The episode "White Bear" brings up a lot of questions on how to deal with criminal acts and the fine line between where justice ends and where torture begins. Victoria is far from a saint. More along the lines of killing and torturing a child, but is her punishment necessary for her crime? At first, it seems like it, but once you figure out that her punishment is an ongoing cycle that she doesn't even know why this is happening to her, the reasoning is a bit unclear. This brings up the question: should a criminal be punished if he doesn't even know why's he's being punished? This can apply for people with mental illnesses or in Victoria's case, memory loss. If he or she wasn't in the right state of mind to know whether what was right or wrong, does he or she still deserve to be punished, since this person would technically be a different person than the one who did the crime? If they are, would that just be torture?
However, in Victoria's case, when she murdered and tortured the girl, she was in the right state of mind when she did it. So this bring another question: what type of punishment do you deal out to criminals? Do you want the criminal to learn from their punishment or only suffer from it? In Victoria's case, she only suffered. Not once did she learn from the situation because she got her memory wiped after each time. If people go to jail to change into a better person, this would see like an ineffective choice because all people are doing is betting on him or her to not learn how to become better but be the person they were when they did the crime, so the punishment would feel more effective. Another problem is maximum and minimum sentences. If a person goes to jail for arson and gets a maximum 3 years, if the person learns his or her in those 2 years, would the last year just be useless punishment? What does the last year do for the now reformed criminal? On the other hand, what about people who can't be fixed? The people who are repeat offenders that don't care what happens to others or not. Would they just deserve punishment for the rest of their lives or do they deserve to be removed from the rest of society completely?
2 comments:
Victoria wasn't able to learn anything because her memory was being erased. The justice park served no purpose and did not serve any justice.
I believe they deserve to be removed from society completely. What would be the point of throwing through an endless cycle of punishments?
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