On our museum trip, the exhibition that had the most impact on me was also the smallest: that between the Pou Kanohi gallery and the Spitfire, focusing on the lives of three men involved in airstrikes on German cities. These men killed civilians, and destroyed the lives of countless more. Despite this, their lives and achievements are honoured. However, I do believe they deserve to be understood as more than the destruction they caused throughout the war—how can we understand the World Wars without understanding those involved as more than murderers and destroyers?
The idea of honouring the lives of those who commit immoral acts beyond what they have done struck me, particularly in relation to Mihingarangi Forbes’ lecture. Those who commit crimes today and are punished for them rarely receive this same understanding. We do not get the chance to see them as humans, as more than their crimes. We never learn about how much they loved to play piano, or how they fell in love with their partner.
There are practical reasons why we never learn these things. News articles can only be so long, there are so many crimes committed that it’s a logistically improbable task, etc, etc. But how does the way we talk about people who commit crimes affect the way they are treated? It’s only recently that people in prison have had the right to vote returned to them, and that only applies to those with a sentence of less than three years. Would we deny the vote to prisoners if we understood them, not as criminals, but as friends, family, and community members?
The concepts of someone as a human being worthy of understanding and as someone who has committed an immoral act can, and should, coexist. Someone loving their family does not inherently mean their actions are forgivable or understandable. However, if we take time to understand someone’s surrounding environment and circumstances, we may better understand what led to these actions, and what we can do to prevent others from taking similar ones.
This concept is vital to the prison abolition movement, which seeks to eliminate the need for prisons through addressing the root causes of crime, rather than punishing those who commit them. Although understanding people who commit crimes outside of their criminal status is not actually addressing the source of crime, would we be as willing to dismiss prisoners to their punishment if we understood them as friends, family, and community members? Why are we so eager to examine the lives of those who have committed crimes long past, yet ignore the lives of those who have committed present crimes beyond their criminal status?
(Crimes and immoral acts are not one and the same. However, given that crimes are typically considered to be immoral acts, I have conflated the two. The distinction between the two is a further and deeply nuanced conversation that is also related to the larger conversation around prison abolition.)
Hey Michael, this is a very enlightening and well-written blog post that picks the brain, encouraging a humanistic perception of crime and punishment. I think a common realization amongst liberal arts students is that there is no perfect morality. In some cases, morality becomes unreliable because it can be influenced by social, cultural, or even economic circumstances. My moral bias stirred in the Mihingarangi Forbes’ lecture because it felt hard to downplay the damage that domestic violence, an event that could overshadow the entire narrative. Why would you let a man like that anywhere near your children, let alone wanting him to be released from prison? It is not easy to balance such powerful moral persuasions because a person’s core values can inform them. I think the analysis of atrocity, both in academic and in law, needs to be executed impartially because there is a large extent of personal bias injected into it. Sometimes declaring a point of view in these matters does more harm than good. It is essential to understand what we morally object to, a trustworthy method of finding a productive solution.
Great ideas discussed here, really enjoyed reading it! I wonder whether you think, as I do, that the distinction outlined in your first paragraph is caused by the relativistic interpretaionas of these acts: where, notwithstanding the harm caused, the orthodox interpretation (at least as purported by their contemporaries)interprets a necessary evil as morally permissible. The distinction here represents the dissipation of the rule of law in wartime where the crimes interpreted now as immoral are condoned in a wartime setting.