A Final Solution?

Some of you may sometimes get the impression that I propose a dream like Utopia with simplistic solutions. That my vision is entirely one of peace and love and is unrealistic in its optimism.

Some of you who know me better and can see that the vision I propose is in fact grounded in concrete reality, have grasped that for me the key pint is this.

A more efficient culture better capable of achieving the name of the life game.

God's rule. Darwin's rule.

Go forth and multiply.

I hold the beliefs in the vision I do for the future, because I envision the evolution of the human species towards greater efficiency, producing more lives, with greater capabilities spreading like a virus through the universe. Man, the triumph of life. Man, God in the making.

I believe the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the key to that. Overthrowing primitive concepts such as property, monogamy, war, wage slavery, eye for an eye justice and moving to a much more technologically secure, luxuriant, enlightened world where humanity moves towards becoming a collective species is the way forward.

So there are some concepts I embrace which to some, would seem sinister.

And there is one point in the agenda I propose post-revolution that many would privately agree with as long as they didn't have to know about it, but would concede is shockingly brutal in its proposition.

And I confided to a fellow blogger yesterday what that was, simply because the subject of sex offenders came up. My view on them and exactly how I would recommend tackling the problem.

You see, there are several sensible points to abolishing eye for an eye justice. We can move to a far more sensible system of simply just righting the problem. Rather than continuing to think that two wrongs make a right.

So, I don't see much sense in an extensive prison system. In a lot of cases, the idea is to show crime doesn't pay. So payment is what is required. Give back. The fraudster who embezzles six thousand, make him wash graffiti off walls at five pounds an hour every weekend till he's repaid it with heavy costs added- say fifty percent extra.

And what of those who we lock up for rehabilitation? well, there isn't much money left for that, once you subtract the £100,000 a year every prisoner costs just to be locked up. It would be far more sensible to invest that money in providing rehabilitation courses that work and just collect them every morning with a police van.
And still make them do community service as well.

So no, I would only be actually locking people up if they were a clear danger to the public.
And like with mental patients, only let them out once you were sure they'd recovered.

The one point a lot of people would object to, is yes, it would mean a lot of murderers, possibly the majority, actually might not even need locking up at all. And many for not long if they were. My experience of talking to murderers, is that for most of them, the only thing that made it murder was a few minutes of intent. A few minutes of total loss of self control. In most cases, that lightening will never hit that spot again. Their lives are ruined enough without making them sit for fourteen years and think about it.

Some would say I'm taking liberal humanitarianism way to far but letting murderers off scot free, if they can satisfy a team pf psychiatrists they really pose no danger to the public, and really were not in their normal frame of mind. But I would.

But there's an angle to this, that may make you shiver a bit.

First, let me say I don't agree with the death penalty. Not as a way of righting scores. So, in the case of Saddam Hussein, it was wrong. In the case of Dr Crippen, it was wrong. In the case of Ruth Ellis, it was wrong. It is always wrong, when you can see that the guilty party isn't a danger. Because they made choices and could very well have chosen otherwise. Ironically, the fact that makes them most guilty makes it most wrong to kill them. Because in the very fact that they really COULD have chosen otherwise lies the fact that yes, they owe, but no, IN THEMSELVES they're not dangerous. Circumstances made them so. And society as a whole, should show the ultimate mercy in showing that when the law wins, it has a moral right to win, because it is better than the rules of those it has defeated.

In not enforcing eye for an eye justice, we prove the moral right of the law to be obeyed. The law exists, to make life more humane. Otherwise, it is worthless.

So. What do we do with those we know are a danger. Currently, we have to let them out, but we can't let them out of our sight. Deep down we know that no matter how hard we watch them, most will re-offend.

And their disease cascades down the generations, as abused grows up to become abuser. It warps and twists our society, a society where one in ten must carry the burden of being the victim of sexual abuse.

We need to tackle this. And regrettably, there is really only one way. And it's brutal.



And yes, you would be right to point out that in one sense, its a scheme that has overtones of totalitarianism.
Because I'll be blunt. It's an extermination programme. I won't call it anything else.

I propose to actually exterminate them. Physically.

I'll admit that this is one part of my thinking on criminal justice that I only finally realised was the ultimate logical position recently. Here is the thinking.

