Wankerous explosion

This is a bit of a compacted mass, poked together between calls at work today which is no place to be assembling these kinds of thoughts, really. Make of it what you will.

As most of you probably know, I work in a call centre. I speak to people who have been given fines and who, for whatever reason, need to talk to someone about them. There is a set of filters operating here which is sort of integral to the whole process of getting fines and failing to understand them. In short, I speak to the dumb people and it’s given me a new appreciation of how difficult it must be to be there. If they don’t read well (or at all), have been brought up not to trust police much (or at all) and don’t deal with formal language well (or at all) a basic infringement notice is an impenetrable mass of text that causes their brain to implode. They will switch off to the point where they can’t even get to the stage of scanning the notice to find the phone number to call. The more information we give them, the less they can cope. So by the time they finally get so scared of the huge pile of paper telling them that they can be arrested and have their possessions confiscated that they call us, they’ve got next to no options left and we’ve charged them a pile of extra fees. They, of course, are the people who can least well afford these extra fees or deal with the more onerous requirements of contesting a warrant.

So what should we do?

Any measure that I can think of that would allow us to take into account the fact that some people are illiterate and/or thick as the proverbial pair of planks would also be hopelessly open to rorting by those who know perfectly well what’s going on and who simply have a dramatically reduced sense of personal responsibility. Compounding that is the fact that these two groups are far from mutually exclusive. This has parallels in other areas of law as well. You can have a sentence reduced for essentially any crime on the grounds of mental impairment or insanity. Are we then suggesting that most rapes, murders, vicious assaults and so on are committed by people who are essentially sane? At what point do we stop saying that someone isn’t responsible for their actions or negligence because they’re dumb and start demanding accountability? Is absence of malice any defense? Is it reasonable to penalise people, sometimes really quite harshly, simply for being incapable of dealing with reams of dense, poorly written bureaucratese? I’m loathe to say that someone who commits crimes should be portrayed as a victim of social circumstance as there are plenty of people who manage to cope with quite incredible levels of privation without resorting to profiting at the expense of others. Having said that, if all of someone’s legitimate coping strategies fail and they don’t have the resources, one way or another, to find the help that they need to cope with life as a whole, what then? Some become homeless, some die and some resort to increasingly desperate and anti-social measures to survive. They will, of course become angry, disillusioned, distrustful and generally unapproachable as a result. How much of this is their fault? How much is ours as a community? To what extent is it acceptable for us to shrug our shoulders and declare that life is simply unfair sometimes?

Angry aggressive sociopathic people don’t usually get a lot of sympathy and we’re often in favour of locking them away where they can’t bother us anymore. There are some good reasons to pursue this as a strategy. Innocent individuals certainly shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of some prat with a deeply held grudge against the world as a whole regardless of how justified that grudge might be. Where does disability end and crime start? Where does detention stop representing psychiatric care and start being punitive? Should we start grading competence? Should we be prepared to tell people “I’m sorry but you’re too thick to deal with raw undiluted life so we’re restricting your actions while acknowledging that you need extra help.”?

I honestly can’t form a consistent opinion on this because I can’t think of a resolution that both manages to not beat people over the head for their lack of smarts or education and which simultaneously demands accountability for anti-social acts. I’m confounded when I think about this because it overturns my notions of both personal and collective accountability. Are there factors beyond intent, competence and outcome that need to be considered here? Do we need to take another step as far as our ethical framework around this sort of thing is concerned? Possibly the notion of punishment for crime is one that really needs to be examined. Punishment doesn’t benefit victims of crime after all (other than via a sort of vengeful satisfaction). Should we move away from raw punishment and towards counselling and treatment? This could well often be custodial if it was determined that they present a danger to others. Hey, the idea that their time in custody is going to be spent in therapeutic session, the effectiveness of which determines whether or not they’re to be released might actually be a lot less palatable to crims than raw basic jail time.

I can’t help but think that this whole issue is a serious failing of our social and legal structure as a whole which really needs to be addressed. I suspect that there are far too many barriers in the way of grasping this particular nettle at the moment though; the very idea would offend far too many people and often for diametrically opposed reasons.

My brain hurts.