Offenders deserve our sympathy, too

The most important lesson you learn from serving a few years in prison and meeting hundreds of offenders is that the people in prison are not fundamentally different from those outside of it.
Yes, they all committed crimes, and many of those crimes caused pain and suffering to others and to society – in some cases unimaginable suffering – yet they don’t belong to a different species of human.

When we discuss crimes in the public sphere we understandably take the side of the victim. Victims rightly deserve our sympathy for their suffering and offenders our condemnation for the pain they have caused.
But when this process takes the form of complete dehumanisation of the offender, things get problematic.

I once had a conversation with a prison officer. He told me that “if a drunk driver like you had killed my daughter, I’d want him to be in prison for at least 30 years.”
What struck me was that it would never even occur to him that in this scenario, his daughter might have been the drunk driver and not the victim.
Would he then also accept that she should be behind bars for 30 years, or would he take a more nuanced view?

We always take the side of the victim and we never imagine that we could end up being the perpetrator.
That is because it is a very unpleasant thought: We seek absolute moral clarity and shun moral ambiguity, which we find deeply discomforting.

This goes so far that in public discourse we engage in a process of dehumanisation, denying offenders their humanity.
Politicians and the press often speak of “monsters” who have committed “twisted and wicked acts of evil.”
The problem is that if you legitimise someone’s description as non-human, you possibly also legitimise their treatment as non-human. 

The psychologist Paul Bloom argues in this book Against Empathy that too much empathy can actually be a bad thing resulting in bad policy. When we empathise with someone we become overly subjective, creating a moral spotlight that focuses on one person at the detriment of all others.

What is equally important to remember is that hate is not the opposite of love, but that they are emotions that are two sides of the same coin, as Robert Sapolsky explains in his book Behave.
The more we love someone, the more we feel hatred towards those who harm that person or take them from us. Our love for a victim directly translates into hatred against the offender.

What strikes me about the recent public outpour of sympathy towards the widow and family of PC Harper – in the case that again has come to public attention due to the early release scheme – is to what degree the offenders are denied their basic humanity and all context and nuance are removed from public discourse.

The offenders are constantly presented as evil killers, when in fact they were convicted of manslaughter and not murder. Equally, a sentence of 13 years is substantial for manslaughter, considering there were 17 at the time and there were other mitigating circumstances.

Due to my personal experience, I might be the only one who feels sympathy for them. But like it or not, they are human beings, and they somehow need to be able to put together the rest of their lives. And they have every right to do so.  


Photo taken from:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/06/against-empathy-paul-bloom-the-empathy-instinct-peter-bazalgette-review