I was thinking about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger brother and to what extent he was influenced by circumstance. I asked myself why we punish him... To make him understand what he did was wrong? What if he already understands that - what if he understood that when he was in the boat bleeding, instead of getting swept up to heaven. Should we stop punishing him then? Most people would say no, myself with them. But if he knows what he did was wrong, why continue to punish him? One answer I think you would hear is that we need to show him and everybody else the full wrongness of what he did has big consequences in terms of punishment.
Why show it to everybody else? Well, that's punishment being used as a deterrent to other would be criminals/terrorists. If you do this bad thing, these bad things will happen to you. The criminal justice system makes sure we all know that.
But what is that in itself? Its an attempt to modify people's behaviour, away from criminal and towards good, through external stimulus. So we accept that people's behaviour can be modified by external circumstances when sentencing, but not as much when judging. At the judging stage we're likely to say that Tsarnaev is personally responsible at the end of the day.
That's a weird quandary, a weird paradox to think about in terms of criminal justice. The idea I take away is that the criminal justice needs to be willing to act at many levels, in order to acknowledge the influences that lead to this kind of thing. Things like inspire magazine itself.
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