The Death Penalty and Indefinite Incarceration: A Stage 1 & 3 Dialectic
I’d like to start by first thanking my friend, who I will call Gs, who is always there to listen to my rambles and bounce ideas.
If you find references to emotional stages confusing, please read the Summary of Emotional Development first.
Allow me to begin with my most controversial and easy-to-quite-out-of-context claim, and then steadily unravel how I came to such a claim:
“The Death Penalty is an ultimate admission of weakness”.
In my country of the United States, there persists a debate between continuing the practice of the death penalty for extremely high crimes, such as mass homicides, and its complete elimination in favor of indefinite incarceration or “life in prison”. There are a couple arguments favoring indefinite incarceration that I find strong: a) help reduce the number of deaths of wrongfully convicted individuals, and b) is ultimately cheaper than the death penalty due to the costs associated with death penalty appeals. In contrast, there is really only one argument I consider strong in favor of the death penalty beyond what I am about to describe later in this essay, which is the following: “There are some people in this world, such as a person who murdered a loved one, we just want to be dead”. The important word to keep in mind here is the word “want” as straightforward desires are difficult to argue against, as opposed to “needs” which are often much easier to argue against, for example:
“I need candy”
“No, you don’t; it doesn’t give you any nutrition.”
Versus
“I want candy”
“Oh, OK.”
In that same way, the want for someone’s death is somewhat difficult to argue against directly, as it isn’t easy to argue that someone does not in fact want something. So the common course of action is to come up with other kinds of arguments that do not tackle the base want, but instead try to persuade on some other foundation, such as moral/ethical (reduce deaths of wrongfully convicted individuals) and financial (indefinite incarceration is cheaper).
In the following, I will make an argument on a new foundation: Emotional. I will lay out the circumstances in which the death penalty is expectable or appropriate, and then explain why it is not appropriate for the society we live in today. I will delve into emotional stage explanations of why we want someone’s death versus why we want someone to be put into prison for incredibly long period of times. At some points I will tie in stories from cartoons, anime, and other pop culture as examples and elaborations.
First, a definition. I understand the Death Penalty to be: “state-sanctioned killing”. By “state”, I mean any governing body with a sufficient monopoly on violence and the authority to mete out such punishments, ethically or not. I’m primarily thinking of the United States, as well as extreme examples such as any cookie-cutter dictatorship or police state. If your local Homeowner’s Association were powerful enough, I suppose they could count as a “state”, too. By “sanctioned”, I mean something that is carried out by the approval of one or more persons within the state that is not necessarily the individual(s) directly carrying out the execution, and is premeditated, meaning something not committed in the heat of the moment but rather with thoughtful deliberation. And finally, “killing” means the death of a person by the hands of another in a lawful way, though not necessarily in an ethical or moral way.
Because a central controversy around the death penalty is whether it is the right or wrong thing to do, I began my thinking on the subject with trying to find a circumstance in which killing, with or without the state, is the ‘right’ thing to do. What I initially found were degrees of killing on a spectrum from “OK” to “Not OK”. Further, the circumstance on the far most “OK” end of that spectrum was Self-defense.
When someone is killed due to self-defense, and we are certain that it was self-defense, not only is the killer not convicted of a crime but our hearts likely go out more to the killer than the victim. This is understandable, because the killer in this circumstance is the one who was initially threatened to such an extreme extent that they genuinely feared for their life. We can pepper in some Emotional Stage theory stuff here by thinking about this fear and threat to life and its relation to Stage 1: Co-dependence. In Stage 1, all important matters are matters of Life and Death. So when your life is being threatened, you are being pushed into a Stage 1 situation. Like a mouse cornered by a cat, you either fight for your life and the lives of your loved ones or die, so it is understandable for you to react in such a way that may end the life of your attacker. In this circumstance, you have a need to kill, because failing to do so likely means the end of your own life or the lives of those around you.
We can see this line of thinking in recent controversial police-involved fatal shootings in the US and their ensuing investigations, where a central pillar of their defenses was often that the police officers genuinely feared for their lives. I won’t go into my personal opinion on these subjects, as I like to go by a case-to-case basis (there being, sadly, too many cases) and their circumstances are not supremely significant to the subject at hand beyond what I noted now.
Point is, self-defense is a circumstance in which killing is A-OK. In concluding such, I then delved further into self-defense scenarios, and found there can be significant differences between self-defense scenarios on the spectrum of “OK” to “Not OK”.
