I do think that the liberal and conservative approaches to criminal justice are different. But artistically, there’s something else going on here. Vigilante movies and television shows tend to lay out a solution to a problem: criminals are punks who need executing or something short of it, and if only our police officers could act in accordance with our emotional revulsion, we’d clean up our streets in a hurry; or, if only men were men, punks who want to rape and torture women would get a nasty surprise; or whatever variant of the week you prefer. Such a worldview seems to assume that crime is inevitable and can only be dealt with after the fact and through deterrence. ---------------------------- Anti-hero stories tend to be ways of explicating problems, rather than offering solutions. Futzing around with criminals’ backstories is an act of sympathy, but it’s also an attempt to figure out why crime happens in the first place and to consider whether we could have prevented it. Breaking Bad isn’t an argument that we should tolerate Walter White being a dreadful human being who sells drugs, watches people die of overdoses, misleads his family, and induces old men to act as suicide bombers. It’s a question about whether if Walter White had adequate health care coverage, a decent pension, and life insurance, he’d have done terrible things anyway, or if he’s a small, angry man who turns to evil because he wants to be recognized by the universe. The Wire isn’t a story about how we should substitute Inspectors General for putting Omar Little in the witness stand and being generally amusing. It’s an explication of how ridiculously difficult it is to build a safety net and put the right incentives in place to help people keep from using drugs and to encourage them to work legitimate but less-remunerative and less-reliable jobs and to build legitimate businesses. It’s a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic perspective on crime: a belief that we can stop it before it starts, but that it’s very, very hard to do so and requires considerable investment.
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/02/13/419663/vigilantes-v-anti-heroes-why-do-conservatives-love-one-liberals-the-other/
