Punishment: An ineffective way to solve societies problems

Even though we might feel that utopias are a thing of the past, every society strives to achieve this unattainable perfection. Our goal as humans is to create a world where every human being is the epitome of morality and righteousness. So if there is no room for sinful individuals who feel that laws are meant to be broken, then what should we do with them?

            The human race has come up with a system of removing immoral citizens and isolating them in a room in an effort to shame them and destroy their lives. Dictionary.com defines a prison as “a place of confinement”. In a utopian society a prison is defined as a place for those who don’t deserve forgiveness and who adulterate society. We feel that “no good can be achieved by [criminals]”(Hawthorn 129) so why not isolate them from the rest of the righteous world. The leaders of the Puritan society feel that shaming Hester permanently for the rest of her life will somehow purge her. What they don’t understand is that evil can’t be fought with evil. The public humiliation Hester felt for her crime will only cause more pain and anguish and won’t reform her in anyway.

            Some aspects of society haven’t changed in hundreds of years. We still feel that the best way to reform a criminal is to destroy his or her life. Yet according to Crimeinamerica.net, 52% of criminals who have been incarcerated will return to prison. Punishing wrongdoers physically and emotionally has never worked in creating the optimum society and it never will.

 

Stereotyping: Venture into the Unknown

A good stereotype seems paradoxical to the common person because we believe that classifying the human race crushes people’s hopes and dreams. We think that everyone is extraordinary and unique and it is impossible to limit someone’s abilities. According to a survey by the National Journal, 55% of people think they are above average intelligence. Ironically, even though we think so highly of ourselves and that we are impossible to classify into a category, we feel that it is perfectly fine to classify other people. Our goal as a society seems to be that we should be able to simply glance at someone and predict everything about him or her. Yet why do we continue to classify people when we know its wrong? 

Stereotyping gives us a sense of safety because it limits the unknown. Dictionary.com defines unknown as “strange, unfamiliar, and not widely known”. Stereotyping gives the ability to know everything about a person and therefore eliminates “strange, unfamiliarity” we experience when we first encounter a person.

Brent Staple’s “first victim”(Staples 205) felt safe and secure because she classified Staples into the robber/rapist category and immediately knew that she should escape from him. If Brent Staples was from some obscure race that had never been classified into a category, the woman would have felt less secure because she didn’t know whether she should run away or stay put. Stereotyping gives us an opportunity to venture into the unknown without actually risking our comfort.

Seeing is Believing

I confidently walked into English class feeling prepared to discuss The Things They Carried. Little did I know that every single assumption I made about Tim O’Brien was completely wrong.  The characters. The experiences. Nothing truly happened. But it was all still true. I still felt empathy for the characters and I still felt that I understood the pains and struggles of  “Tim O’Brien”.  I still perceived the novel to be true. Why does O’Brien find it so easy to affect our perspective on war? The answer is because people on the home front have no clue what war actually is which is why it’s so easy to affect our view on war.

           

According to the philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”. Everything we have heard about war is from a movie, the news, or from other people. We have no preconceived notion of our own when it comes to war because no one in our 11 AP class has experienced it (I’m assuming). O’Brien could have said that war is the greatest thing on Earth and “War is fun”(O’Brien 76) and we would still believe him just because we have no idea about what war is really like. According to Dictionary.com, perception means, “to become aware of, know, or identify by means of senses”. Yet this definition is false because perception doesn’t mean are truly aware of something. It just means we are seeing or listening to a second-hand experience.