Eclecticism

The Burden of Responsibility

So the latest questions on this one's mind: at what point can you judge someone responsible for a crime, and what should be done in recompense for such actions?

The thought behind this one comes from terrorism, actually. Let me explain: I'm from America, where we have faced some rather brutal terror attacks in the past, the biggest of which is (of course) the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. I was rather young at the time, so I have no personal recollection of the event-- but that's not what this piece is about. I'm not here to tell you what an atrocity 9/11 was; I think that's evident to pretty much everyone. No, it's the people who aren't included in that "pretty much everyone" that I'm going to talk about. Obviously, since terrorist attacks have happened and will continue to happen, at least one person per attack must view that outcome as favorable. Well, why? Naturally, it's not always easy to understand exactly how someone rationalizes indiscriminately hurting people to get a point across, and that is something that would vary from person to person anyway. In the end, it doesn't matter-- what they did was entirely unacceptable... from our end.

So now it's time for a story. In 2013, a woman from Britain left to go to Syria alongside a man who was a black hat hacker for ISIS. The woman, Sally-Anne Jones, began to train female operatives to carry out suicide missions as well as encourage sympathizers to launch their own attacks. She also sent out lists of military personnel that were intended targets. Although it hasn't been definitively confirmed, it is likely that she was killed by an American drone strike in 2017. Ultimately, though, my point in this story isn't to share the horrible actions of one woman. My point is about her son. When she left Britain, she brought her nine-year-old son with her and dedicated him to the life of a child soldier. In 2016, the boy was filmed executing hostages along with four other boys. In 2017, her son likely perished in the drone strike with her. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that all of us reading this have been nine years old. Probably most of us, now older, have interacted with children at that age. It's easy enough to deceive them or to sway them, given effort and time, and that's in normal situations-- not in the life of a child raised by a person such as Sally-Anne Jones and forced into the military at such a young age. And yet, that boy participated in the murder of hostages a few years later, and I have to ask myself: how responsible was he for that? I have mixed feelings... my gut instinct is to say "not at all", given his age and his environment, but we're not talking about a firefight here. This was a point-blank execution, and if I excuse that at age twelve-- when what's right and what's wrong is known-- then at what age do I say that he was responsible? If he had reached adulthood and continued such actions, would I excuse him because that's how he was raised?

Speaking as a person studying forensic psychology, not as anyone with true authority, culpability is a mess. So, so many factors go into a person's life, some of which they have no control over. For example, low resting heart rate has a correlation with criminal behavior. So does low birth weight. If one's mother smoked while she was pregnant, one is at risk for potentially committing antisocial acts later. Even with environmental factors, how are children supposed to spare themselves from the effects of abuse, even if they are not the target? How are they supposed to turn out when the people around them drink excessively, take drugs, get arrested? Looking at the childhoods of many serial killers, it's hard not to initially sympathize with them. John Wayne Gacy lived with an alcoholic, violently abusive father who once beat him to the point of unconsciousness and told him that he was "dumb and stupid" and would "never be good enough". His father's effect extended into Gacy's adulthood up until his death. Yet, are we supposed to excuse Gacy's actions because of how he was raised? Are we supposed to forgive the man he is on account of the boy he was? The court did not, and he was executed in 1980.

At what point do we look at someone and decide that their circumstances just aren't enough reason to spare them punishment? The two factors that I see most often in the news today are mental state and age. If someone's of perfectly sound mind when they commit a homicide, they're likely to get a harsher punishment than someone who is not. If someone commits homicide at the age of 13 and another at the age of 33, the younger person is likely to get a more lenient sentence. But then we have to ask ourselves the effects of this kind of sentencing. I was watching a documentary where a boy who was about 13 or 14 and of sound mind murdered his step-father. The man did not abuse him and as far as I recall, the boy's justification ran along the lines of "I didn't like him". Although he expresses regret now, he is in a juvenile prison and expected to transition to an adult prison when he turns 18.

For people unfamiliar with the American prison system, calling it "unpleasant" is a gross understatement. When inmates look at this boy, they're going to think of him as "fresh meat". Violence, both sexual and purely physical, is rampant in some prisons; in some, prisoners steal objects such as barbers' razors and slice off bits of metal from their furniture to use as improvised weapons, and there have been records of hits arranged from prisons where the target was states away. Needless to say, it's practically impossible to emerge from the system unchanged-- and the problem is especially bad for people like that boy, since they have no skills to fall back on other than what they learned in prison. The rates of recidivism (the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend) are pretty high for people in that situation. Often, situations like these lead to some backlash against a punishment system as compared to a rehabilitation system. 

But as is the nature of things, the rehabilitation system isn't flawless, either. Norway's recidivism rate is at a worldwide low, and their prisons include therapy, education, and job training as well as vastly superior living conditions to the ones in American prisons. The downside is that many people complain that the standards of living are higher for prisoners than they are for many residents in nursing or retirement homes; additionally, Norway does not have a death penalty (whether that is a pro or con is personal opinion) and only has a maximum sentence of 21 years, which can be extended by increments of 5 years should the patient not be fit to return to society. That provides the chance for many people who have committed abhorrent crimes to return to society, including a man that killed 77 and injured hundreds with an explosive and guns. The problem then becomes whether you feel as if it is more important to agree with the long-term results (rehabilitation generally leads to lower recidivism rates than punishment) or whether you think that it is unfair to the victims that the person who caused so much harm has that sentence. I'm of the mind that regardless of which system you choose, we are (at the very least) not removing limbs and carrying out executions for basic crimes. Beyond that, I'll keep my opinions to myself-- back to the question at hand.

The burden of responsibility is as much on us as it is on the perpetrator. What do we do with a child-soldier who executes hostages? What do we do with someone who has had a horrible, violent childhood, but is willing to turn around and put another through the same pain? It's a complex issue, and not one that I have the answers to. If we say that it's fine to charge someone differently as soon as they become an adult, then is there really much difference between the state of mind of a seventeen-year-old as compared to someone who's one year older, especially since the brain doesn't finish developing until about your mid-twenties? If we say that it's fine to judge someone differently if they're fully aware of what they did (or should have been), then the boy who murdered his step-father could be in prison alongside someone three times his age. Even if you personally are fine with one of the options above, or any I haven't mentioned, there's no doubt that the people around you may not feel the same.

Ultimately, here is what I know about myself: regardless of how I felt about myself afterward, when I first learned of the true horror of 9/11, I thought that the perpetrators would have deserved anything we decided to mete out. I was and still am unsure of how exactly I would react to that child-soldier. The most I can say is that a drone strike wouldn't have been it, but whether attack drones are a necessary evil or just an evil is a debate for another time. This debate is one I return to again and again, wondering if there is any complete standard that I would accept. Our systems now-- whether you look at the most lenient, the most draconian, or anything in between-- all have their flaws, by the very nature of being designed by humans, run by humans, and involving humans. I don't think they'll ever be perfect, but I do think that it's vital to try and get them as close to perfect as possible. I realize what a complicated objective that is, but perhaps it will be my career in the future. As for you, I hope that you also shoulder some of this burden. Even if it's just keeping yourself educated, the reality is that this issue will affect many, many people over the course of your lifetime and after it, so the changes we make have far-reaching implications.