Berner, Bruce

English

ValpoScholar

Valparaiso University
ValpoScholar
Law Faculty Publications Law Faculty Presentations and Publications
2-1990
A Meaner, More Punitive Nation
Bruce Berner
Valparaiso University School of Law
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.valpo.edu/law_fac_pubs
Part of the Criminology Commons, and the Law Commons
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Faculty Presentations and Publications at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for
inclusion in Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff
member at scholar@valpo.edu.
Recommended Citation
Bruce Berner, A Meaner, More Punitive Nation, The Cresset, Feb. 1990, at 26.
A Meaner, More 
Punitive Nation 
Bruce Berner 
President Bush's much 
burlesqued yearning for a "kinder, 
gentler nation" deserves more 
serious attention. It proceeds 
from an assumption that, collec-
tively, we are currently mean and 
punitive. But are we? What 
gauges exist to measure our mean-
ness-gentleness quotient? There 
are many symptoms, such as the 
creeping disappearance of simple 
courtesy, but I agree with the opin-
ion of deTocqueville that one of 
the clearest indicators of a soci-
ety's civility is the way it treats its 
criminals. This piece scans the 
recent American criminal punish-
ment landscape and concludes 
that the President's wish may be 
granted. We may become kinder 
and gentler because that is about 
the only direction left open. We 
have, I argue, hit near-bottom in 
mindless, punitive reaction to 
Bruce Berner, a graduate ofVU and 
member of the faculty of the School of 
Law, contributes regularly to The 
Cresset on issues of law and jurispru-
dence. 
26 
cnme. To demonstrate this, I dis-
cuss a series of recent cases and 
statutes. 
Before the young Republi-
cans assail this piece as the latest 
bleeding-heart entry in the war-
on-crime debate, let me suggest 
that such charge would be misdi-
rected. The issue herein is not the 
means for fighting crime. The 
events which are chronicled here 
are outside any sensible debate on 
law enforcement or penology. 
Among the justifications 
ordinarily offered for punishment 
for crime are deterrence, preven-
tion, rehabilitation, education, 
restraint, disapprobation, and 
reinforcement of norms. We can 
argue about these and redesign 
punishment as we learn more 
about them. We may choose to 
commit more or fewer resources 
to the crime problem as political 
tides ebb and flow. And, of 
course, we do. Such is the war-on-
crime debate. How many years in 
jail will most effectively prevent 
robbery? Should we throw more 
or fewer dollars in to the effort to 
rehabilitate offenders? Should we 
spend more energy on crime, 
drug, and alcohol education? 
Does the death penalty deter? 
Can people ever really change? 
0 
There remains, however, 
an undeniable, critical, aim of 
punishment variously identified as 
'just desert," "revenge," or "retri-
bution." We punish in part 
because some fundamental 
instinct tells us that deviance 
should prompt outrage which in 
turn should prompt the infliction 
of suffering on the deviant. Kant 
even had a calculus, complete with 
pluses and minuses, for exacting 
retribution. Unless and until the 
correct "payment" was made (nei-
ther too high nor too low), the 
cosmos was misaligned. We, with-
out this technical apparatu , 
ticulately sense that if cer 
conduct goes unpunished. 
world is out of whack. While l 
punishment aims, like preven 
or rehabilitation, reside in em 
cal, logical, and psycholo 1 
realms, retribution is almost.,. 
ly the product of how outraged 
feel and of our sense of pro 
tion in quenching that outra 
How much pure retribution 
demand (after we have exhau 
the preventive, educational, rc 
bilitative, etc. effects 
punishment) is a powerful bar 
eter of our collective mood. 
One final introductu 
observation. Punishment f 
crime is relatively high in the n 
ed States. Length of prison ter 
actually served for comparab 
offenses is nowhere else so hig 
The percentage of population 1 
prison is higher only in the Smi 
Union and South Africa. Th 
death penalty is abandoned in m· 
tually every other Westerr 
industrialized country. But eve 
accepting typical American pun-
ishment as a baseline, th 
following events seem to suggest 
current American retributi\ 
impulse amazing in magnitude. 
Cameron Kocher. Nin · 
year-old Cameron Kocher took hi 
father's high-powered rifle and 
killed a seven-year-old girl as sht 
whizzed by on a snowmobile. I! 
may have been an accident; it rna 
have been intentional. A jury will 
soon sort that out ~ince the Stat 
of Pennsylvania is trying Cameron 
for murder. 
