an offender and that for society's own welfare, criminal punishment
should reflect not our basest instincts (vengeance) but our
most noble values,'I9 or (about punishment) 'at its most it provides
a fleeting moment of satisfaction as one's thirst for vengeance is
quenched. '20
But why is this type of absolutist rhetoric necessaty? In the face
of centuries of debate and any number of good arguments to the
contrary, I see no reason for anyone to accept that 'the' goal of
criminal justice should be to improve the offender. As it stands,
the claim is ridiculous. And since when is punishment merely a
matter of base, emotional vengeance? This sort of rhetoric would
be enough to make me an unrepentant 'justice-model liberal' .
This leads me from the case for doing good to the claims for
doing justice. Here I take a somewhat unusual supporting text -
not two sociologists reaffirming rehabilitation, but a psychiatrist
reaffirming justice. In his compelling account, The Killing of
Bonnie Garland, Gaylin provides a model liberal argument for
doing justice - as a positive social value (beyond 'base vengeance')
and as a counter to liberal versions of doing good.21 The details of
the case do not concern me here: how Richard Herrin hammered
his girl-friend to death; how the working of a defence claiming
'extreme emotional disturbance' excused him from maximum
responsibility and led to the reduction of the charge to manslaughter;
and how organized religion (the local Catholic church),
psychoanalytical ideology and the adversarial trial system, all
conspired to reach a verdict which placed individual welfare
beyond social needs.
This is the essence of Gaylin's case: that organized good-will,
empathy, compassion and the doctrine of psychic determinism
usurped the feelings due to the victim as representative uf the
community. Not rehabilitation, but justice has to be 'reaffirmed',
as an honourable moral value in itself and not merely something
which the law mechanically requires. Gaylin insists that this
moralistic idea is not the same as the notion of equity which lay
behind the 'back to justice model' (of which he was one of the
original advocates!). Justice is not just measurable fairness;impartiality
and equity (this should have been called the 'equity model'
rather than the 'justice model'), but a broader, more social and less
tangible sense of 'rightness'. While the insanity defence (and similar
notions from the rehabilitative model) have operated historically
to bring a compassionate limit to the concept of human responsibility
and a greater sense of relativism (and hence a more humane