Aspergers, ASD and Social and Criminal Sanctioning

Post Reply New Topic

OK - this is an other question. I have more than doubts about the whole idea of punishment and guild is in anyway helpful to prevent crime. In my eyes it is only an institutional form of revenge, appealing to lower instincts.If we start to dig a bit in our western culture and try to find the origin of this idea we find The Eumenides of Aeschylus, in which revenge was cast into the institution of courts. I wondering that we did not fond in the recent 2500 years a better concept.

When we rethink what function the criminal justice system shall provide for society, namely the prevention of acts which are harmful for the functioning of society and to protect the members of society, than it is to say: It failed. The raise in the standard of living in the recent 200 years did more for the prevention of crime than all the most brutal methods of punishment in the century prior.

In my option the question must not: What is the right punishment, but how we can repair structures which led to crime - on the level of society as a whole and on the level of the single person. The actions of society in reaction to a crime should not be measured on the crime, but on mindset and circumstances of the criminal to prevent this in future.

So say is simple: "Don not punish, repair!"

Yes I'll buy that
I think revenge is a natural response to attack, mediated through anger. It usually takes a lot for an animal to retaliate strongly against another of its own kind, and the process is normally a string of warning messages followed by action of gradually increasing severity. Strange how a primordial, thoughtless, biological procedure so closely resembles the carefully worked out doctrines of minimum force that underpins a lot of modern law. Leaders rarely want ordinary people to do revenge for themselves, they much prefer to take it over and measure it out on our behalf, where they tell us it's done more fairly, and they change its name to retribution and put on a sophisticated ritualistic show to impress us with how carefully they do it. Yet it can be very unsatisfying to a victim to see their attacker being treated like a human being by the courts.

If I got my way the victims would be furious, because what they want to do is to hurt their attacker like their attacker has hurt them, whereas I only wish to make sure the attacker doesn't do it again, unless I myself were the victim, in which case I'd see their point. Sometimes I think the judicial system should let the victim have the option of personally inflicting something suitably nasty on their offender, just so they'd feel vindicated, and then let the courts take over with benign restraint and rehabilitation. At least it would keep the tabloid readers quiet. And it would be interesting to see how far people would actually go with revenge when actually faced with the prospect of harming somebody face-to-face - I suspect a lot of them talk up what they'd do, but given the chance, they'd not be so harsh.

Thanks for your comments so far.

I am travelling at the moment and will respond when I return home.

It is possible to have Autism Spectrum Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, as well as are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators, some victims also can become criminals, but that is rare. Some victims become delusional or psychotic and then develop severe personality disorders and unhealthy paraphilias/unhealthy fetishes and make delusional excuses as to why they want to murder their abusers and some of those people commit murder against their abusers.



To say that victims can't become criminals is false and untrue because being abused for a long time can affect your mental health badly into symptoms of personality disorders that may lead to criminal behavior later on in young adulthood.



Research, sources, and references:



​1) https://www.google.com/search?q=The+cau ... s-wiz-serp





2) https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-con ... evelopment.





3) https://www.samhsa.gov/mental-health/an ... y-disorder





4) https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/d ... y-disorder





5) https://jaapl.org/content/49/4/462





6) https://www.google.com/search?q=Autism+ ... s-wiz-serp





7) https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/crimi ... ce-system/



But Prof. Sam Vaknin links crime to High-functioning Autism, also known as Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1: https://youtu.be/7GjuAdqi1nA



Same thing with Wikipedia as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-func ... m#Behavior