Ray and Faye Copeland 
This couple is accused of thre 
murders. The State of Missoun 
seeks the death penalty. He is 75: 
she is 68. 
juvenile death penaltJ. 
Many states are imposing capital 
punishment on persons aged 16 
and 17. Some had been sentenc-
ing persons 15, 14, or younger to 
death until the Supreme Court 
The Cresset 
led the practice unconstitution-
as "cruel and unusual." 
nether or not it is cruel, it was 
t all that unusual. 
Abolition of the insanity 
fense. A large number of states 
mcluding Indiana) have virtually 
lished the defense of insanity. 
Before sorting through this, I 
oncede that these actions have 
en taken through judgments of 
few people or bodies not always 
ompletely responsive to the con-
tituencies they are supposed to 
r present. But there are so many 
ecent instances like these and so 
attle negative reaction to them 
at they can be fairly employed to 
o rtray the culture from which 
ey spring. 
None of the listed events 
an be fully explained by invoking 
deterrent, rehabilitative, or educa-
tive purposes . The idea of 
deterring Cameron or other "simi-
rly motivated" nine-year-old boys 
b.,· convicting him of murder is 
pretty bizarre. (For one thing, to 
ell a nine-year old that if he kills 
n purpose, he is a murderer, is to 
amply to him that such actions are 
ith in the realm of his choice. 
here are some nine-year olds 
t left ignorant on that point.) I 
·ouldn't want to have to argue 
that putting Cameron in jail will 
make him better. The experience 
up to now seems to have been lost 
n him. At pretrial conferences, 
he communicates (when he is 
wake) solely by tugging on his 
wyer's sleeve to ask when he can 
o home. He seems also to have 
missed a few of the more subtle 
o ral issues of his conduct and 
pcoming trial by telling all who 
em upset by this killing, "If you 
o n 't think about it, you won't be 
d." 
None of this suggests 
ihruary, 1990 
Cameron need not be dealt with. 
He needs help of all kinds and, if 
the killing was intentional, has 
needed it for a while. Family, 
church, school, counselling, the 
juvenilejustice system all may be 
appropriate. But to bring to bear 
on him the criminal justice system, 
that awesome apparatus designed 
to channel and express the moral 
condemnation of the community, 
is to seek revenge without 
thought. I have talked about this 
case with a number of child psy-
chiatrists, grade-school principals, 
and fourth-grade teachers, all peo-
ple who deal with the behavior 
and mentality of nine-year-olds 
regularly. Not one could see any 
sense in this prosecution other 
than an unreasoned manifestation 
of fear and retaliation. Cameron's 
case is not quite the fulfillment of 
the worst-case scenario, for Penn-
sylvania, as well as several other 
states, could bring the same 
charge against a child as young as 
seven. (Read my lips, "s-e-v-e-n.") 
Indiana law patiently waits until 
the child reaches ten. 
Annually in the United 
States, about 250 children under 
twelve gain access to a gun and kill 
someqne. It is a problem. Most of 
these cases are dealt with officially 
by the juvenile system. Many are 
the result of careless adults who 
may be appropriately sued civilly 
or punished criminally. Some are, 
irreducibly, the price paid for per-
mitting private weapon possession. 
As Ollie North likes to say, "It's a 
dangerous world out there." But 
let us not move toward "solving" 
this problem with the electric 
highchair. 
And in the case of the 
elderly Copelands, criminal prose-
cution is surely appropriate as is 
serious punishment if they are 
convicted. This case moves us into 
more uncertain issues of degree. I 
do not argue here that imposing 
the death penalty on the elderly is 
unjust, only that it is symptomatic 
of an extremely strong retributive 
impulse. It is akin to shooting a 
mouse with a cannon. Most seri-
ous studies cast grave doubt on 
whether the threat of capital pun-
ishment ever has measurable 
deterrent effect, and presumably 
any such effect would be dimin-
ished when aimed at persons 
nearer the end of their lives. So, 
rather than pass over the question 
with rhetoric about deterrence 
and wars on crime, let us admit 
that we need to kill people like the 
Copelands to get our fair measure 
of revenge, that imprisoning them 
for the rest of their lives is simply 
and finally not enough. 
