Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory
It goes on and on. We're afraid to make any judgments on people and we tell the press latter "He was a little strange".
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The reason for this is partly that hindsight is 20/20. We can always look back at someone's past and say "well, they should have known, he did X." The problem is, there's an X for every one of us, yet only a very few commit crimes.
As a somewhat less violent example, take the concept of the "gateway drug". The real gateway drug is alcohol. If you look at, say, heroin users, nearly every one of them, if not
every one of them, started out with alcohol. That doesn't mean that using alcohol, or even
abusing alcohol, will lead to doing heroin. For most people, it doesn't. Locking up every alcohol user because they might someday become a heroin addict would be silly. The equation "every heroin user drinks alcohol" does not reverse to become "every alcohol drinker uses heroin."
And that's the problem with "doing something" about people who are considered different in some way. In the case of the killers, you can
always find something different -- because if you look hard at pretty much anyone, you can always find something different. You're looking backwards, after you already have your criminal, for some sign that he's going to become one. Of course you can find something. The problem is, out of thousands, maybe millions, of people who demonstrate that same form of weirdness, all but one are not, and never become, criminals. If you jail all of them anyway, as a form of preventative measure, you've just jailed thousands or millions of innocent people in order to catch one guilty one. If you simply investigate them all, you're still investigating thousands or millions or innocent people in order to weed out that one guilty one, which is a horribly inefficient waste of resources. If every cop can thoroughly investigate one weird person per week, then at a rate of one in a thousand, on the average he'll go 10 years of spending all week, every week, investigating weird people before he catches one actual criminal. Assuming a 30-year career, our hypothetical cop would catch three criminals per career. Generally, we expect better results than that from our police. And that's 1 in 1000; make it 1 in 10,000 instead (not getting anywhere near the millions) and the odds are that despite a career of investigation, he'll
never find an actual criminal. Or, of course, you can criminalize being weird. That's going to require a lot of jails, because there are an awful lot of weird people out there. And while you're locking up all the obvious weirdos, you're missing the Dennis Raders. So you've jailed millions of innocent people and there's a particularly sick serial killer living unseen among you. That doesn't work either.
Hindsight is 20/20, and we can always look back and say "well, of course we should have seen it coming; he did
that." But if you're looking forward, which of the thousands of people who did
that are the one you want?
Most gay lovers' spats
are gay lovers' spats (though how the cops in the Dahmer case could have
been in his apartment and not noticed the smell boggles the mind). Most people who have religious writings all over their vehicles
just have religious writings all over their vehicles; I saw one this afternoon, in fact. Most people acting strange never do anything
but act strange. Depending on who you ask, an awful lot of us on MobileRead might qualify, actually.
Look at me: I have a whole series of books on how to kill people (Writers' Digest sells them). I play
World of Warcraft. I keep snakes as pets, and more than one. I'm abysmally slow at unpacking any time I move; there are still boxes. I tend to not say the right things to people; I don't do the whole social thing very well. If I were to kill someone tomorrow, the media would have a field day with my life. "Look at the background here: Better known as 'Worldwalker' than by any actual name. Look at that library full of books on how to kill people, books on weapons, books on wars ... the whole library gives me the creeps. Plays evil games, and worse yet, is pretty good at killing other players in them, and don't forget the pseudonyms from there, either. See those reptiles, we're talking
live snakes here; how can pet snakes, of all things, not be a warning sign? And look at the pictures of that house!" Except, of course, I've never killed anyone. I've never hurt anyone. The worst I can plead guilty to is harsh words. I'm totally outside the social mainstream. I'm
weird as most people see weird. I'm a lot weirder than Dennis Rader, that's for sure. I'm weirder than Ted Bundy. I'm enormously weirder than Harold Shipman (most people are). I'm just not dangerous, and they were.
So "doing something" about the people who don't fit the social mold ... pre-emptive justice ... just doesn't work. Sure, if you cast your net widely enough, you'll catch some criminals -- some of the ones who made the news -- but you'll miss others. You'll give the Shipmans of the world a free pass. And to do that, you'll be arresting thousands or millions of people who will never commit crimes, just because they fit the profile. It's as effective as locking up all alcohol users in order to catch future heroin traffickers. Or, in simpler terms, locking up all males between 15 and 30 would get the overwhelming majority of criminals off the streets ... but is it worth the cost?