There was no name on the query to me about truly evil people and
getting people off vengeance, but here's a response. First, I'm
skeptical that there are "truly evil people." There are admittedly
some people who have been so brutalized that they are numb to
violence. As for the truly evil people, I'd appreciate hearing a
description from anyone who has known one personally rather than
presuming the evil from afar.
I wouldn't ask people to desist from vengeance before I offered them
something else to do. I'd offer first. We can and have for instance
experimented with asking gangs to perform community functions we
value--even to taking care of older residents in the neighborhood.
It's not so much a matter of stopping the vengeance, I think, as of
involving the vengeful in other activities for which we value them.
The challenge is for us to find the good in them and acknowledge it
rather than dwelling on a life they probably don't like much better
than any of the rest of us would.
It's easier to figure out how to respond to specific "criminals" based
on personal knowledge of them than to lay out a recipe that works for
all. Ultimately, the problem lies in treating people as abstractions
in categories rather than attending to people case by case, which
among other things requires trying to understand what a particular
person has gone through, and how and why the person resorts to
violence as any of us might if driven far enough; rather than labeling
a person or group as just plain evil. Nor can we foresee when those
who know any person may decide that someone who had hurt people badly
has become safe enough to live among us again.
The easy way out, building more prisons and filling them to
overflowing, has worked no better than beating a sobbing child to make
the child stay quiet. I'm not so much saying I know how to make
violent people peaceful as claiming that there's no way to learn but
the hard way--tailoring what we do to the peculiar circumstances of
every violent person we would change. I'm comforted by the knowledge
that I have managed to stay safe with people whom the outside world
considers as dangerous as they come. And actually, people I have
found myself most afraid of have tended to be those who are deemed
trustworthy and law-abiding enough to be given power to exercise over
others, and abuse it with impunity, even rising up the ladder of
outward social success. Put another way, on the whole, I find
prisoners more morally self-conscious than us in the free world, and
easier to trust.
Did I respond to your questions or evade them? hal pepinsky