On the extreme end of “OK”, we might have a young child who is being attacked by a couple adults, and, perhaps by dropping a brick on their heads or causing them to slip on some marbles on the stairs, kills his attackers. In such a scenario, we rush to the care and comfort of the child, sorrowfully fearing what sort of effect such a traumatizing experience might have on the child. On the other end towards “Not OK”, we might have a professional boxer in a bar attacked by a drunk patron, ending in the death of the patron by the boxer’s hands. There, culpability is much greyer, and deeper investigation is required to determine whether the boxer acted irresponsibly. Either way, the boxer’s reputation among the boxing community may be damaged.
What is the difference here? The difference is Power. The less power you have, the less responsible you are for any given situation. The more power you have, the more. Because the boxer is an adult, because he is trained, because he is strong, he has more options available to him, a greater variety and effectiveness of ways to diffuse the situation. The stronger you are, the less you need to kill. With that said, let us return to my initial claim: “The Death Penalty is an ultimate admission of weakness”.
The Weak need to kill, because by virtue of being weak they have few to no options. The first lesson you learn in most any martial art is: “Priority #1 – Run Away”. The Strong, despite being more capable of killing, don’t need to kill, because by virtue of being strong they have many more options. Strength is not merely physical power but also intelligence, knowledge, resources, influence, cunning, and more. To kill is to admit that you’ve been pushed so deeply into a corner, stripped of so many of your options, made so vulnerable, and rendered so powerless that you have no other recourse but to utilize a Stage 1: Co-dependent reaction. Stage 1: Co-dependence is the stage of feelings of powerlessness and, consequently, violent overreaction and defensiveness.
It was at this point that I realized I was wrong about one of my assumptions: The “OK”/”Not OK” spectrum is mislabeled. It is not about what is OK and not OK. There is no killing that is OK. There is no killing that is just fine or acceptable. All killing produces negative emotional effects, whether it be by creating victims, traumatizing the killer, or generating an atmosphere of fear and hatred, i.e. Evil, Darkness and the Real. The actual label should be: “Forgiveness”. Killing is more or less forgivable depending on the circumstances. A child killing an adult in self-defense? Most forgivable. An adult drowning a preschool class in the cold blood of puppies and kittens? Most unforgivable. The “Forgiveness Spectrum” may supplement the explanation(s) for why folks suffer from survivor’s guilt even when other peoples’ deaths were outside of their control – they do not struggle with whether the deaths were OK or not, but with whether they can forgive themselves for being the ones to survive. Perhaps then the go-to consideration to keep in mind when talking to someone about survivor’s guilt would be to frame it in terms of forgiveness regardless of whether any wrongdoing was committed.
So when a state sanctions a killing, that state is admitting that the person they are killing is so imminently threatening that they have no power to do anything but kill the person. It is at this point that I’d like to say that in general it is not only OK but important for people to be able to allow themselves to be vulnerable. And the same holds for a state, because a state is just a more formally organized group of people. So if there is indeed a circumstance in which there exists a person within a state’s jurisdiction that is so imminently and uncontrollably threatening to the lives of people, then if the state is able to publicly admit its own weakness as justification for the death penalty, then I would not fault the state for carrying such a thing out.
I am anxious about something regarding my argument, and so I feel the need to clarify: when I talk about the state and that which is imminently threatening, I am not talking about that which is threatening to the persistence of the state itself, but rather about the lives of actual people, i.e. citizens. A state, i.e. the specific organization of a group of people with authority and power over citizens, can persist in defiance of the actual desires and needs of the majority of its citizens, and the operators and executors of state power may and often do act against the health and prosperity of their citizens if it means the furtherance of the state’s persistence. In fact, if I were to give an extremely brief and unsatisfying history of societal development, then I might say that during the earliest times of subsistence hunting and farming, it was about the persistence of the village until the next day. Then when cities formed, it was about the persistence of the ruling elite into the next generation, which leads us into feudalism, e.g. nobles and royalty. When mercantilism and eventually capitalism developed, it was about the growth and persistence of sheer wealth into infinity. During these times the Nation-state was conceived of, which banded large groups of people together in a way that was more effective at creating and persisting power and wealth than feudalism was. Part of the nation-state development process was, “Ya know, if we try to take care of people’s wants and needs a little bit, we can more effectively utilize them for the extension and persistence of state power, like for example we can make and maintain a standing army”. Aaaand that’s where we are today, where the nation-state tries to more or less take care of some of their citizens’ needs, but mostly to the extent that it enables the state to persist (though the present era of globalization is blurring the lines between nation-states, so it’s getting all funky and more complicated).
