard for me to end up on the inside of the razor wire. If a few things went a little bit differently, maybe that would be my fate. I’ve received certain gifts in this life, and that’s been my good fortune. A bodhisattva would not take that for granted, but would understand that still involves the whole web of life that we operate within. Our interdependence with one another, and more than this, our long karmic interdependence of many lives, means we’ve all been in these various roles going back beyond any hope of reckoning. We’ve played the aggressor and played the victim, but there’s no telling where that might have started, and does it even matter?  What matters more requires that we wake up from the nightmare of crime and punishment itself.

This is where we get to the crux of it. Gibran:

OFTENTIMES have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong
      as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you
      and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise
      beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest
      which is in you also.

He points, uncomfortably, to “the lowest which is in you also.” If we bifurcate our society into “the holy and the righteous” against the “wicked and the weak,” that begins with how we personally bifurcate ourselves in the same way, identifying one side against the other, rather than seeing ourselves whole. This leads to a lack of humility and a lack of shared perspective, where the holy and righteous might recognize their own wickedness and weakness, and the weak and the wicked might recognize their own potential holiness and what a righteous path might genuinely consist of.

Whatever role we end up playing in the drama of crime and punishment, it’s not fixed in place as to who can express compassion and see beyond the fixed boundaries of the game. If we’re unable to see the humanity in each other, the darkness will only persist, and no one will see the face of the sun, though it’s been shining on us all along.