The Thinking Man's Fridge

“Justice is the bread of the nation, it is always hungry for it” (François Chateaubriand)

This weekend saw four children, aged 10, 11, 15 and 17, die when they crashed the stolen car they were travelling in. New reports say that the four had stolen another car earlier that night, thrashed it, bogged it, and set it alight.

Amidst the usual throng of people who jump up and down blaming the parents, the teachers, the government, society in general, and anyone else they can think of, there is always a loud public voice screaming ‘they got what they deserved’. This usually is rebuked as being a heartless and Draconian response to what initially appears to be a tragic situation. Comments such as this appeared almost immediately on internet pages:

• “Well all I can say is if you are going to go stealing cars and driving at excessive speed… then you got what was coming.”
  
• “Tragedy? Four less out-of-control louts who would have been of no benefit to society? Almost certainly.”
  
• “They wont do it again.”
  
• “Four less criminals off our roads.”

So why, now that we’re nigh-on a decade in to the 21st century, does the public mass still make such proclamations? Have we, as humans, regressed to a Colosseum-like lust for blood? It’s not as barbaric as people think. No, I think it’s actually far more simple than that.

It is the legal system that has a lot to answer for in regards to the incredible public response to this accident.

For many years the legal system has been handing down weaker and weaker sentences for crimes throughout society. The usual ‘slap on the wrist’ response which we are now accustomed to leave no feeling amongst the public that justice has been done. This is particularly reinforced from time to time when a driver’s actions cause the death of other people, and we find out that they have multiple driving, drinking or drug offences for which they have not served one day in a prison cell.

The public is tired of this happening over and over and over again: car theft, home invasions, attacks on the elderly, rape and child murder, attacks at trains stations and being afraid to walk through public places. If sentences for crime were such that the public could say about the offender ‘they got what they deserved’, then we wouldn’t be waiting for incidents such as this, where the criminals end up killing themselves by their own misadventure, so we could say ‘well… they got what they deserved’.

If you want to find out why the public has such a revengeful or vitriolic response to these incidents, it’s because they have not been able to rely on our legal system to provide a sense of justice when criminals are caught.

I firmly believe that the sense of revenge is a very key part of what makes us human (and before anyone starts lecturing me about ‘an eye for an eye’, learn to read the Bible in context, rather than spouting useless quips like an infomercial, and look up a guy called Hammurabi while you’re at it). Now that custodial sentences have been watered down as being a time for rehabilitation rather than punishment, that sense of revenge and social justice can’t be found by the public. At that point, as happened in this incident, people rely on a sort of ‘natural justice’, where those perpetuating the crime are killed by their own misadventures, to feel that sense of social justice, and to have that desire for revenge placated.