A few weeks ago, a Cornell freshman was arrested for violently raping another Cornell student. Incidentally, I had played a game of pickup basketball with him about two weeks before news of his arrest was released. This made disturbing news all the more disturbing.

During our basketball game, he seemed like a normal guy. He was a great player (he actually played on Cornell’s team) and was a sportsman throughout. Nothing about our interaction screamed “violent rapist!”

“ Now, with all these cameras focused on my face

You’d think they could see it through my skin

They’re looking for evil, thinking they can trace it, but

Evil don’t look like anything” Westfall by Okkervil River (a dope song from the perspective of the perpetrator of the gruesome yogurt shop murders)

News of his arrest led to a heated debate on the nature of justice and criminality in, of all places, my fraternity’s intramural basketball GroupMe (which did return back to the perhaps more pertinent debate of Shaq vs Kobe).

I’m used to having these abstract conversations at debate tournaments and meetings of my organization, the Prison Reform and Education Project. But here was a living example of one of the most heinous things one human can do to another, eliciting reactions from people who aren’t immersed in issues of criminality and justice.

The reactions were understandably ones of anger and disgust like:

“worthless waste of a human life” “deserves what he gets and probably more” “I’ve got a lot of problems with the prison system, but this guy deserves it” “Deserves to die” “If we don’t demonize the worst offenders we will become desensitized to real horrible crime. That is the scariest possible reality.”

These are completely legitimate reactions, and I am not trying to paint anyone who reacted similarly in a bad light.

More importantly, they’re very human reactions. We’re social creatures, and we tend to have a natural empathy towards other people: we see ourselves in them. This tendency towards empathy is why I believe that people are, on the whole, good.

It’s also why we so fervently reject behavior that we find repulsive. It’s why words like “inhuman” and “inhumane” exist. Obviously, nothing that humans have done is inhuman, yet when certain social mores are violated, we strip the label of “human” from the violator in a semantic excommunication from the species.

I’m pretty sure German people don’t look like this

This thinking is dangerous.

“Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking — a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.” — David Livingstone Smith, author of Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

It’s hard to defend rapists and murderers.

They’ve violated the moral and legal codes that society holds most dear. Evidence of the harm they’ve inflicted is tangible in the imagery of grisly murders and the haunted psyches of victims and families who will never be the same.

They deserve punishment.

On this, I agree.

As an advocate for criminal justice reform, these cases are something I struggle with. The normal answers of releasing nonviolent drug offenders, addressing racial bias in policing and prosecution, and focusing on education don’t really apply. These acts are the most visible and the most inexcusable.

Yet when we fall into the trap of dehumanizing their perpetrators, we begin down a path headed inexorably to explicit or incidental violation of other mores that we hold dear.

“But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.” — John McCain on the floor of the Senate in 2014

John McCain actually being a maverick

For example, most of the international community has agreed that the use of torture under any circumstances is a violation of human rights: the international codification of social mores.

But in the United States, nearly 100,000 men and women are currently held in solitary confinement, a practice widely agreed upon as torture. The prevailing popular belief is that solitary is reserved for the worst offenders or for those who pose a threat to others. But in New York State, 5/6th of everyone in solitary was placed there for a nonviolent infraction. Here is a clear case where demonization of the worst offenders has led to widespread and explicit torture of all offenders.

“In 1993, Norwegian criminologist Nils…Christie concluded that the more unlike oneself the imagined perpetrator of crime, the harsher the conditions one will agree to impose upon convicted criminals, and the greater the range of acts one will agree should be designated as crimes.” — Doran Larson in the Atlantic article Why Scandinavian Prisons are Superior

Anyone who questions the severity of solitary confinement should read William Blake’s essay a Sentence Worse than Death:

“Set me afire, pummel and bludgeon me, cut me to bits, stab me, shoot me, do what you will in the worst of ways, but none of it could come close to making me feel things as cumulatively horrifying as what I’ve experienced through my years in solitary. Dying couldn’t take but a short time if you or the State were to kill me; in SHU I have died a thousand internal deaths.” — William Blake, a man who has spent nearly 30 consecutive years in solitary confinement

And anyone who thinks that solitary is meted out in a just or measured fashion is simply ignorant of the reality of prison administration.

Or take prison rape. A practice so normalized that jokes about “not dropping the soap” are part of the cultural lexicon. This is what comes to my mind when people say things like, “deserves what he gets, and probably more.”

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” — Fyodor Dostoyevesky

This is what happens when a group loses its voice.

Groups that have a platform for complaint are not systematically abused and neglected. Dehumanization removes the platform. Arguments against abuse and neglect are predicated on the humanity of the victims. When that humanity is stripped, nobody feels compelled to listen.