The same analysis applies 
to executing teenagers. The only 
plausible explanation for doing it 
is to exact retributive payment. If 
we are afraid of what they may do, 
they can be restrained; we have as 
much power to deliver life sen-
tences with no prospect of release 
as we do to kill. As to deterrence 
of others, if we cannot demon-
strate that the death penalty 
influences adults, can anyone 
believe that the problem gets less 
complicated when we introduce 
the teenage mind? I've been 
unsuccessfully trying for years to 
deter my fifteen-year-old son from 
leaving his coat on the floor, 
which seems less complex than 
preventing killing. (I often won-
der if it would help if I didn't leave 
mine on the floor.) 
Even when the death 
penalty is not involved but the 
debate is over how long a prison 
term should be, Americans consis-
tently intuit a period of time long 
by any comparative standard. Law 
students often complain about 
some perpetrator of, say, a petty 
theft, "getting off with only a year 
in jail." I understand, indeed 
share, their frustration with crime, 
27 
but I wonder what would lead any-
one to put the word "only" in a 
sentence that contains "year in 
jail." 
The movement toward 
abolition of the insanity defense 
suggests either an unwillingness or 
an inability to distinguish illness 
from evil. If this statutory trend 
were simply a confession of inabili-
ty, abolition would be defensible 
on deterrence grounds-after all, 
insanity can be faked, so if we 
make the defense unavailable, we 
will at least deter the would-be fak-
ers. (Trying to figure out how to 
deter the truly insane will only 
make your head hurt.) Yet, there 
are a variety of ways to control the 
uncertainties of the distinction 
between illness and criminality 
without destroying the decisive 
moral difference . These may 
include: maintaining a definition 
of insanity which includes only 
gross mental illness and excludes 
neurotics and persons with per-
sonality disorders, conditions not 
only less serious, but more diffi-
cult to diagnose with accuracy; 
restricting the scope of expert psy-
chiatric testimony so that the 
ultimate question remains a moral 
one for the jury, not a "clinical" 
one for experts or pseudo-experts; 
placing the burden of proving 
insanity squarely on the defen-
dant; increasing the standard of 
proof as by requiring defendants 
to prove insanity by "clear and 
convincing evidence." The failure 
to try such intermediate steps (a 
few states have and they seem to 
work) suggests that, for many, 
there is not an inability, but an 
unwillingness, to maintain the dis-
tinction between criminality and 
illness. 
The whole theory of crim-
inal punishment, however, rests 
on the assumption that humans 
are creatures with the capacity to 
make choices. When facts demon-
strate that the choice to kill or not 
28 
is unduly compromised, we either 
applaud the choice as right Uusti-
fication defenses like self-defense) 
or recognize that to ask more of a 
person in such a position is to ask 
too much (excuse defenses like 
duress). Insanity, when properly 
defined, is the label for people 
who have so far lost the capacity to 
make choices or to discern the 
propriety of those choices that no 
criminal punishment could be 
effective or appropriate. If they 
are dangerous, we should protect 
ourselves from them. There are 
many legal and extralegal tech-
niques for this. For example, we 
quarantine those with serious, 
communicable diseases. But we 
don't view it as "punishment," we 
don't insist on visiting a criminal 
conviction on them, on announc-
ing to them that they are to be 
morally condemned. There are 
many factors in this complex ques-
tion of abolishing the insanity 
defense. One fair conclusion, 
however, is that there exists in 
America a spirit which possesses 
and indulges a willingness to 
impose punishment beyond our 
ability to account for it rationally. 
Nothing is wrong with 
righteous anger and outrage. If 
we never experienced it or acted 
on it, we would be ill, morally 
bankrupt, or in paradise. And 
clearly our institutions for chan-
neling and expressing that 
outrage are morally advanced 
from lynch mobs. But "how?" and 
"how much?" are different ques-
tions. Regardless of how 
stunned we may be at the havoc 
wreaked by nine-year-old children 
or by those with profound mental 
illness, moral outrage expressed 
by invoking the criminal process is 
inappropriate. As to other situa-
tions, in which such outrage is 
justified, we must be vigilant of 
both upper and lower boundaries 
in venting it. Too little punish-
ment risks moral decay. Too 
much risks cruelty. My the 
that the current pressure is on 
upper boundary. 
Will we become kin 
and gentler, at least in this ar 
criminal punishment? Not u 
two things happen. First, we m 
overcome the intuition that 
er and harsher punishments 
alleviate the crime problem. 
must stop blaming the fever 
the aspirin. We must cease c 
ouflaging retributive impulse ~, 
rhetoric about deterrence, edu 
tion, and "wars on crime." \ 
must, in short, own up to o 
thirst for revenge. Second, 
must want to reduce that thir 
The revenge instinct is strong; it 
probably insuperable by mer 
human effort. 
