| Healing the breach... |
[Feb. 8th, 2009|10:43 am] |
First, an easy way for those of us gifted in words/language to get some instant egoboo? Go to thefreedictionary.com main page and play the game. In two minutes, I felt better about myself. :P
On a serious note, the quote of the day there got me thinking, and I thought I'd see if it got anyone else thinking, too. It's all academic, but I thought this makes an interesting jumping off point for talking about alternative justice systems:
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Googling "how to repair a breach of faith" didn't get me any interesting hits on the first page, so I substituted trust...in this case, they are true synonyms, I think.
I found a website called Ask Maple, where she is talking about regaining trust after an affair. Let me turn some of the points from that article to this topic...
"Let's put them all on the same level so that they are all equal. If we do that, we can see that we are all guilty. None of us is perfect. We have all committed some type of offense..."
I think it's true that error is a matter of degree, and this is something we should keep in mind, even when we see errors that go to a degree that is incomprehensible to us. Criminals are not aliens...they are human beings.
"What prompted the affair? Is there a problem within the marriage that caused the erring partner to feel a need for outside involvement? Every facet of feelings must be explored by both spouses and openly and honestly discussed. Once the truths are on the table they can be discussed openly and each one examined as to how it can be resolved or reconciled."
To me, this is what a court system should be about, determining the truth of the situation, considering all the factors, the reasons behind the crime and examining them for resolution or reconciliation. Addressing only an individual act out of the context of society does not result in accurate justice, I think.
She talking about the imbalance of power between the guilty party and the victim, and how that imbalance needs to be rebalanced as soon as possible...this goes to the heart of how our society deals with people who have served their time/paid their fines and are now returned to society. We must find ways to rebalance, or society becomes a strong contributing factor in recidivism.
She talks about stopping affairs before they happen by asking ourselves certain questions about burgeoning relationships. Perhaps this is part of how we should be educating our children...how to assess an action to determine if it is moral. We need, perhaps, to teach them to recognize and acknowledge immoral motivations and rationalization. I don't think this necessarily needs to involve religion or anything terribly controversial, either. As a group, don't we "know" when we are acting out of negative motives? We need to study how we "know" that, what, exactly, it is that we "know", so that we can bring that out and teach that. Rationalization, really, we already know plenty about, but I've never seen anyone formally teach what it is, how to recognize it, how to stop doing it, when it's okay and when it's not...that last one is a doozy, though!
She talks about the healing stage, which goes back to addressing the return of people to functioning society...
"The victim in the relationship must have compassion for the offender and earnestly desire restoration of a level, equal relationship. They must be extremely sensitive to the harm caused when the issue is constantly referred to during periods of questions of trust, which may arise in the future. The offender must realize the intensity of their breach of trust and realize that only time can heal the heart. They must realize that they may need to be aggressively honest for a period of time, explaining anything, which might be perceived as being suspicious, even before being asked."
In our discussion, the victim isn't just the individual(s) directly affected, but also society as a whole. You know, we apply this responsibility to victims in non-criminal behaviors, but in the case of criminals, we, as a society, tend to put the entire burden on the shoulders of the criminal. Many think that's just, but I suspect they only think it is just because the criminal isn't a person to them. That's the heart of this discussion, I think, that the justice systems currently in place lacks human intimacy...perhaps that's the place to begin?
Your thoughts?
Edited to add some thoughts from my shower time:
I was thinking that things like counseling and education, specifically moral education, should be mandatory for all incarcerated individuals, and offered for victims. (More jobs! :P)
Now, I realize "moral education" is a tricky term at the very least, but I was thinking, perhaps the way to approach that is to work backward from the laws our society has put in place, then teach the underlying ideas, acknowledging the cases in which there are several and explaining them all...that only bolsters the case for why something is immoral, after all.
This may be the way to (re)separate morals from religion, something our multi-faithed society has struggled with almost since inception.
Side discussion possibility: Is it useful or interesting to discuss faith in terms of trust and trust in terms of faith? How are they different, how similar, etc?
Back to the main discussion:
The ideal resolution is a society in which everyone is a content, fulfilled, functioning member. Should not that be the stated goal of ALL our governing systems? Should not everything, including our justice system, be modeled on that goal? If we approach from that point of view, instead of one of punishment or survival, might not we be shaping the path to that lofty goal as we go?
Yeah, someone's going to call me a pie-in-the-sky idealist, but entrepreneurs all say the same thing...reach for the stars, or you won't get there. |
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