I'm still here. I have just not posted much on here because of two reasons; a major case of blogger's block and general businesses that has kept me away from my computer over the past 10 days or so.
I finally got together with my man Justin Fogel on Tuesday night. It had almost been a month that ain't right. He brought over some marinated chicken, garden fresh green beans from his mom's garden (in North Dakota). We grilled, had a sumptuous dinner before heading down to the
AQ (Artist's Quarter) to check out their new organ player.
The guy who left (whom we loved) is called
Billy "The Legend" Holloman, the new guy's called "Downtown" Bill Brown. Both names start with a "billy" and end in "n" which I think is cool. We liked Downtown, but he's just not The Legend. Decent show. By the way this is about jazz (the only music type you'll find discussed on this here blog).
Justin and I now habitually use these escapedes to share and discuss our mental musings. For several reasons, the issue of prisons and retributive justice was at the fore of my mind, so that's what we discussed. Lately I've come to think that prison and sending people there is contemporary society's failed fantasy of how justice should work.
Someone commits a crime so we commit them to prison in order to reform them and to payback society for their wrong against it. As reality would have it, things don't work like that. First off, the prison system is failing dismally at reforming criminals. In fact prison have become accesories to some of the most hienous crimes today.
But second and even more importanly, the idea of retribution is just logically defective. A prison sentence or even capital punishment doesn't payback anything for anyone. It doesn't restore a crime victim's former dignity and it certainly does not give the criminal 'what he deserves.'
What do I mean, let mean illustrate this point using the analogy I gave Justin. Let's you have a ten dollar note and I take that money (committing a crime). The fact that I give it back to you (payback/retribution) doesn't absolve the fact that I violated your ownership of that money. Further, me giving back your money, doing time or whatever doesn't equate to me enduring suffering tantamount to my violation of your dignity and ownership of the money. Hence I say that the idea of retributive justice is inadmissable logically.
Society today is caught up in the mental trap of retributive justice, people are going to prison by the hord to give back the proverbial ten dollar bill back to society. Sadly, it's not solving the crime problem.
See, injustice is a violation of human dignity. It's lot more than just physical loss/damage. Therefore, I think, soceity must graduate our mentality about justice, retributive justice in particular, to engage the deeper problem.
Hopefully by looking deeper into the problem we can solve it effectively because the idea of retribution just doesn't work.
There you have it, my latest thoughts.
