Society should condemn the crime , not the criminal.
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“He had withdrawn from society and shut himself up , till he was ready to shun, not merely his landlady, but every human face. Poverty had once weighed him down, though, of late, he had lost his sensitiveness on that score.”
“Crime and Punishment”
—-Fyodor Ddostoyevsky.
Here also, in this short story (by Colin Dexter), we see that James Roderic Evans, a prisoner has withdrawn himself from normal human society. He has been behind the bar, but so cunning and smart he is that he has broken out of prison thrice . Now it is the fourth time he is breving exactly the similar exploit under a dangerous plight. He is putting a question to Mr. Jackson, The prison officer,
“Can I ask you something Mr. Jackson? Why did they bug me in this cell? “
Here lies the tragedy of a prisoner, prisoner as Evans who, as the writer slightly indicates , has been a prey to kleptomania. Why and what for he is imprisoned, have not been clearly pointed out with citing evidence. At the end, his wit, his adroitness cast a stunning effect on all the personalities related to the prison in which he has been kept.
There are crimes of various sorts that are being committed in our society, day in and day out, throughout the ages and apart from some grievous kind, most of them are amendable. Yet, our society, instead of applying reformatory proceedure brackets crimes and criminals together without classifying illegal or immoral acts relating to crime. It is also seen that judicial consideration tends to favour the mighty and the influencial who belong to the upper crust of the society. If, therefore, not entirely depending upon the judiciary, we, the social people judge the criminal with the hearty senses of judiciousness , criminals could be probably better served.
Crimes of any kind are condemnable. Theft, hooliganism, child-beating, lynching, outrage, torture and cruelty to animals, so on and so forth, are being committed off and on in our society.
There rises noisy refrains “crime, crime crime,” and misdoers are haunted by police personnels and after a series of investigations, search and research the suspects are caught and put under the police or jail custody.
Here the case of Evans is not exceptional. Nobody ever has asked himself or the as a whole why ‘lads’ like Evans become criminals. On the contrary, prison staff often develop a soft corner for those in custody. We can have the example even in this story :
‘As the prison van turned right from ChippingNorton onto the Oxford road, the hitherto silent prison officer unlocked the handcuffs and leaned forward towards the driver, “ForChrist’s sake get a move on! It won’t take ‘em long to find out. – ‘
“Where do ye suggest we make it for?” Asked the driver in a broad Scots accent…
“What about Newbury?” Suggested Evans.
This sympathetic approach towards the juvenile delinquent helps unquestionably in bringing Evans as well as his comrades, back to the mainstream of the society. Security teams or anti-crime squads always engage themselves in finding out the nature of the criminal but not the source , where from the very nature is being formed. The germs of illegal and unsocial activities germinate in illicit and immoral family and social atmospheres. Though, these days, we are provided with more comfortable luxuries and affluence, yet family feuds and social disharmonies are becoming unavoidable incidents which cast an impish influence on infantile as well as adolescent minds. States are not free from this curse. They too are indulging in discriminatory treatment towards their citizens, inviting, in the end , intercaste, intercommunity, interclass conflict. As a result, we have experienced heinous fracas not only in our country but in many countries in the world. These all are related to and make a link with the degradation of human values. Children are soft prey to impropriety added to immorality. They become individualistic, self-centred. Sensitiveness is replaced by hard-heartedness. Mercy, forgiveness, compassion
that distance the individual from being criminal are mercilessly suppressed at the dawn of their lives.
So the root of criminalism has entered into a fathomless depth. It is sometimes felt that modern human civilization, as a whole , is addicted to a self-destructing crime. Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere in and on which we live are continually being polluted to such an extent that within a few centuries this planet will no longer be a place of an abode of life. Deforestation at random, urbanisation at will, annihilation of wild and aquatic animals for satisfying his ravenous hunger and thus bringing about destruction to ecological balance of the earth are not the cruellest of the crimes man is committing?
Again the talk of the day goes about ‘criminalization’. Historical ideologies, political ‘isms’,social staying, even religious doctrines are deliberately being criminalised to acquire and grasp power in a view to strip the poor, the uneducated, the god- fearing, simple-hearted people of their last resources. Criminalization is now universalised.
To set the new and young generation free from this universal trend of unethical, inhuman activities sounds next to impossible. Yet, anti-crime missions throughout the world are active and operative. There are separate courts specially established for the juvenile, homes have been set up to keep them and treat them sympathitically. NGOs are at work. But overall progress is not up to the expectation. Behavioural change of the younger ones, prone to antisocial activities, solely depends on the behaviour that the society demonstrates before them.
Very depressing though, but none can disagree that the human society, by and large, has been internally, apparently outwardly too, broken into classes. The upper class society, irrespective of creed and community it belongs to, enjoys the almost total occupancy right to wealth and enjoyment of what the earth has stored for the whole humanity and that gives birth to covetousness in the mind of the people who are deprived of. This deprivation is one of the major reasons of terrorism which knows no bound in spreading organised crime worldwide.
Here again we are coming back to the saying :
“Society should condemn the crime, not the criminals” which advocates not in favour of the crime – crime of any sort, but pleads on behalf of the misguided, of the wayward. To put an end to the curse (a Herculean task) of crime by applying only harsh judicial methodology on the criminals is and will be of no use.
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