On Tuesday, February 8, the Yale Political Union held its annual Gardner-White Prize Debate, on the topic "Resolved: Bring Back The Stocks."
The winner of the debate was Leah Libresco, a former President of the Yale Political Union and a member of the Party of the Left.
Tonight, we've heard the speakers negating this resolution slander shame. One speaker described shame as intrinsically debasing to its target, another told us that shame feeds our own moral complacency, and yet another claimed that shame was always an assault. Since I believe shame can be a powerful, ennobling force for good, it's almost enough to tilt my sympathies to the affirmative of this resolution.
The trouble is, when shame is yoked to the state and to the justice system, it becomes exactly the scourge that the side negating this resolution has described it as tonight.
Put simply, shame is a kind of grief. Both shame and grief are the result when the love we bear someone is destroyed or damaged. Shame can feel uniquely tragic, because the wound of grief is caused by human choice, rather than blind chance or natural death, but shame is also uniquely hopeful because the betrayal can be repaired through human action.
If we want a chance to heal these wounds, we need to give shame the same kind of respect and awe that grief commands. We have to recognize that shame is the natural outgrowth of loving relationships between people, not something that can be administered by the state as part of the justice system.
As the right of the Union likes to tell us, the State does not and cannot love us. The social contract is not going to show up at my door and tearfully ask me why I broke it. Without the force of love, there is no power to shame.
Shame has no place in our justice system. Justice is intended to serve the people generally, by disincentivizing crime, and the needs of the victim, by forcing the criminal to make restitution. The justice system can work for rehabilition, but its primary focus will never be the task of healing the criminal.
That work has to be left to individuals. Between two people, shame is a gift. A way out of grief. When someone shames us, we are aware both of the hurt that we have dealt them and the love that compels them to show us the depth of the sorrow we have given them and they ask for our help in mending it. Showing our wounds makes us vulnerable, but that pain is a gift - a reminder of the love we bear since without love the betrayal would never have hurt so deeply.
As an atheist, I don't have the luxury of trusting in any kind of healing after death. I can only act in this world, and any redemption for me comes at the mercy of my friends who work to keep me on the straight and narrow. My friends, who I trust to love me enough to tell me when I've hurt them, when I'm hurting myself, and who aren't afraid to show me the wounds I've made so that I may have a chance to heal them.
Without love, without vulnerability, shame is the debasing contempt that speakers on my side have railed against. Offered in a spirit of healing, shame is a path out of wrongdoing. It is love seen through the lens of pain.
I urge all the members of this body to strive to offer and accept shame as a gift, to fight against the portrait of shame that the speakers against the resolution have offered. That fight will last us the rest of our lives, but it begins tonight in rejecting this resolution's call to bring back the stocks. It begins in recognizing shame as a relation between persons, not between the state and its citizens. It begins in recognizing shame as something designed for the wrongdoer, not an instrument of justice.
I urge the body to join me in voting against the resolution before us tonight.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to questions.
In second place was Tristyn Bloom, a Sometime Chairman of the Party of the Right. She blogs at http://sublimitynow.blogspot.com/
"In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. ... The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world."
Ladies and gentlemen, we've heard much tonight about shame and humiliation, but I stand before you now not to outline some "high embarrassment theory", nor to indulge some quasi-medieval fantasy of communal accountability, but to remind us all of the profound disgrace we have let befall our country. Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to shame you.
Mr Speaker, what do China, Belarus, and Iran have in common? I think the body already knows! All of these countries-- and many more besides-- have lower incarceration rates than the United States of America. Our country: home of the fire that would light the world, the shining city upon a hill, the last, best hope of earth-- where 748 of every 100,000 residents wake up in jumpsuits instead of pajamas and in cells of iron and concrete instead of homes. Let me stress how phenomenally high that number is: the United States comprises less than 5% of the world's population, but nearly 25% of the world's prisoners are American.
How did we get here? How did the land of the free become the land where, despite relatively constant rates of violent crime over the past three decades, our prison population has quadrupled? The culprits are many, including mandatory minimum sentencing, "three strike" rules, and, of course, the War on Drugs.
However, to blame our legislators would be to ignore our complicity: through unforgivable apathy and willful ignorance, we, too, are guilty. Guilty of perpetuating "a society of captives", and guilty of sitting idly by while American ghettos feed overpopulated prisons like some diseased vulture regurgitating its last meal into the throat of its chick, fatally poisoning it thereby.
Now Mr Speaker, I do not mean to imply that our nation's inmates are without guilt, or undeserving of punishment, but I think it is by now clear that we as a society are wholly unaware of what I deem to be the most pressing issue facing modern America.
To the fiscal conservatives: in 2005, it cost an average of $24,000 to imprison someone for one year. States vary wildly, however-- in Rhode Island, they managed to spend $45,000 per inmate. We could've sent them to Brown for 39.