To the extent one thin 
the punishments chronicled abo 
are proportionate expression 
righteous moral outrage, it is net-
ther necessary nor advisable t 
become kinder and gentler. For 
those of us who would like to 
change, who see in ourselves mor 
thirst for revenge than we like t 
admit, we will often find changin 
very difficult. Anger and angui h 
frustration and fear are not light· 
heartedly left unrequited. The 
beasts are overcome only with pro-
found struggle. 
One helpful strategy is to fol-
low those who lead by example. 
They live in all times, culture 
and traditions. The patriarch 
Abraham, as well as Gandhi, Mar· 
tin Luther King, Jr., and Mother 
Teresa all come to mind. At ~ 
University under the cross, it 
shouldn't be too difficult to thin 
of one more. 0 
TM Cressel 


A Meaner, More Punitive Nation

Valparaiso University

Valparaiso UniversityValpoScholarLaw Faculty Publications Law Faculty Presentations and Publications2-1990A Meaner, More Punitive NationBruce BernerValparaiso University School of LawFollow this and additional works at: http://scholar.valpo.edu/law_fac_pubsPart of the Criminology Commons, and the Law CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Faculty Presentations and Publications at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted forinclusion in Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staffmember at scholar@valpo.edu.Recommended CitationBruce Berner, A Meaner, More Punitive Nation, The Cresset, Feb. 1990, at 26.A Meaner, More Punitive Nation Bruce Berner President Bush's much burlesqued yearning for a "kinder, gentler nation" deserves more serious attention. It proceeds from an assumption that, collec-tively, we are currently mean and punitive. But are we? What gauges exist to measure our mean-ness-gentleness quotient? There are many symptoms, such as the creeping disappearance of simple courtesy, but I agree with the opin-ion of deTocqueville that one of the clearest indicators of a soci-ety's civility is the way it treats its criminals. This piece scans the recent American criminal punish-ment landscape and concludes that the President's wish may be granted. We may become kinder and gentler because that is about the only direction left open. We have, I argue, hit near-bottom in mindless, punitive reaction to Bruce Berner, a graduate ofVU and member of the faculty of the School of Law, contributes regularly to The Cresset on issues of law and jurispru-dence. 26 cnme. To demonstrate this, I dis-cuss a series of recent cases and statutes. Before the young Republi-cans assail this piece as the latest bleeding-heart entry in the war-on-crime debate, let me suggest that such charge would be misdi-rected. The issue herein is not the means for fighting crime. The events which are chronicled here are outside any sensible debate on law enforcement or penology. Among the justifications ordinarily offered for punishment for crime are deterrence, preven-tion, rehabilitation, education, restraint, disapprobation, and reinforcement of norms. We can argue about these and redesign punishment as we learn more about them. We may choose to commit more or fewer resources to the crime problem as political tides ebb and flow. And, of course, we do. Such is the war-on-crime debate. How many years in jail will most effectively prevent robbery? Should we throw more or fewer dollars in to the effort to rehabilitate offenders? Should we spend more energy on crime, drug, and alcohol education? Does the death penalty deter? Can people ever really change? 0 There remains, however, an undeniable, critical, aim of punishment variously identified as 'just desert," "revenge," or "retri-bution." We punish in part because some fundamental instinct tells us that deviance should prompt outrage which in turn should prompt the infliction of suffering on the deviant. Kant even had a calculus, complete with pluses and minuses, for exacting retribution. Unless and until the correct "payment" was made (nei-ther too high nor too low), the cosmos was misaligned. We, with-out this technical apparatu , ticulately sense that if cer conduct goes unpunished. world is out of whack. While l punishment aims, like preven or rehabilitation, reside in em cal, logical, and psycholo 1 realms, retribution is almost.,. ly the product of how outraged feel and of our sense of pro tion in quenching that outra How much pure retribution demand (after we have exhau the preventive, educational, rc bilitative, etc. effects punishment) is a powerful bar eter of our collective mood. One final introductu observation. Punishment f crime is relatively high in the n ed States. Length of prison ter actually served for comparab offenses is nowhere else so hig The percentage of population 1 prison is higher only in the Smi Union and South Africa. Th death penalty is abandoned in m· tually every other Westerr industrialized country. But eve accepting typical American pun-ishment as a baseline, th following events seem to suggest current American retributi\ impulse amazing in magnitude. Cameron Kocher. Nin · year-old Cameron Kocher took hi father's high-powered rifle and killed a seven-year-old girl as sht whizzed by on a snowmobile. I! may