Crime and Punishment

By Tom Kando

We have been hearing about this monster Garrido for the past couple of weeks. He kidnapped, raped and impregnated Jaycee Dugard, and held her in captivity for 18 years. Horrible. But the large amount of attention devoted to this case by the media may have some unintended negative side effects. I just saw Dr. Phil hollering on TV about the authorities’ scandalous failure to prevent what happened. Garrido should not have been on parole after his previous felonies. There are dozens of registered sex offenders living in the neighborhood around South Lake Tahoe where Jaycee was nabbed, etc. etc.

The message is loud and clear: In the Garrido case, the authorities were asleep at the wheel. Our society is much too lenient on criminals. We need to lock up more and parole less.

This is how our criminal justice system works. Legislation driven by one-time, celebrated cases. That’s how the three-strikes laws, the Megan laws and all the other inane laws which broke the California budget without necessarily lowering the crime rate came into being - on the basis of individual and highly publicized cases like Polly Klaas and Jaycee Dugard.

This is no way to run a society. Our prison system is utterly broken, with 3 times as many prisoners as it should have and 10 times more prisoners than it had a generation ago.

The State is trying to negotiate a reduction in the prison population, but with the hysteria generated by sensational but rare cases like Garrido, conservatives will once again be able to bamboozle the public into believing that we need to lock up more, not less.

And another thing: Why do we need to come up with new categories of crimes all the time? When the concept of “hate crime” first came up, decades ago, I had a problem with it. I asked: Isn’t most crime based on some sort of hate? If I love you, I am not likely to kill you, am I?

And we have sex crimes. Why? Why separate out this category? Should we also have food crimes? And greed crimes? Pride crimes? Crimes against society? Political crimes? Sports crimes? Work crimes? Leisure crimes?

Crime is crime. It often consists of someone harming someone else. Often, it consists of harm to the collective. And it occurs whenever a law is broken, whether the law makes sense or not.

The main purpose of having categories of crimes is to agree on their seriousness. The greater the harm, the more severe the punishment should be. Many criminal classifications are useful: property crimes vs. violent crimes, the FBI’s distinction between Index crimes and Part Two crimes, felonies vs. misdemeanors, etc. etc. But other ones seem to reflect shifting cultural and political values more than scientific criminological concepts. They are not helpful. leave comment here