We can do better

I’ve been following a story from Tennessee, USA this week that I haven’t quite been able to shake. The one about the woman on deathrow.

There is something absurd about killing people to demonstrate that killing people is wrong.

That sentence is deliberately a little glib. Because there is absolutely nothing glib about what happened to 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Tennessee in 1995.

She was brutally murdered.

Christa Pike was convicted of that murder and sentenced to death. She was 18 at the time of the crime.

More than 30 years later, the State of Tennessee tried to execute her.

And failed.

They administered two doses of pentobarbital. They didn’t kill her. Instead, Pike ended up unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator. Her lawyers said the drug entered tissue rather than her bloodstream, leaving her arms swollen, burned and blistered.

The man responsible for Tennessee’s prisons subsequently resigned. The governor stopped executions for the rest of the year and ordered an independent investigation.

Fuckit man.

What exactly are we doing?

Before anyone misunderstands me: being against the death penalty is not being pro-crime.

Actions have consequences. They must.

Some crimes are horrific. Some people need to be removed from society, sometimes for a very long time and sometimes for the rest of their lives. Victims deserve justice. Society deserves protection.

And I know it is much easier to write about compassion when you haven’t just buried someone you love because another human being killed them.

If it were someone I loved, perhaps I would feel differently. I hope I never have to find out.

But punishment and vengeance aren’t quite the same thing.

And perhaps prevention matters even more.

I don’t think I’m naive, but I simply don’t believe most people are born evil.

I think an awful lot of terrible human behaviour grows in terrible soil: abuse, neglect, poverty, addiction, poor education, mental illness, violence, lack of opportunity and sometimes simply never having experienced enough love or stability to learn a different way of being in the world.

That doesn’t excuse what people subsequently do.

And it is important to say something else too: not every criminal had a terrible childhood and, much more importantly, the overwhelming majority of people who experience abuse, poverty or trauma do not become criminals.

But it does make me wonder what we could prevent.

Pike’s childhood was reportedly filled with abuse and trauma. She later received serious mental-health diagnoses.

Again: that does not excuse murdering Colleen Slemmer.

Both things can be true.

A young woman was brutally murdered and deserved far, far better.

And the 18-year-old who murdered her had also been failed long before she became a murderer.

That, for me, is where this becomes about much more than the death penalty.

What if wealthy societies spent more of their enormous resources intervening earlier?

Better early-childhood development. Better schools. Mental-health care. Support for abused children. Safer communities. Drug treatment. Jobs. Opportunity. People who notice when a child is disappearing through the cracks and actually do something about it.

Help people make better choices before we’re punishing them for terrible ones.

There is something bizarre about our willingness to spend enormous amounts of money dealing with the damaged 40- or 50-year-old while so often failing to invest enough in the damaged eight-year-old who came before them.

Perhaps that is partly because punishment is visible. Prevention often isn’t.

When prevention works, there is no headline.

There is simply a child who stays at school. Someone who gets treatment. A family that gets help. A young person who gets a job. A life that takes a different turn.

No drama. No breaking news.

Just a different outcome.

And then, when people do commit crimes, prosecute them properly. Sentence them appropriately. Protect society. Rehabilitate where we can. Imprison for life where we must.

That isn’t being soft on crime.

It might actually be being serious about crime.

There is also little comfort for supporters of the death penalty in the evidence.

There is no reliable evidence that capital punishment deters murder better than alternatives such as life imprisonment.

And despite the apparently obvious economics of “one execution versus decades in prison”, death-penalty cases in America generally cost substantially more because of the trials, appeals and safeguards necessary when the state plans to kill one of its citizens.

Which brings me home.

South Africa abolished the death penalty in 1995.

Not because South Africa didn’t have violent crime.

God knows we did.

And do.

Our Constitutional Court wrestled directly with that uncomfortable reality in S v Makwanyane.

Justice Pius Langa wrote that our Constitution does not allow us to “kill criminals simply to get even with them.”

I like that.

Not because murderers don’t deserve punishment.

Because perhaps the test of a society isn’t how lovingly we treat lovely people.

That’s easy.

The harder test is what we do with people who have done terrible things.

And there’s another uncomfortable layer to all of this.

Christa Pike is white.

If someone with her history can fall through every crack in one of the richest countries on earth, think about the millions of children around the world who begin life with poverty, violence, racism, terrible schools, no mental-health care and almost no one fighting their corner.

How many people do we fail before they fail themselves, their families and ultimately society?

And in South Africa we don’t have to look very far.

We live in one of the most unequal societies in the world. Millions of children grow up surrounded by circumstances they did not choose: poverty, dysfunctional schools, violence, unemployment and communities where opportunity can feel very far away.

Most of those children will not become criminals.

That point matters.

But surely every child we help to achieve more of their potential makes our society stronger — and potentially safer too.

This isn’t only government’s job.

It is ours.

Business. Schools. Families. NGOs. Communities. People with money. People with skills. People with time. Those of us lucky enough to have choices and opportunities.

To whom much is given, much is expected.

We won’t eliminate crime by loving everyone a little more. Life isn’t that simple.

There will still be bad choices. There will still be damaged people. There will still be people who do terrible things. And there must still be consequences.

Justice.

Punishment.

Protection.

Rehabilitation where possible.

But not vengeance dressed up as justice.

Maybe none of this is simple.

Maybe some people really do commit acts so terrible that forgiveness feels impossible. Maybe, if it were someone I loved who had been murdered, I would struggle to write any of this.

But I keep coming back to that hospital bed in Tennessee.

A state decided that a woman should die.

It tried to kill her.

It failed.

And then doctors had to work to keep her alive.

There is something terribly, terribly absurd in that.

Surely we can spend more of our energy, money and humanity much earlier – helping children, educating people, creating opportunity, treating trauma, supporting families and giving more people a genuine chance to make better choices.

And when people still make terrible choices, as some will, there must be consequences.

But killing people to show that killing people is wrong?

I think we can do better.

I think we have to.