by C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)

In the late 1940s, Britons were debating the morality of capital punishment. Opponents of execution favored rehabilitation instead of “stern” retribution (i.e., proportional, “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” punishment). Oxford professor, C. S. Lewis, countered that it was “essential to oppose the Humanitarian [rehabilitative] theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it.”¹ Of course, he welcomed such rehabilitation as might occur, but when “cure” became the highest priority, criminals were turned into patients or laboratory experiments, while justice and human dignity fell to the wayside. By this standard, a grumpy prisoner, one who refused to repent, could serve a life term for petty theft; he had to stay in jail until the authorities declared that his mind was “right,” and that could take forever. This was the road to tyranny.

Those who hold [the Humanitarian theory of punishment] think that it is mild and merciful. In this I believe that they are seriously mistaken. I believe that the ‘Humanity’ which it claims is a dangerous illusion and disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end. I urge a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal. . . . My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being. The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert [i.e., deserving]. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. . . .

[T]o undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grow wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? . . .

Lewis also demonstrated the superiority of retribution to deterrence, the view that the point of punishment was to convince potential criminals that they should behave themselves. Yes, deterrence was a good thing, but unchecked by retributive justice, it generated horrors:

If the justification of exemplary punishment is not to be based on desert but solely on its efficacy as a deterrent, it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime. . . .The punishment of an innocent, that is, an undeserving, man is wicked only if we grant the traditional view that righteous punishment means deserved punishment.

Lewis explained that while “cold retribution” might seem unmerciful, it was, in reality, the true friend of mercy.²

The older view was that mercy ‘tempered’ justice. . . [b]ut the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. . . . Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety.

Footnotes:

from Kairos Journal