Mob killings or the death penalty – it’s all about wanting a redistribution of the fear we feel, writes Glen Heneck.
Cape Town – It’s an awkward thought, but there’s a meaningful link between vigilante murders and the abolition of the death penalty. The mob killings that have been ominously increasing over the last while are directly related to the perception among law-abiding citizens that the established criminal justice system is hopelessly unequal to its protective task. Criminals are getting away with murder and people are increasingly despairing and angry. Sociologists tout redistribution of wealth as a panacea for social ills, but what township residents want is a redistribution of fear.
The problem is that, for sophisticates everywhere, the capital punishment debate has long since ended. Public executions are seen as relics of a more barbarous age, like sweatshops and male-only suffrage. The modern consensus, in the West at any rate, is that “cruel and unusual” punishments are wrong: not needed, not civilised and not effective. The killer blow, so to speak, was the evidence that the reintroduction of state sanctioned killings in some American states had little or no bearing on their levels of violent crime.
I’m an abolitionist by instinct and by dint of a half decent education. I can’t help thinking though that there’s a serious discussion to be had on the subject, with specific reference to our local circumstances. I am, you could say, against the death penalty on principle, but without being wholly convinced that a society at our stage of evolution can afford to be shot of it.
In the UK, by way of revealing benchmark, the vast majority of the population is educated, invested and cowed to such an extent that the threat of disembowelling, or hanging, drawing and quartering, is not practically needed. They have a murder or 10 each week, but it can by no means be said that the society suffers an epidemic of violent crime. This is a country that was executing pickpockets at one point – in the ages of both Shakespeare and Dickens – but they dismantled the last of their gallows about 50 years ago.
We, of course, are rather less fortunate in terms of both mass sensibilities and mass circumstances. We suffer 30 times the British homicide rate, with over 18 000 people succumbing each year. That’s close to 50 murders every single day – and yet our policy makers, in all three arms of government, seem to believe themselves morally bound to follow the First World lead. The most exacting First World lead, which excludes not only parts of America, but also countries like Japan, Russia and Singapore. And of course China, where they summarily shoot about 30 people a week.
My informal survey of the comparative history suggests that all human societies have made use of the death penalty, in their early stages at least. In some cases, applying the most imaginative and bloodcurdling methods. It is only when they reach a certain level of maturity that the practice falls to be reviewed and, in some cases, abandoned. The inference being that fearsome punishments have been universally regarded as necessary civilising devices – and that freedom from this particular form of terror is properly seen as a luxury; as a communal privilege that has to be earned, over time.
Terror, that’s what it is we’re dealing with here. That form of extreme fear that is calculated to stay the hands of those contemplating gross offences against the common good…
South Africa Today – South Africa News
