Human Zoos Revisited

My last article on prisons not surprisingly generated some heated views and disparate opinions on the subject. I plan here to continue in a critique of the prison system itself, and explore what I consider to be a more just, humane, and true alternative: The idea of restitutional justice.

It is worthwhile to retread some covered ground, if only to reaffirm the foundation for what follows. I was not and am not evaluating the supposed effectiveness of prisons; they can both in theory and in practice in some way prevent and punish crime; but are they the best way? Are they even close to being a good way? I think we would all agree that teetotalling is one answer to drunkenness, but by no means the best answer, let alone a good one.

No, the basic and fundamental nature and purpose of prisons is at issue – that is, to make the criminal the ward of the state, and rehabilitate him or her until the state determines the individual has met its own completely arbitrary requirements for re-entering society. I contend that far from being just, prisons destroy the humanity and basic liberty of the offender, never restore the offended – the most basic requirement of justice – and actually open doors for political oppression. How long before political dissent is considered full-blown treason, if our neoconservative or far left friends have their way? McCain-Feingold isn’t exactly an auspicious sign, and the secretive, closed nature of Guantanamo Bay should make us all wary.

I recently saw a TV show in which a prosecutor and defense attorney were haggling over sentencing for a man who had been a serial molester. They were almost casually bantering back and forth, weighing a man’s life – and a disgusting crime – by a few years here and there. How do you determine just how many years of life someone is going to be a slave to the government when they commit a crime? Who decides whether 10 or 20 years is an appropriate punishment for molesting children?

Consider what happens to a married individual who is sent to prison for 10 years. Think of what that actually does to this person, assuming it’s a man. He comes out alive and unsodomized if he's lucky. He’s been told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it for every waking moment. His family has lost its primary breadwinner, and is for all practical purposes destroyed. He has no applicable work skills anymore. He has no way of functioning as a free and independent individual. The Shawshank Redemption is the only worthwhile Tim Robbins film I've ever seen, and it was poignant and unflinching in showing the ravaging effects of prison on the human character, especially on human liberty. Freed inmates barely knew how to function away from the control of the zookeepers.

Remember who pays for this, folks. You do! In a supreme example of governmental perversion, the victims of crime end up paying the offender's bills through their confiscated taxes. This isn't about to be changed; the prisoners most definitely aren't in a "productive" position. Prisons are a lean, mean laundering machine for the state to gorge itself on private funds to pay for the millions of people it incarcerates. Talk about making out like a bandit.

So what do we do? Where do we go from here? We need to start with our very basic assumptions, and come to grips with the fact that we need an objective, knowable standard for law. If we are not working on this basis, we become our own standard. The modern state-religion is a striking example of how an unbridled philosophical and political autonomy will inevitably degenerate into totalitarianism; whoever has the power makes the rules. Far from the liberty ensured by a government bound by objective law, governments make up right and wrong as it suits them.

The very same Western culture that produced the giants of liberty also had a Biblical worldview as its foundation, a framework within which a civilization could develop. What this means is a return to the roots of what made our once-great nation so: a love of liberty and justice; justice not defined by the passing whims of whoever might be able to snatch power for himself at the time, but by the unchanging standard of God.

The most basic Biblical proposition that defines any situation, whether violent crimes, theft, or property damage, is that there can be only two possible offended parties in a crime: God, and the victim. As we have already established, the state doesn’t make the cut as an impersonal organization.

In any violent crime committed against another person, the very image of God is violated, and He demands that the equivalent be demanded of the offender. If a life is taken in premeditation, a life is required. Interestingly enough, for people who fret that this is cruel, Scripture has strict provisions for not only an accidental taking of a life, where the death penalty is not required; but also for ensuring that as much as possible, wrongful convictions are avoided – a case could not even come to trial, let alone conviction without the corroboration of at least 2 witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6). False witnesses in a capital case were also executed if found guilty (Deuteronomy 19:18). This system goes to great lengths to ensure, as much as possible, that false convictions are avoided, while at the same time making the serious consequences for capital crimes much more imminent.