have been an accident; it rna have been intentional. A jury will soon sort that out ~ince the Stat of Pennsylvania is trying Cameron for murder. Ray and Faye Copeland This couple is accused of thre murders. The State of Missoun seeks the death penalty. He is 75: she is 68. juvenile death penaltJ. Many states are imposing capital punishment on persons aged 16 and 17. Some had been sentenc-ing persons 15, 14, or younger to death until the Supreme Court The Cresset led the practice unconstitution-as "cruel and unusual." nether or not it is cruel, it was t all that unusual. Abolition of the insanity fense. A large number of states mcluding Indiana) have virtually lished the defense of insanity. Before sorting through this, I oncede that these actions have en taken through judgments of few people or bodies not always ompletely responsive to the con-tituencies they are supposed to r present. But there are so many ecent instances like these and so attle negative reaction to them at they can be fairly employed to o rtray the culture from which ey spring. None of the listed events an be fully explained by invoking deterrent, rehabilitative, or educa-tive purposes . The idea of deterring Cameron or other "simi-rly motivated" nine-year-old boys b.,· convicting him of murder is pretty bizarre. (For one thing, to ell a nine-year old that if he kills n purpose, he is a murderer, is to amply to him that such actions are ith in the realm of his choice. here are some nine-year olds t left ignorant on that point.) I ·ouldn't want to have to argue that putting Cameron in jail will make him better. The experience up to now seems to have been lost n him. At pretrial conferences, he communicates (when he is wake) solely by tugging on his wyer's sleeve to ask when he can o home. He seems also to have missed a few of the more subtle o ral issues of his conduct and pcoming trial by telling all who em upset by this killing, "If you o n 't think about it, you won't be d." None of this suggests ihruary, 1990 Cameron need not be dealt with. He needs help of all kinds and, if the killing was intentional, has needed it for a while. Family, church, school, counselling, the juvenilejustice system all may be appropriate. But to bring to bear on him the criminal justice system, that awesome apparatus designed to channel and express the moral condemnation of the community, is to seek revenge without thought. I have talked about this case with a number of child psy-chiatrists, grade-school principals, and fourth-grade teachers, all peo-ple who deal with the behavior and mentality of nine-year-olds regularly. Not one could see any sense in this prosecution other than an unreasoned manifestation of fear and retaliation. Cameron's case is not quite the fulfillment of the worst-case scenario, for Penn-sylvania, as well as several other states, could bring the same charge against a child as young as seven. (Read my lips, "s-e-v-e-n.") Indiana law patiently waits until the child reaches ten. Annually in the United States, about 250 children under twelve gain access to a gun and kill someqne. It is a problem. Most of these cases are dealt with officially by the juvenile system. Many are the result of careless adults who may be appropriately sued civilly or punished criminally. Some are, irreducibly, the price paid for per-mitting private weapon possession. As Ollie North likes to say, "It's a dangerous world out there." But let us not move toward "solving" this problem with the electric highchair. And in the case of the elderly Copelands, criminal prose-cution is surely appropriate as is serious punishment if they are convicted. This case moves us into more uncertain issues of degree. I do not argue here that imposing the death penalty on the elderly is unjust, only that it is symptomatic of an extremely strong retributive impulse. It is akin to shooting a mouse with a cannon. Most seri-ous studies cast grave doubt on whether the threat of capital pun-ishment ever has measurable deterrent effect, and presumably any such effect would be dimin-ished when aimed at persons nearer the end of their lives. So, rather than pass over the question with rhetoric about deterrence and wars on crime, let us admit that we need to kill people like the Copelands to get our fair measure of revenge, that imprisoning them for the rest of their lives is simply and finally not enough. The same analysis applies to executing teenagers. The only plausible explanation for doing it is to exact retributive payment. If we are afraid of what they may do, they can be restrained; we have as much power to deliver life sen-tences with no prospect of release as we do to kill. As to deterrence of others, if we cannot demon-strate that the death penalty influences adults, can anyone believe that the problem gets less complicated when we introduce the teenage mind? I've been unsuccessfully trying for years to deter my fifteen-year-old son from leaving his coat on the floor, which seems less complex than preventing killing. (I often won-der if it would help if I didn't leave mine on the floor.) Even when the death penalty is not involved but the debate is over how long a prison term should be, Americans