6.6.7: The Need for a More Humane Approach

 6.6.7: The Need for a More Humane Approach As Durkheim (1895/1964:68) pointed out, deviance is inevitable—even in a group of saints.

 Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals.

 Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear invisible to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary society. With deviance inevitable, one measure of a society is how it treats its deviants. 

Our prisons certainly don’t say much good about U.S. society. 

Filled with the poor, uneducated, and unskilled, they are warehouses of the unwanted.

 White-collar criminals continue to get by with a slap on the wrist while street criminals are punished severely. 

Some deviants, who fail to meet current standards of admission to either prison or mental hospitals, take refuge in shelters, as well as in cardboard boxes tucked away in urban recesses.

 Although no one has the answer, it does not take much reflection to see that there are more humane approaches than these. 

Because deviance is inevitable, the larger issues are to find ways to protect people from deviant behaviors that are harmful to themselves or others, to tolerate behaviors that are not harmful, and to develop systems of fairer treatment for deviants.

 In the absence of fundamental changes that would bring about an equitable society, most efforts are, unfortunately, like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. 

What we need is a more humane social system, one that would prevent the social inequalities that are the focus of the next four chapters. Watch Ex-Juvenile Lifer Begins Life on the Outside Play Watch Ex-Juvenile Lifer Begins Life on the Outside