I presently believe that the next emotionally evolved form of governance in the modern day is a state that is OK with the end of its persistence. This is not communism whatsoever; communism is a society absent the state (though communism’s definition for state likely differs significantly from my much simpler one). What I mean instead is an organization of people in power that is OK with having their power end and replaced by others according to the needs and desires of the citizenry. Basically, a state that is not desperate to persist in its current form, but instead willing to weaken and subside if it means better meeting the needs of its people.
I got the idea for this from my favorite manga series ever, One Piece, during the Alabasta arc. The arc has been out for at least a decade, so spoilers: the king of the country of Alabasta discovers the source of the true threat that has been manipulating events around the country to bring it closer and closer to open civil war. Unfortunately, he learns of this just as the rebel army of manipulated citizenry are charging towards the capital city’s gates. The king’s generals ask him if their army should meet the rebels on the battlefield before they take the royal palace. Instead, the king orders the entire army to empty from the capital and charge west, towards the source of the true threat. “But sir”, they worry, “we will lose the capital!” In response the king proclaims, “This country is not its capital. This country is its people!” The king was personally OK with the collapse of his own state if it meant the protection of his people. To me, that is a Stage 4: Independence or Stage 5: Transcendence mode of thinking. Definitely not Stage 3: Group-dependence, who would struggle between the preservation of the state and their need to try their best to meet people’s needs. To be fair, I do not think this necessarily means that a Stage 4 or 5 government will always necessarily choose “needs of people” over “preservation of the state”, because the two may not be diametrically opposed, but rather interwoven within the other. What Stages 4 and 5 do enable, however, is decisive action in the face of damning pressure.
Tangent aside, how does Indefinite Incarceration compare to the Death Penalty as they relate to emotional stages? In stage 1: Co-dependence, death is the ultimate punishment, so folks and states struggling with Stage 1 tend to favor the death penalty. In stage 3: Group-dependence, being exiled from the group is the ultimate punishment, and one form of exile is imprisonment. So Indefinite Incarceration is an ultimate punishment for folks and states primarily function in a Stage 3 emotionality.
Thus it is a Stage 3 society that favors “life in prison” as its primary ultimate punishment and a Stage 1 society that favors the death penalty as its primary ultimate punishment. A society that was operating at a greater stage can be pulled down by traumatic events and in this way be made to change what punishments it favors. This is effectively the end goal of extremism and terrorism today – to bring societies down emotional levels in order to render them more vulnerable and thus more easily manipulated. It’s also easy to see what emotional level extremism and terrorism operates from, regardless of political leaning. Suffice to say, whenever I engage in a discussion on politics with another person, I try to understand the emotional stage a rationalistic argument is being made from as much as I try to understand any given argument itself. Recall that all arguments and rationalizations stem from and are limited by the emotional stage in which that argument is made from, so if the emotional foundation of an argument you are making coincides with one of an argument someone else is making, you two are more likely to be able to agree and find common ground perhaps regardless of the actual content of the arguments. This is likely more consistent at higher stages and less consistent in lower ones, due to lower stages having a greater tendency to view and assert things in terms of black and white.
“What about Stage 2? What does state-sanctioned punishment from Stage 2 look like?”
The answer to this question I got from the fictional novel World War Z. In one of the sections, it describes one survivor’s group’s struggle with maintaining order, especially among the people who were formally white-collar investment bankers and jet-setting socialites who now had to learn how to repair toilets. Feeling that such jobs despite their importance were beneath their former lives, they threw tantrums and were uncooperative. These folks suffered from Stage 2: Counter-dependence, i.e. an overinflated sense of self-worth leading to rebellious behavior. Unfortunately, the group’s postwar society did not have the resources to imprison these folks – idle labor that needs to be fed and clothed is a supreme waste within the circumstance of a total war with zombies – but they could not justify killing these adult children for such petty behavior, nor could they simply leave them alone. Eventually, they came up with some old-school punishment which, while making them uncomfortable with how uncivilized and archaic it was, seemed to work: The stocks. A few days of public humiliation appeared to sufficiently temper the majority of Stage 2 complainants, especially when, in the backdrop of the zombie world war, Life and Death of the whole of humanity was on the line.
I bring this up to lead back into the significance of Power in this conversation and how power relates to vulnerability and punishment. Because the state had significantly reduced power in World War Z, they had to resort to Stage 2 methods for punishing their citizens. This is not a good thing, but it is understandable. The weaker you are, the fewer options you have available to you.
