Post No.: 0987
Fluffystealthkitten says:
The notion of ‘murder’ – like all crime categories really – is socially constructed hence the existence of different legal codes in different times and places. The notion of ‘crime’ cannot exist without the creation of laws by a given society to criminalise certain actions. It’s not an objective imperative to attempt to live in civilised societies – we could live like lawless wild animals instead.
Unlawful murder isn’t absolute. Unnatural deaths can occur due to abortion, accidents, euthanasia, capital punishment, in war against enemy combatants, when prisoners of war get executed, or when civilians get killed as collateral damage, honour killings (which include revenge killings, as well as confrontational killings where two people challenge each other to a fight and either party could’ve ended up being the murderer) and more. So should all killings be viewed and punished the same? To what extent does the intention behind a homicide affect whether or not we should deem it as murder?
Even if you think two presented cases are examples of unlawful murder, you might think about them differently – like premeditated versus non-premeditated, commissions versus omissions of action, or intended versus unintended, cases. And even if intended – for what reason? Should we allow for aggravating and mitigating factors when ascertaining responsibility and culpability? How shall we decide what are reasonable expectations from people?
The precise definitions will depend on the jurisdiction but homicide is usually broadly broken down into – from the relatively most severe to the least – first-degree murder (a premeditated and intentional kill), second-degree murder (an unpremeditated but intentional kill), and third-degree murder and/or manslaughter (an unpremeditated and unintentional kill).
So motives are something we must consider. Yet it’s difficult to truly establish someone’s motives because they’ll attempt to rationalise the reasons behind their acts should they be arrested.
Whereas attempted murder en-tails the presence of an intention to kill, not to merely cause grievous bodily harm – for murder to be found, there’s only the need to have intended an unlawful assault that resulted in death.
If a defendant intended to kill someone but ends up killing another person, they can still be found guilty of murder due to the doctrine of transferred mens rea (the intent to kill).
The public and media respond to different forms of murder differently. Why does the image of large corporations that (slowly) cause (many) deaths down the line after flouting health and safety legislations rarely spring to mind whenever we think of unlawful murder? The killing of a newborn baby by her/his mother might be viewed less harshly than the killing of a child by a paedophile.
A perpetrator might be a victim of unfortunate, desperate, impoverished socio-economic circumstances and/or of her/his appalling upbringing? A violent person might be a victim of social disrespect, perhaps because of her/his social class or race (you’re less likely to need to feel angry if you’re not persistently being discriminated against or marginalised)? A killer might be a victim of her/his own biology, personality or a mental illness, like high testosterone levels or anger management issues? Yet even if so – how far should we go in accepting these as mitigating factors or extenuating circumstances?
Euthanasia is the patient’s own choice. But aren’t they essentially coerced into that ‘choice’ by their hapless circumstances? Another individual may have been indoctrinated by a group into joining a suicide pact? These are difficult quandaries to answer as a collective society.
Manslaughter is a form of homicide but is viewed as being less serious than murder. Generally, any unlawful homicide that isn’t classified as murder is categorised as some form of manslaughter, like accidental death. It can be a case of voluntary manslaughter if the perpetrator experienced a loss of control, the heat of passion (a crime of passion), diminished responsibility or was a survivor of a suicide pact. It can be a case of involuntary manslaughter if death is the result of gross negligence or an unlawful or dangerous act.
Most homicide perpetrators are male, aged 16-35. Unemployed citizens often have little to lose, which decreases the disincentives to perpetrate homicide. Professional or skilled workers rarely commit homicide (although wealthy individuals can afford to hire others to carry out murders for them). The vast majority of murders occur between relatives or people who know each other (especially spouses), at home.
Most homicide victims are male, aged 21-35; with those aged 0-5 being another high rate group. In the UK at least, black and Asian people are disproportionately more likely to be victims.
Despite these statistics, individual homicides aren’t always comparable, which makes it difficult to form any generalisations about homicides and the people who commit them.
…Regarding the penal system, there can be a dilemma between maximising prison efficiency (putting similar criminals in the same facilities) but then grouping like-minded individuals together and risking them scheming together, sharing their ideologies, contacts and enlarging their criminal networks once they’re released.
It’s a tad similar to whether to group disruptive pupils together into one class (which reduces the chances of any one of these pupils improving but at least they won’t be disturbing any well-behaved pupils) versus splitting them apart and incorporating them each into classes full of well-behaved pupils who won’t play along with their disruptive behaviours (which improves the chances of each of these disruptive pupils improving due to positive peer effects but risks occasions when a disruptive pupil is riotous enough to disturb an entire class of well-behaved pupils).
According to one account, the inception of Daesh/ISIL took root because many high-ranking Sunni military personnel, who were formerly under Saddam Hussein, were detained in Iraq by western forces during the 2003 Iraq War. Having already been angered by the western invasion – by congregating them all together inside the same prison, they could plot their schemes for an Islamic caliphate. (Also, every time an innocent Muslim anywhere in the world was suspected of plotting terror and was tortured or intimately surveilled, or arrested and detained for prolonged durations without charge (where was the ‘presumption of innocence’?), it increased the risk of them and their family and friends radicalising and despising ‘the West’, even if they were previously neutral.)
