Recently, my philosophy class and I watched an episode from Black Mirror. This episode is titled, "White Bear". Sounds cute and cuddly right? . . . Well this episode and the situation presented is the exact opposite of that. This situation raises a variety of ethical questions for me. The idea of torture and its history has always been interesting to me. I believe that people who commit crimes should be upheld to some form of punishment or debt. However, White Bear takes a new turn on exactly "how" people repay said debts. In a sense, it seems like mere torture. This episode starts us off with a young lady named Victoria. She awakens lacking vital memories and is thrown into a situation where she is being hunted. Later in the episode, we find out that Victoria was apart of a heinous crime. And her punishment, is to be constantly tortured and forced to relive a traumatic experience. However, Victoria claims that she was coerced into to doing said action. In all honesty, I am not sure that I believe her but that is not important in my opinion. What is important to me is the phrase, "an eye for an eye". While yes, I believe that it is fair that she is being punished, but must she constantly relieve this experience? I do not believe our justice system should embrace methods like this. But at the same time, isn't that exactly how our justice system is?
For example, our justice system has sentences like life in prison and the death penalty. That's the issue that's still here today, what about rehabilitation programs? Should Victoria have the opportunity to redeem herself? Taking the standpoint of the mother, its an instant no. I would be furious and would want the woman who stood by and let my child to be tortured to suffer immensely. However, I have seen cases of where parents of murdered children have advocated on the behalf of the criminal. And are the people who watch Victoria suffer any better? Here they are, taking enjoyment from someone else's suffering just as they claimed she did.
Another thing that caught my eye was the economic aspect of this whole new form of punishment. It appears to be some sort of an amusement park. What bothers me is how exactly is this funded? And does this add any economic value to the United States? While this question probably doesn't matter, I am still curious to see if this program has any impact on the economy. Now is there a "white bear" for every criminal? Is this form of punishment experimental in this world or has it become a permanent and normal idea. While the episode doesn't exactly answer all of this questions, it still leads me to think further about how our justice system is today.
3 comments:
The parallels between White Bear and our current justice system is very concerning. Because lots of jails are privately owned and rake in a profit based on the amount of people in the cells. So by know that in a fictional world they outright turn criminals into amusement and allow people to pay money to watch these people be terrorized is very concerning.
I thought about how this episode kind of represented our prison system as well! As Asha said, most prisons are privately own meaning they only reap their maximum profit by incarcerating a numerous amount of people. I felt that this idea was sort of hinted at when they revealed that they were charging people money to get into the Justice Park. In the business world, the only was you gain profit is to either charge more or get more people to buy your product, and I feel as though they were probably marketing or advertising this Justice park, in some way, for there to be new faces or volunteers everyday. Ultimately, it seems like the prison system is just one big business profiting off the imprisonment of individuals.
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