The headlines today follow last week's illogical claim by the Director of Homeland Insecurity: he had a gut feeling that there would be a terrorist attack this summer.
Point in logic: if not based in intelligence reports, what business does he have making such a statement? For what reason does one make such a claim without offering solid evidence? Even further, if the government is capable of gleaning such intelligence, what business do they have informing the public before they have thwarted the threat?
And today's headline is that al Qaeda is now planning an attack on American soil.
Again, for what purpose do they inform the public? Why don't they just rush to the source, outfox the 'enemy' since they claim to have intelligence in the first place, and eliminate the threat before informing us that it was there?
Both instances are designed to accomplish one thing: keep the people scared. If you've got 'em scared then you can do anything you want in the name of patriotism and freedom. I wonder which civil liberties they're after this time? Are the Democratic candidates for President getting too much press, giving too much hope, eclipsing the thunder of the Republican candidates?
All this while I've been meditating on the difference between punishment and rehabilitation, the great dividing line in how the government treats law offenders. Conservative rulers lean toward punishment, liberals toward rehab. What with felons never being able to get student loans and sex offenders (and you should see what offenses they include in this category!) are monitored for the rest of their lives, it is getting to the point that any conviction results in a sentence for life. One cannot pay one's debt to society and be reinstated as a citizen.
What does punishment accomplish? To a degree, we know from psychological research, aversive rewards for behavior tend to diminish the behavior. However, there is a line that can be crossed to where the punishment is larger than the crime, the attitude toward the offender is so closed-mindedly absolute, and rebellion replaces diminished illegal behavior. From that point the punishers can elect to either realize they're being too harsh ("When governers rule too closely the people will rebel") and back off on punishment, or they will redouble their efforts to punish even more severely. Seeing as the United States incarcerates a larger proportion of its population than any other post-industrial nation it seems that we have the latter.
If punishment doesn't diminish illegal behavior then it must benefit the punishers. It must satisfy some animal lust deep within. These are people, remember, who argue for the right to torture 'enemy combatants', which is a loose definition in the first place. Yet it doesn't provide the social control it is intended to. To put it bluntly, they've gotten too tight-assed, and with increasing lack of cooperation they don't know what else to do but more of the same. Not a good system. If they insist on tightening a nut that's already too tight they'll shear the bolt. There will be rebellion on a large scale. Let's hope it's limited to the voting booth.
A related thought, or maybe just an unanswered question: are those who tend to punish rather than rehabilitate also those who are oriented to competition rather than cooperation? Competition can be overdone, too. In its furthest reaches it starts looking like paranoia. And as I've claimed for years, paranoia is poor public policy.
