The Crime Of Punishment

The threat of punishment has never been, nor ever will be, a significant deterent to crime. The primary criminal deterent has always been social consciousness. And, the primary cause of crime has always been the lack of social consciousness.

The threat of punishment works to undermine social consciousness, and by doing so only ends up promoting the very behavior it purports to deter.

Social consciousness can be instilled in a person's character at any age under proper conditions, though it is most commonly instilled during childhood. In order to instill social consciousness the person's personal experiences must reflect an ability to trust social mechanisms and social structure.

The lack of social consciousness is always caused by social experiences that demonstrate a lack of benefit to the individual while at the same time demanding personal sacrifice and suffering.

The primary benefit of a healthy social system is a sense of belonging and purpose. It is the perceived absence of this benefit that leads directly to criminal behavior. This is also the very first thing that is forcefully and thoroughly stripped from a person as soon as they have any encounter with the so-called Correctional System as an offender. It should be no wonder at all that such people, even if they had a relatively intact social consciousness going into the “System”, rarely have any social consciousness at all coming out of the System.

The only way to restore a person's sense of social consciousness is to restore their faith in the social system. Punishment does the exact opposite. Criminals rarely believe that they deserve to be punished. (Recently corrections officials have figured out that the offenders who genuinely believe their punishment was deserved are far less likely to re-offend. The officials don't seem to realize that this is a cause, not an indicator. The criminal behavior itself is an indicator of the more serious problem of lost social function.)

Punishing the criminal is tantamount to killing the messenger. It doesn't solve anything and usually only makes the problem worse. The only solution (and one that has been proven to work) is to develop a system that promotes, instead of destroys, social consciousness. But that would diminish the need for the government's power, and we couldn't let that happen, could we?