So a (poorly-run) prison can act as a place for criminals to actually hone their criminal strategies and build a network of criminal connections. They may also normalise each other’s criminal attitudes and behaviours by being amongst other criminals. If they don’t genuinely wish to become better citizens, they could potentially game the parole system by feigning improvement.
If they alternatively genuinely wish to become better citizens, they might instead be constantly reminded of their offences instead of helped in moving onto a new life. Or they might believe they’ve been fixed by merely spending time in prison when the factors that help minimise their chances of re-offending once they’re released haven’t been sufficiently addressed at all (e.g. they’ll be dropped right back into poverty again and desperate for ways to find money to fund a drug habit they’ll fall back into after one more temptation in the outside world).
Criminals can be effectively perpetually punished – they serve time with restrictions on their liberties while in prison and, even when released, their punishment continues because fewer people wish to employ them, rent them properties, etc.. They’re not always fully forgiven thus can become marginalised and unable to successfully reintegrate into society. They may therefore resort to crime again, creating a vicious cycle.
So they may be punished beyond the terms of their prison sentence, through social stigma and the collateral consequences of criminal conviction. Many first-offenders are adolescents or young adults who’ve just simply made a foolish mistake that they regret. Even high-profile individuals who were merely arrested but not convicted can have tarnished reputations and be treated with caution by society.
Some people wonder why civilisation has generally agreed to spend enormous proportions of its taxes on imprisoning sizable numbers of its workforce, and in turn ends up spending too much on housing criminals relative to housing the poor or homeless per capita?
Well one group that benefits from having as many citizens incarcerated as possible, and incarcerated for a long time, are private for-profit contractors. Some such companies are even quoted on the New York or London stock exchanges, and they collectively have immense lobbying power against governments. So is there an inherent flaw with the public sector outsourcing or contracting out these kinds of services (e.g. prison, offender management, probation and immigration services) to for-profit enterprises?
There has concurrently been, overall, a massive rise in the number of drug-related incarcerations over the past several decades in the US. And mixing non-violent inmates with violent inmates encourages more inmates to become violent. This behaviour may transfer once they leave prison.
Like any other for-profit business, they want as much repeat business as possible to maximise their profits. So does this present a conflict of interest between these corporations serving their best to minimise recidivism from the inmates under their care once they’re released (i.e. maximising their rehabilitation) versus serving their best to maximise profits for their shareholders (including possibly by leaving these inmates more vengeful of the system and society that punished them)? The latter presents a cost that society pays as a whole.
Overcrowded prisons and understaffing also cuts costs, and cutting costs is another way to maximise profits. In some prisons in the US, there are limited rooms and beds so that some beds are inside enclosed rooms, some are on bunk beds in communal spaces, and some beds are makeshift mattresses placed on the floor – which sets up an environment of inequity and discord. There aren’t always guards present. There’s not always help for mental health sufferers. They might have balcony floors as if inviting inmates to jump off and commit suicide. Inmates may have periods when they’ve got nothing to do, and ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’. Smuggling in contraband is often too easy.
Make the inmates more employable, help them get jobs, and their probabilities of committing a serious crime after being released will be vastly reduced. But some of them are just made to colour in pictures of Peppa Pig during an ‘employability skills’ class(!) (This was caught on camera in HMP Northumberland in 2017 – a prison operated by private firm Sodexo. G4S has been embroiled in a number of scandals too.)
Linking the payments paid to these contractors to prison metrics doesn’t always work – when proxy quantitative targets are the aim, the actual qualitative service to rehabilitate inmates can degrade, and staff can become overworked due to understaffing.
The ultimate purpose of a prison sentence is to rehabilitate an inmate – not to punish them or get revenge. This is for the sake of everybody in a community hence we all have a stake in their rehabilitation.
…In the bigger picture – we appear to need both carrots and sticks to some degree, plus approaches to prevent as well as punish crimes. Some believe that some criminals can never completely shed their criminal mentality. Nonetheless, in advanced democracies, we don’t want to return to/emulate those times or places where criminals were/are branded with hot irons, had/have their offending limbs amputated (e.g. chopping a thief’s paw off) or were/are publicly executed and gibbeted on display as an example to others. Forms of capital punishment still presently exist in the USA and Japan though.
One suggestion is to make lawbreakers repair, pay for and/or clean up the damage they’ve caused where possible, plus a little bit more. Make amends so that they can earn some respect back and personally move forwards. If they do this then they ought to be reaccepted as a productive and forgiven member of society.
Meow. Restorative justice focuses on repairing the harm caused by criminal behaviour as best as possible through cooperative processes that involve all stakeholders, including the victims. Please read Post No.: 0748 for more.
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