The dehumanization of minority groups — Jews in Germany, blacks in America, and gays, well, everywhere — was a necessary step in justifying, even compelling, violence against them.

We’ve come a long way from the days of chattel slavery and anti-sodomy laws (although some states took a while, looking at you Texas). But things get more difficult when the party being dehumanized cannot appeal to their innocence.

It’s pretty obvious that someone’s skin color or sexual preferences shouldn’t affect how we treat them. But people who commit crimes should be treated differently. Whether the motive for that treatment is rooted in concerns for safety, rehabilitation, justice, or revenge doesn’t change the fact that they should be treated differently.

How we justify this different treatment is where things get tricky. Do we lock violent people up for the protection of society and the rehabilitation of the perpetrator? Or do we do it to satisfy our base desires for retribution, a primitive moralistic justice?

If we use the latter to justify our actions, where do we draw the line? What does the perpetrator deserve? If we use the framework of what people do and don’t deserve, it’s hard to argue that a remorseless killer does “deserve” legal representation and doesn’t “deserve” anything that’s coming to him.

This is the trap of relying on our human desire for satisfaction as the motivation for punishment. It is very unlikely that the satisfying response will be “best” in any reasonable measure.

Let’s imagine that the response to any violent crime that causes irreparable harm to the victims (violent rape, murder) should be met with an immediate life-sentence with no possibility for parole. This response would probably satisfy our desire that the perpetrator suffer immensely for his or her actions. But in what ways would it be the best?

Cost? Well it would be enormously expensive. The average cost of imprisoning someone for one year is $31,307. Expect that cost to be higher for inmates in maximum security prisons. Most people commit crimes from ages 14–25 so expect to be keeping them locked up for 50+ years.

Justice? It’s not clear to me who would benefit from a policy like this. The family of victims of murder are obviously irreparably harmed by the murderer. It’s natural to want this person to suffer for his or her actions. I know that’s what I would want.

But his suffering will not bring back the victim or improve the lives of the surviving family (outside of any psychological benefits of knowing that the murderer is suffering, which seem marginal in comparison to the severity of the trauma).

Safety? The “one fewer criminal on the street” argument does hold up here. But this benefit must be weighed against the immense costs of incarceration, in addition to the lost human potential of forever removing someone from society.

Wouldn’t this act as a deterrent? All the evidence points to…not really. According to the National Institute of Justice:

“The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.”

They further state that there is no evidence that the most severe response of all, capital punishment, has any deterrent effect.

It looks like satisfaction is not the only or even the best criterion to use when responding to violent criminality.

“any violent act towards them should be judged on its probable consequences — how much it makes the world better, how it deters these sorts of acts in the future — not on how satisfying it might be to me or my friends.” — Yale Psychology Professor Paul Bloom on attacking ISIS

A system where the victims call all the shots isn’t justice, it’s vigilantism. A system where emotional responses dominate isn’t justice, it’s mob rule.

I know that I would be incapable of thinking clearly if someone I loved was a victim of a brutal crime. I also know that what I want should not be the only consideration.

This simple example of how our attitudes can shape our policies is why I want my justice system to be cold, dispassionate, even inhuman.

“Then there are victim-impact statements, where detailed descriptions of how victims are affected by a crime are used to help determine the sentence imposed on a criminal. There are arguments in favor of these statements, but given all the evidence that we are more prone to empathize with some individuals over others — with factors like race, sex, and physical attractiveness playing a powerful role — it’s hard to think of a more biased and unfair way to determine punishment.” — Paul Bloom again

So how should we treat the most violent criminals?

I wish I had a good answer.

One thing that we must do is claim them. Excommunication from the species is more than a slippery slope: it prevents us from properly confronting the capacity for evil that exists within the enormous range of human potential.

When we cast aside the great murderers of history as “inhuman,” we fail to engage with what conditions led to their actions. Waving our hands and blaming “evil” or “inhumanity” doesn’t seem like much of a solution to me.

We should instead identify the conditions that make violent behavior more likely and work to ameliorate them.

Further, people who have acted violently should be punished, both as a deterrent to others and for the sake of their victims. But I don’t think the vast majority of people who have done violent things are incorrigibly violent people.

People are capable of changing, provided we give them the tools to do so. The punishments designed to satisfy are at odds with the punishments designed to rehabilitate. Providing services like education and therapy to people who have done bad things is not satisfying, but it works a lot better than treating people like subhumans.

In the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP), we exclusively referred to the people we taught as “students.” Are they technically “inmates” or “felons”? Yes, but in the context in which we interacted, the only relevant fact was that they are our students.

People have a tendency to meet the expectations others have of them. If you keep calling people animals, they’ll eventually come to believe you.