consis-tently intuit a period of time long by any comparative standard. Law students often complain about some perpetrator of, say, a petty theft, "getting off with only a year in jail." I understand, indeed share, their frustration with crime, 27 but I wonder what would lead any-one to put the word "only" in a sentence that contains "year in jail." The movement toward abolition of the insanity defense suggests either an unwillingness or an inability to distinguish illness from evil. If this statutory trend were simply a confession of inabili-ty, abolition would be defensible on deterrence grounds-after all, insanity can be faked, so if we make the defense unavailable, we will at least deter the would-be fak-ers. (Trying to figure out how to deter the truly insane will only make your head hurt.) Yet, there are a variety of ways to control the uncertainties of the distinction between illness and criminality without destroying the decisive moral difference . These may include: maintaining a definition of insanity which includes only gross mental illness and excludes neurotics and persons with per-sonality disorders, conditions not only less serious, but more diffi-cult to diagnose with accuracy; restricting the scope of expert psy-chiatric testimony so that the ultimate question remains a moral one for the jury, not a "clinical" one for experts or pseudo-experts; placing the burden of proving insanity squarely on the defen-dant; increasing the standard of proof as by requiring defendants to prove insanity by "clear and convincing evidence." The failure to try such intermediate steps (a few states have and they seem to work) suggests that, for many, there is not an inability, but an unwillingness, to maintain the dis-tinction between criminality and illness. The whole theory of crim-inal punishment, however, rests on the assumption that humans are creatures with the capacity to make choices. When facts demon-strate that the choice to kill or not 28 is unduly compromised, we either applaud the choice as right Uusti-fication defenses like self-defense) or recognize that to ask more of a person in such a position is to ask too much (excuse defenses like duress). Insanity, when properly defined, is the label for people who have so far lost the capacity to make choices or to discern the propriety of those choices that no criminal punishment could be effective or appropriate. If they are dangerous, we should protect ourselves from them. There are many legal and extralegal tech-niques for this. For example, we quarantine those with serious, communicable diseases. But we don't view it as "punishment," we don't insist on visiting a criminal conviction on them, on announc-ing to them that they are to be morally condemned. There are many factors in this complex ques-tion of abolishing the insanity defense. One fair conclusion, however, is that there exists in America a spirit which possesses and indulges a willingness to impose punishment beyond our ability to account for it rationally. Nothing is wrong with righteous anger and outrage. If we never experienced it or acted on it, we would be ill, morally bankrupt, or in paradise. And clearly our institutions for chan-neling and expressing that outrage are morally advanced from lynch mobs. But "how?" and "how much?" are different ques-tions. Regardless of how stunned we may be at the havoc wreaked by nine-year-old children or by those with profound mental illness, moral outrage expressed by invoking the criminal process is inappropriate. As to other situa-tions, in which such outrage is justified, we must be vigilant of both upper and lower boundaries in venting it. Too little punish-ment risks moral decay. Too much risks cruelty. My the that the current pressure is on upper boundary. Will we become kin and gentler, at least in this ar criminal punishment? Not u two things happen. First, we m overcome the intuition that er and harsher punishments alleviate the crime problem. must stop blaming the fever the aspirin. We must cease c ouflaging retributive impulse ~, rhetoric about deterrence, edu tion, and "wars on crime." \ must, in short, own up to o thirst for revenge. Second, must want to reduce that thir The revenge instinct is strong; it probably insuperable by mer human effort. To the extent one thin the punishments chronicled abo are proportionate expression righteous moral outrage, it is net-ther necessary nor advisable t become kinder and gentler. For those of us who would like to change, who see in ourselves mor thirst for revenge than we like t admit, we will often find changin very difficult. Anger and angui h frustration and fear are not light· heartedly left unrequited. The beasts are overcome only with pro-found struggle. One helpful strategy is to fol-low those who lead by example. They live in all times, culture and traditions. The patriarch Abraham, as well as Gandhi, Mar· tin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa all come to mind. At ~ University under the cross, it shouldn't be too difficult to thin of one more. 0 TM Cressel 

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A Meaner, More Punitive Nation

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