According to the BBC, there is dismay in India over a decision of the Indian Supreme Court to release three men convicted of rape and murder who had been previously sentenced to hang. Advanced opinion in India is in favor of hanging rapists.

Whether the Supreme Court’s decision was correct in this case depends very much on whether or not the weaknesses that it found in the prosecution’s evidence were real and substantial. 

If they were not, it is a terrible thing that men guilty of so brutal crime should go unpunished and be set free. But some of those who want the men hanged seem to think that it is better that someone should hang for the crime than that no one should, almost as a ritual sacrifice.

The Indian (and Japanese) resort to capital punishment is judged very differently from that of the United States, where it is deemed by most thinking people to be brutal, unjust, primitive and discriminatory.

Indeed, the very idea of punishment of any kind has often come under intellectual attack, not only for empirical reasons (that it fails either to deter, to reform the criminal or to protect society), but for philosophical ones. 

Criminals, penological liberals argue, are victims of their circumstances, such as poor homes or education, themselves the consequence of social injustice, and are often merely reacting to that very injustice. 

If they take drugs, they are victims of a mental health condition, and theft or robbery is but a form of economic restitution of what, in a more just society, would rightfully be theirs anyway. This is the philosophy of defunding the police.

There is just enough truth in the depiction of the criminal as the victim of his circumstances to make it plausible and to keep alive the idea that punishment is unjust. 

In most societies, criminals such as robbers and thieves do not usually emerge from their best-off members, and the biographies of many, perhaps even most, criminals are unfortunate.  

Penological liberals go further. Punishment is unjust because, in essence, we are all victims (or sometimes beneficiaries) of our circumstances and cannot be otherwise. 

Therefore, we are not truly responsible for any of our actions. We are but vectors of the forces acting upon us: and therefore to inflict punishment, by definition unpleasurable to those subjected to it, is cruel and unusual. 

There is no such thing as cruel and unusual punishment by contrast with punishment that is neither of those things because all punishment is cruel and unusual, a primitive surrender to the sadistic impulses that exist in all of us.

My point here is not to refute this philosophical outlook in the abstract, but to point out that it is rarely, if ever, consistently held by anyone. 

Observation of human beings shows that even the most liberal of penological liberals reserves in his heart a crime or offense that he wants severely repressed by punishment and is outraged when it is not. This crime or offense that is the object of his strongest reprehension may vary, but there is always at least one.

For example, if you say to a penological liberal that you think that burglars are too leniently dealt with by the courts, they do not say that convicted burglars should be released from prison; rather, they usually retort, “What about white collar criminals such as tax evaders?”

They do not extend to tax evaders the kind of pseudo-psychological understanding that they extend to burglars, but rather are offended that they often get away with their crimes or receive very light sentences even if caught. 

They often elaborate further: tax evaders do more harm than burglars, because a burglar steals only from a few people, whereas a tax evader in effect steals from millions. 

In speaking of tax evaders (to say nothing of rapists) all thought of human beings as victims of forces beyond their control is forgotten: and suddenly punishment, previously reviled as ineffective and primitive, is rehabilitated as being socially necessary and its absence disastrous.

I do not blame the kind of penological liberal I have depicted for his inconsistency, because I think it is impossible for anyone, or at any rate for the overwhelming majority of people, to think like such a liberal for very long. I blame him, rather, for his dishonesty, or at best his self-deception.

The fact is that the notions of reward and punishment are inescapable for human beings. 

Indeed, without them life would lose all meaning, hope and fear losing all application. We should become like Satan (according to Milton) on his expulsion from Heaven:

    So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear, 
    Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;  
    Evil, be thou my Good:

The dishonest pretense that there is victimhood where there is agency, which is the doctrine of radical liberal penology, provides excuse in advance for bad, even the most terrible, conduct, and thereby promotes it.