An Erosion of our Humanity by the Justice System.

Something has been niggling me for some time about our approach to crime and punishment. Why is it that whenever a crime is committed, large or small, a whole raft of extenuating circumstances are brought out and the sentence reduced?

This worries me deeply, a criminal being able to say that he/she did something because of all these external factors and so should be mercied. I believe that one of the fundamentals of humanity is the ability to make a conscious decision, weigh all the pros and cons before acting. I wonder what the message is then when leniency is shown, the messages that I can see are:

• Either, if you make a conscious decision to break the law, having weighed all the factors, that's OK, it's not that bad really,
• Or, it's alright to break the law because you didn't really think about it, didn't think about the damage that you were doing and were only conscious of a small part of your decision making process.

The first message is bad enough. It takes the judgement of Solomon to determine whether there really were mitigating factors, and the mitigating factors have to really outweigh the negative consequences, not just outweight them in the mind of the offender.

The second message is far more dangerous, it goes to the heart of what makes us part of an human society. This means that it's alright to act as a criminal as long as you didn't think clearly about it, you didn't act as a thinking human being so we'll allow you back into human society sooner. That is a very bad thing. It attacks our humanity in general, it means that there is a general belief that we are unable to aspire to be rational beings and it's fine just to act without thought.

I take this very, very personally.