To those concerned with justice: there has been more significantly more legislation about banning smoking in prisons than about collecting data on rape and sexual assault, much less doing anything to prevent it, but according to Human Rights Watch, 140,000 American inmates are raped each year. I refuse to believe that that is a price any of us are willing to pay for "justice".
Are you worried about safety? Since 1980, the number of drug offenders in our prisons has increased 1200%. But aren't most drug offenders violent criminals? Only 1 in 10 federal crack offenses involves violence, or the threat of violence. Whether you think cocaine in vending machines is the American way or not, I think we can all agree that pedophiles, rapists, and murderers take precedence.
The absurdity of the resolution aside, tonight's debate is far from a joke. I apologize for not having paid sufficient lip service to tonight's conceit, but the criminal justice system in this country is an abomination, and it is a black mark upon all of our souls that we pay more attention to unions, and guns, and charter schools, and whatever drivel Sarah Palin or Keith Olbermann said last night, than to prison reform. I stand here tonight in the affirmative because there is nothing more shameful, nothing that goes more against the noble spirit President Kennedy alluded to in his inaugural address, than the family-destroying, spirit-crushing, agency-erasing, hellholes of drug addiction, violence, and rape into which we so nonchalantly throw thousands upon thousands of American citizens every blessed year.
Whether you care about freedom, or justice, or equality, or the strength of the economy, or the legalization of drugs, or the spread of AIDS in inner cities, or all of the above and then some, you must vote in the affirmative tonight. Yes, the stocks are primitive, cruel, barbaric, and exposed prisoners to all kinds of verbal and physical abuse--but compared to what we have now, they are downright progressive.
Thank you.
In third place was Adam Stempel, a former Speaker of the Yale Political Union and a Sometime Chair of the Party of the Left.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, it is somewhat dull to get up here to argue for the continuation of the status quo. Without a doubt, it is endlessly more amusing to rant and rave at the shortcomings of our time, to advocate for revolution, and to try to shock what audience still has the capacity to be shocked.
Unfortunately, I stand tonight in the negative of this resolution. It is our weary lot to defend the oft-maligned notion that not all worthwhile ideas are radical and that not all radical ideas are worthwhile. Rather, to address the issues of public humiliation, of criminality, and of justice, it is useful to first ask, "What is it we are trying to achieve?"
First, however, what virtues do those in the affirmative see in the stocks and their return? Naturally, the stocks offer an opportunity to bring public notoriety to criminals whose crimes might otherwise go unnoticed. How better to deter the prostitute from walking the streets at night than making her crouch in the public square throughout the day? There comes a unique satisfaction in observing the humiliation of another person. It is refreshing to set someone apart, to make an example of them. The distinction between the good man and the bad man is never more clear than when the bad man stands stock-still before the good man, his face sunburned, eyes bloodshot, wrists raw. Who here does not crave the adrenaline of righteousness and of righteous scorn? I cannot say that I never do.
But, Mr. Speaker, is this our goal? Justice is what we claim to seek, but how do we seek to apply justice?
I submit that the justice that is served by the stocks is not real justice; it is not a justice fit for our civilization.
What is justice? Many have used the term this evening, few have defined it well. My own conception is very much developing, but this evening I believe that justice is done when people fairly receive what they deserve in the way that best enhances human prosperity. Purely negative justice--punishment--does not promote prosperity, and purely positive justice cannot sustain it. Thus we have the concepts of criminal justice and social justice. Both are essential.
We must now ask whether a justice system based on public shame fulfills these criteria. Clearly not--it does not promote prosperity; it is negative. It takes away from a person and gives nothing back, not even to the other citizens. Shame breeds disgust, and leaves a hole in the heart of both parties.
In addition, true justice must be universal and must be evenly applied. I would like you to imagine the kind of person put in the stocks. Is it the executive who used shady accounting standards to cheat his employees, or is it the prostitute and the small-time thief? If you say the former, I would ask you to think again. When has shame been effectively and consistently used against the powerful? What is shameful is based on that which is established to be shameful, and so the establishment often finds itself exempt. In the words of Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges." The transgressions of those at the top of society are glossed over, those of the bottom are made larger than life. This is the "justice" done by shame--it is not justice.
And so, for these reasons among many others, tonight I implore you not to bring back the stocks. It is not that there can be no good achieved by them, but that the good they achieve does not bring our society closer to our ideals. The justice they do is petty, selfish, and alienating. The stocks punish but do not heal. They give the illusion that we can identify and corral all the evil among us, all the while blinding us to the deeper problems that bring about these evils.
Justice requires that we unite in pursuit of a better society. The fight is hard and is far from being won--let us not bind the hands of our fellow men.
Thank you, I yield to questions.