Originally, I'd considered that the best thing to do with these sorts of offenders was have a few highly secure units that they couldn't escape from- the only 'prisons' I'd keep, but ensure they were looked after well. The same rules would apply to them as to those judged criminally insane. In effect, I'd simply be classing all sex offenders as criminally insane. But I figured that all of them should be treated as well as they could in there, the idea being that they were simply incurably people the rest of us didn't want around the place. Which is fact. It doesn't matter ultimately why they are the way they are. The fact is, you can't change it, and we don't want them around. The lives of the rest of us are better off if they're safely locked away and nothing can change that.

But then I got to pondering a slight illogicality in the overall position.

Because I do agree that where it has to be taken as pretty much certain that the prospects of a person ever having a life without physical pain and suffering are virtually non-existent, that person should have the right to die.

And I also believe that doctors are right to switch coma victims off, if the prospects of their coming out of the coma are tiny. Because in a sense, they probably are suffering.

And I found myself thinking that surely, in these cases, having to be locked up forever because you're just too disgusting for your peers to want you to live in their company, surely that existence is one lacking in quality.

In fact, would it not be the most humane thing to say that assisted suicide is the right decision. It's not suicide, you say. But in a sense it is. You could legitimately argue that this person is so far from the grounds of what normal human beings term rational, that he is not competent to decide on his own quality of life. It has to be determined by others. And if you took as the assumption that no sane person could bear to live and have such sick impulses, you could rightfully judge that they were condemned to a life of no quality, with no prospect of improvement, and yet incapable to request their own euthanasia.

In other words, I propose that the simple procedure should be that all sex offenders should be assessed on conviction to see if there is a realistic prospect of their being cured. And if the answer is no, a simple shot in the arm solves the problem.

Put down, like a dog. But humanely. It doesn't have to be some morbid ritual- think more the way the the old man dies in The Secret of Soylent Green. Nice music and a nice video to go out with.

And I'd suggest being ruthless about it. Really. It's a disease. Usually incurable, if it takes root. It really doesn't matter what causes it, or whether some cultures once thought it OK. Fact is, we've decided its not good for society they way we want society to be, to tolerate it at all.

What I would suggest is that an initially harsh extermination programme would soon remove the bulk of the apparent problem. Then the next step would be to look under the carpet. Because the abuse would remain, just now the spotlight would be shining on it.
In time, with enough persistance, abusers would be quickly uncovered and swiftly despatched.
And the stats would soon tell you how much the problem was nature, and how much nurture.

So even if it turned out to be genetic, society could now decide if it wanted to sterilise the possessors of certain genes known to be a problem.

People might suggest this is a harsh and brutal approach. I would simply pr pose they consider this well known thought experiment, used often in decision making training.

You are walking beside a train tracks. Ahead of you the line branches.
The points are set to the right.

No train is due for hours. To the right, five children are playing on the line.

To the left, a Workman fixes the track.

Sudden;y, you look behind you to see a runaway carriage hurtling down the line.

The children can't hear you. The workman can't hear you.

But you can get to the points before the carriage does.

What do you do?

Do you do ANYTHING?

And that of course, is the point of the thought experiment. Can your conscience live with either choice?



Because it seems to me, we can actually eradicate the problem of sex offenders once and for all. It really is in our power to do so. Its just we fear the implications of deliberately doing so. One point is the idea that we're playing God.
Thing is once, you've started growing ears on the backs of mice, you're kind of in God's toybox anyway.

It does sound like a 'Final Solution'. Because it is. But perhaps the best parallel I can find is this. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible is a powerful use of a historical event, the Salem Witch Trials, to make a point about the then contemporary McCarthyite Communist hunt. But as one critic pointed out, the parallel was flawed for the simple reason that the McCarthyites were at least hunting something that existed.

You see, the thing that was wrong with the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem', ultimately, was that in its assumption that the world would be better without Jews in it. We don't agree with that.
But we DO agree the world would be better without sex offenders. We're all agreed on that. And there really IS only one long term solution to the problem, one that eradicates it for good.

And I can't help feeling that the facts are that we can now potentially identify, eliminate and eradicate for good, a minority of society that cause harm to the existence of society, disrupt its existence and who add entirely to the detriment of the concept of the greatest human happiness.

We can wipe them out.

And we should.



Please do NOT read this as telling you go out on a vigilante crusade. I'm talking about society having the right to eradicate them, having been given that power by democratic consent. Not you as individuals thinking you should get an early start on the task.