Now regarding the death penalty in modern day America: Should we practice it, and why or why not? My answer is No, we should not because we are not so vulnerable. The moment we capture someone and put them within our control is the moment we lose our justification for killing that person. Killing in the heat of the moment is more forgivable than killing after they’ve been put into custody. We are too far from weak to be going around applying the death penalty, even for the most heinous crimes. Only when either a captive presents an imminent and irrevocable threat to human life despite being in custody or if the power of the state is so depressingly reduced such as in an apocalyptic scenario can we sincerely claim we are vulnerable enough to justify an execution.
For a brief moment let’s talk about the nature of “Threat”, and its relation to killing and stages of emotional development theory. When talking about “threat” in terms of stages of emotional development theory, the feeling of threat is as important as the actual presence of threat, because it is the feeling or emotional perception/conviction of threat as opposed to the logical determination/conclusion of threat that drives our reactions. However, with regard to killing and the death penalty, I would argue that evaluating the feeling of threat is insufficient to determine our willingness as a state to forgive; the actual presence of threat must be evaluated as well. For one, maturing as individuals necessitates tempering our emotions with knowledge and vice versa; it is important to balance our feelings with what we can know and learn. For two, feelings are not necessarily based on reality and often skew or twist the actual nature of events. A person stressed out over possibly being laid off soon may misinterpret his friend telling him about the family vacation to Disneyworld they went on recently as mocking his decreasing ability to provide for his family.
Allow me to wind down with what originally got me invested in this whole topic. What really got me thinking about the subject of the death penalty was the animated movie Superman vs. the Elites. I won’t spoil the important parts of the movie, so what you need to know about it is that in the beginning there is this one supervillain that Superman has to capture again and again because the supervillain keeps on escaping. Problem is, every time he escapes he kills many people, so people start getting upset about Superman following the rule of law and only merely capturing him. In reaction to that, a new superhero group calling themselves “The Elites” comes out and does what Superman can’t bring himself to do, and doing so stages a battleground of competing philosophies about justice and the appropriateness of killing. Superman really struggles with this, and so I tried to think of a mode of thinking that would enable him to parse out his thoughts on a case-by-case basis involving villains. Batman struggles with the same thing when it comes to the Joker, and the temptation to kill versus the commitment to no killing persists as an eternal struggle for these two heroes.
With what I have argued above, I could make the argument with Superman that he could kill the supervillain and forgive himself for doing so while also not turning towards the Dark Side. He can do this by sincerely admitting his weakness of being unable to contain the supervillain, and then taking action to change and improve his capability. It was made self-evident by his repeated escapes and mass murders that neither the state nor Superman could contain the imminent threat to human life that the supervillain exerted. They lacked the power. Being able to admit that would make the act of killing more forgivable. It will still hurt Superman, and the state, and everybody involved, and forgiveness would still be a difficult trial, because killing always has negative emotional effects regardless of its circumstances, but it would enable Superman to exceed his moral/ethical conundrum without falling into the Stage 2 arrogance-trap of the movie’s main antagonists “The Elites” while also protecting people. Batman could likewise do the same with regard to Joker.
The primary personal barrier to all of this is the willingness and presence of mind to perceive and admit one’s limits. Even if this all makes sense in his head, Batman may still not go for this, as he is supremely a Stage 3: Group-dependent kind of person who almost always overextends himself beyond his emotional limits and punishes himself with self-exile. His overwhelming sense of duty and obligation to the city of Gotham consequent to him feeling responsible for the death of his parents is what fuels the tortured soul we have come to know and love. Batman has been stuck in stage 3 for a very long time, and very well may die there. Depending on the iteration, while Batman has demonstrated his willingness to admit his weaknesses, he has in equal part demonstrated his unwillingness to forgive himself, hence his tendency towards self-exile.
In Conclusion
The death penalty is an admission of weakness, because the appropriateness of killing someone is a function of power. The more powerful you are, the more options you have, the less you can justify killing, i.e. “With great power comes great responsibility”. Killing does not exist on an “OK vs Not-OK” spectrum, but rather a “Forgiveness Spectrum”, because killing always damages emotionally and requires forgiveness to heal. We cannot justify the death penalty in modern day America because we have far too much power. Only in exceptional circumstances, such as an apocalyptic scenario or the existence of a captive individual whose imminent threat to human life cannot be contained, could we find ourselves vulnerable enough to warrant judicial killing.