In "White Bear", an episode of Black Mirror, Victoria is a criminal condemned to punishment in the "White Bear Justice Park". Every day Victoria wakes up in the park with no memory. She heads out into the park where she goes through an intense, seemingly real scenario designed to cause her to suffer the same psychological pain that her victim suffered. Afterwards she is taken into a room full of delighted spectators. She is reminded of her crimes, and then paraded in front of a jeering crowd to the room where she woke up that morning. There her memory is wiped for the next day, which for her will seem the same as the first. Except for a few staff members, most of the people at the park are there for just a day. They visit the park to be entertained by and to help punish Victoria. This goes on for weeks, maybe months.
Victoria committed a terrible crime. After helping her fiancé kidnap a young girl, she recorded him brutally murder the young girl. While Victoria certainly deserved punishment for her crime, the punishment she received was extreme. The purpose of the punishment was to force Victoria to experience what her victim experienced. For the most part, I think the punishment successfully recreated the victim's experience, but is that desirable. To recreate the experience of the victim for the person who commits a crime. Subjecting the criminal to what the victim went through victimizes the criminal. There are atrocities that society refuses to inflict on anyone because we have no business inflicting those atrocities on anyone. In war, certain chemical weapons are not used for this reason. Some crimes are so terrible that the punishment cannot sufficiently recreate the crime without going further than we are (currently) willing to go. It is a scary thought that we could be pushing that limit into punishments that are more horrible.
The most disturbing part of Victoria's punishment to me was the reaction of the bystanders. I do think they were right to hate the crime Victoria committed, but they hated her. They enjoyed watching her suffer. Her pain brought them pleasure. Did Victoria enjoy watching the girl die as much as these bystanders enjoyed watching her punishment? I doubt it. In a very real way, these bystanders were deriving pleasure from an action worse than the one they were helping to "punish". This seems to be rewarding them for doing the same sort of thing, or worse, that Victoria was being punished for.
2 comments:
i think most every child has heard the line "this hurts me worse than you," while receiving punishment from a parent, that element of correction is definitely not being reflected in this ideal. I like you are left with the question who is really the more demented individual Victoria or the general public portrayed?
The audience's thoughts about what they are doing to Victoria really are scary to think about. I think their belief that this is justice makes them blind to the fact that they are enjoying it too much.
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