By: Jane

Thanks for this piece. I feel your pain, but overall, I find this attitude naive.

There will, unfortunately, always be violence and other crime in our society; it’s a fact of life that we must contend with. Appropriate punishments must be meted out in the interests of deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, or some combination thereof. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. (I’m open to the idea that incarceration is overused and ultimately does more harm than good in many instances, but I am opposed to universal prison abolition.)

Even if we were to rid the world of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and racism, men of similar ethnic and class backgrounds would still keep killing each other. They represent the overwhelming majority of murderers and victims.

I do think that education will lead to a reduction in bigotry, but it will never get rid of it completely. Even without bigotry, people commit crimes out of desperation, greed, anger, and probably other motivations I can’t think of at the moment. I googled someone’s name today and accidentally came upon the grave of a girl my age who died 18 years ago at the age of 20; I clicked, only to discover that she had been shot in the head by her boyfriend at her job. I don’t think the boyfriend was the spawn of Satan — I don’t believe in Satan. I believe that he, like all people, is theoretically capable rehabilitation and remorse. But I’m not going to support the destruction of societal structures that protect the vulnerable among us from those who wish to do us harm.

I will finally point you to statistics around violence against women in Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_women_in_Mexico

The lack of punishment reflects a societal indifference to the value of women’s lives. The same could be said of transphobic crimes that go uninvestigated, unsolved, unpunished. It’s a necessary evil, perhaps, but punishing wrongdoers is society’s way of recognizing the value of the person harmed.

I realize it’s de rigueur in some circles these days to explain away the impulse behind certain criminal actions, to view the incarcerated as victims of an oppressive government. And that’s not entirely wrong. But it’s not the full picture.