Crime vs. Punishment

In the episode “White Bear”, I think that the main character was deserving of her punishment. The only thing that I would change is her memory being erased. I think that if this was done to her after she filmed the child being burned, she would then understand that what she did was wrong. Even though this is an extreme punishment, it will likely cause her to empathize with the child and make her realize the extent of her actions. Many times, people do things without thinking of the effect on others and it isn’t until it is done to them that they know how wrong the action was in the first place. Of course, not all crimes can be treated this way, but in this case I think it would be rightly justified. If someone was capable of doing something so wrong and immoral, they too need to feel the same pain to a certain extent. I do realize that this line between what is acceptable and unacceptable to do may be blurry, but there must be more action done than just placing the person in jail or giving them community service. Going to jail or community service does not provide any real solution to people committing crimes. A lot of times people do their time in jail or do their service hours and then they are free to go back into the real world just to do another crime and get back into jail or service again. It is truly a never-ending cycle. There is no lesson learned and there is no justice being served. Ideally there needs to be a program that allows criminals to see and understand why their crime that they committed was wrong, but it is hard to make a program like this because each crime is different and all of them would need different punishments. Maybe some crimes can get resolved with an “eye for an eye” method, but some crimes are too extreme to be done to its doer again. With these extreme crimes, the death penalty is what is usually given out, but there must be some other way for them to be dealt with because many people believe that the death penalty is getting off easy compared to jail. Having the perfect solution to counteract a crime is seemingly impossible, but there must be something more to be done than what is going on now.