Thieves should pay restitution of what he or she stole (Exodus 22:4). In the case of rape or other aggressive sexual crimes, the biblical principle again is that the offender has done violence to the very image of God in committing rape, and the life of the rapist is forfeit. Deuteronomy 22:25-27 makes it clear that rape is “just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him.” The libertarian non-aggression axiom gains its philosophical legitimacy from this very basic truth, that the individual has great worth and is not simply talking mud, as evolutionary Darwinists would have us believe.

One of the natural (and desired) results of a return to a biblically-based justice system is that bureaucrats find that most of their professional existence becomes completely unnecessary. As Jacob Hornburger wrote, the one legitimate purpose of civil government is to ensure that justice is done. Not the warped justice of today’s America, where it is considered a heinous crime to actually resist the legally sanctioned theft of the IRS, but true justice between an individual and his neighbor. “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly practice justice between a man and his neighbor, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, nor walk after other gods to your own ruin, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever” (Jeremiah 7:5-7).

The entire notion of justice is quite simply the redressing of a wrong committed by one party against another. Prison as an idea assumes that an individual’s freedom is his only by leave of the state, a power that God did not grant to it. Prisons function on the Marxist premise that the criminal “owes” society (the state) rather than the offended party, or victim. It is tremendously ironic that while so many liberals and neoconservatives recoil at the notion of slavery or indentured servitude to another person, they blithely encourage literal slavery to the government. The state should be an arbitrator, not an incarcerator.

This is not an exercise in bland, abstract theory. It is important to realize that there is an objective, knowable standard for law that is found in Scripture. If every man does "what is right in his own eyes" those who can forcibly take power or vote it for themselves through a majority pose an unrestrained threat to the freedom of the minority or the individual. Too many conservatives who should know better are caught up in the collectivist concern for the good of "society" – a concept that is nothing more than the Marxist bastardization of the biblical idea of the covenant community.

Prison by nature is arbitrary and so antithetical to the idea of impartial and objective justice; and, not coincidentally, an efficient means of expanding governmental power. The Soviet Gulag is simply the logical end state for what Solzhenitsyn aptly named the “prison industry.” Gather the “dangerous” individuals, separate them from the rest of the people, and put them through Clockwork Orange reprogramming until they meet the subjective standards the current rulers set for freedom. That is not justice. That does not embrace and value liberty and strictly limited government, which is what the founders of our nation envisioned. Calling for more prisons does nothing to address the malignancy of ever-increasing state control and injustice in our culture.

An astute reader sent me an article by C.S. Lewis which appeared in his excellent work, God in the Dock. Lewis' opening salvo against the "humanitarian theory" of punishment crystallizes the issue in his succinct, deadly accurate fashion:

In England we have lately had a controversy about Capital Punishment. I do not know whether a murderer is more likely to repent and make a good end on the gallows a few weeks after his trial or in the prison infirmary thirty years later. I do not know whether the fear of death is an indispensable deterrent. I need not, for the purpose of this article, decide whether it is a morally permissible deterrent. Those are questions which I propose to leave untouched. My subject is not Capital Punishment in particular, but that theory of punishment in general which the controversy showed to be almost universal among my fellow-countrymen. It may be called the Humanitarian theory. Those who hold it think that it is mild and merciful. In this I believe that they are seriously mistaken. I believe that the ‘Humanity’ which it claims is a dangerous illusion and disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end. I urge a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal [emphasis added].

In all this, it is obviously impossible to have a fully literal reestablishing of Biblical law; there just aren't too many oxen running around goring people these days. The principles, however, are as unchanging, true, and genuinely humane as they ever were.

Through the years prisons have been the means of governments (including those supposedly “Christian”) inflicting horrible abuse on the individual human being. Just because we are supposedly civilized today, there is no getting around the fact, to paraphrase Mr. Hornburger, that there is rot at the center of our empire. It’s time we all open our eyes and see it for what it is, before what Francis Schaeffer called our "personal peace and affluence" dulls us to the point that we give away all our liberty. I fear we have already come far down that path.

July 23, 2003