Turning The Ballot Box Against Republicans

25 years? Your judges hand down so many extreme sentences.

Yes, cruel and unusual punishment. I have always believed the death penalty is less cruel.

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In our culture, it’s not uncommon to look unfavorably on rule-breakers and say they should have known better. Many of us grew up with parents who favored the “hot stove” theory of education: You warn a child that the stove is hot, so they learn not to touch it. Often, the child touches the stove anyway. That’s the education part. Then you tell the child, “I told you so.” Burned fingers are the physical manifestation of what comes from not listening.

But there is something pernicious hidden in this lesson. Something we don’t like to admit or say out loud. And that is the concurrent belief that those who don’t listen to our warnings deserve whatever punishment they receive. It gives us a brief sensation of moral superiority to say, “Well, what did you expect?” Or, “I told you so.” We imagine the pain that others endure for ignoring our warnings is warranted, even reasonable.

We do this often in our own country. We hand down outsize punishments that really aren’t much about the crimes themselves but are mostly penalties for breaking the rules. We don’t hate crime nearly half as much as we love punishment. We are fanatically dedicated to upholding the rules even when the rules themselves — and the people who make them — are suspect. And we hand out sentences that speak to the vast distance between those who have no trouble following the rules and those whose lives that are harder, meaner, scrappier. We cling to “I told you so” because it helps one group maintain that distance.

But this kind of thinking is unproductive and often just cruel. And we can be just as ruthless as the Russians when it comes to the price we make people pay for not following the rules.

We must resist this kind of thinking because it is, at some level, vindictive. It is objectively wrong to punish two people for what amounts to a victimless crime. It’s an imaginary moral victory that provides comfort to no one. It might work on children, perhaps once or twice. But mostly, it just makes us feel better about ourselves.

Our government should work to bring both Griner and Fogel home. I know it will take weeks, if not months. I know we will probably have to trade some truly rotten bad guys away to get them back. And I know it will consume the time of a lot of people. But I know it will probably happen eventually and, when it does, it will be something we can feel good about.

A lot of these crimes are committed by mentally unhinged/unwell people and may even be the child of another mentally ill person. The biggest mistake we made was in deconstructing facilities for the mentally ill. There, people got their medication, shelter, food, some kind of treatment, and society was safer.