When a violent crime shocks a community, public demands for punishment often drown out calls for understanding and nuance. Even in cases where severe mental illness is a factor, many insist “justice must be served,” often equating justice with retribution.
Why does this happen?
Groups amplify emotions. Fear, grief, and anger spread quickly, creating a collective urgency to act. In these moments, we think with our hearts, not our heads.
Psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo described this with the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): instead of carefully processing information (the central route), groups often rely on quick emotional cues and surface signals (the peripheral route). When tragedy strikes, the public reaction is driven by headlines, victim stories, and visceral images, not by deep evidence-based reasoning.
Cognitive shortcuts like the availability heuristic (thinking vivid crimes are common) and the representativeness heuristic (believing offenders are “monsters”) push societies toward harsh responses that feel justified in the moment.
Sociologist Stanley Cohen described moral panics—moments when societies fixate on a perceived threat and demand disproportionate punishment. Calls to reinstate the death penalty or push for severe sentences often follow, despite little evidence that they improve safety or justice outcomes.
Individually, people can understand that severe mental illness can remove moral agency and that proper treatment can protect society. But collectively, fear and anger overshadow this understanding, replacing fact with emotion.
Real justice requires balancing society’s need for safety with evidence, compassion, and facts—not fear-driven vengeance.
It is also important to recognize that satisfying emotional desires with harsh punishment does not necessarily mean fewer crimes will occur. During my years volunteering with the John Howard Society, I spoke with a former death row inmate whose sentence had been commuted to life. He told me that at the time of his crime, he believed he could only be executed once, so it did not matter how many people he killed during a robbery that had gone wrong. For him, the threat of capital punishment was not a deterrent—it placed a ceiling on punishment, not a boundary. This is a clear example that while harsh punishment may feel like justice, it does not always translate into a safer society.
The next time a shocking crime leads to calls for harsh punishment, pause and ask: Is this about real safety, or just about satisfying collective outrage?
No comments:
Post a Comment