How many times must we hear the claptrap that the person in the dock is "not the same person" who committed the murder, assault, theft or robbery of which he has been found guilty? It's as though we are experiencing an invasion of the body snatchers. Of course it is the same person. If it is so that the criminal has made a true and heartfelt change for the better, halleluiah! What about the effects of the wrong they cannot undo? Indeed, neither are the victims of their crimes the "same." I suspect most of these claims of reformation mask the real issues: a continuation of what Samenow termed "criminal thinking errors" and more specifically the adoption of the "victim stance" and a very sincere desire to limit the coming punishment. Read on:

Absolvo Me
"I know I have let you down, but I have also let myself down." So said Tonya Harding at a press conference, admitting that she had been hiding knowledge about the attack on Nancy Kerrigan. Jane Alpert, a 1960s radical who had taken part in bombings that injured twenty-one people, said she had spent years in therapy "learning to understand, to tolerate and forgive both others and myself." Lorena Bobbitt's lawyer said the acquittal was "a giant step forward for Lorena in the healing process. She really needs healing." And Michael Jackson's lawyer, announcing a multimillion dollar settlement for alleged child molestation: "Michael wants to get on with his life and let the healing process begin." Then there are the Menendez brothers. Testifying for the defense, the psychologist says of Lyle: "He had this strong love for his father. And the conditions that had been produced meant he had lost his father. He no longer had this person he loved." The condition that Lyle had produced is called patricide.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer describes himself as a longtime student of the American way of confession, and he finds fascinating these instances of self-exculpation. "The themes are self-betrayal and self-forgiveness. They reflect perfectly a culture in which one no longer sins against God, natural law, the moral order, society, or even one's fellow man-to take them in descending metaphysical order-but against oneself." In the Menendez case: "Their trial has elevated therapeutic expiation to truly comic proportions. The classic definition of chutzpah is a person who murders his parents and then demands mercy from the court on the grounds that he is an orphan. . . . But this joke is dangerous. Our obsession with the psychic welfare of the victimizer leaves us philosophically defenseless against crime. When the victimizer is nothing more than another victim, justice becomes impossible. Bobbitt walks. The Menendez brothers prove impossible to convict. . . . The President and Congress can climb all over each other to be tough on crime. But as long as the only real crimes are crimes against oneself, as long as psychic injury turns criminals into victims, the task is hopeless."
Crime and punishment. It used to be thought that they go together. Having philosophically discredited the idea of punishment, we are left only with crime. But now we have crime without criminals; there are only "conditions produced," and of these conditions we are all victims. From our inability to think clearly about punishment we conclude that we are all punished, and the doleful fact is that we are. Most of us might sympathize with Lear when he cries, "I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning." But today, how would one know?

(excerpt from a longer piece)
Richard John Neuhaus
Copyright (c) 1994 First Things 43 (May 1994): 63-76.