Sunday e-mail 4th February

Two countries: two Crime & Psychology cases

Valdo Calocane assaulted a police officer with a knife. His arrest warrant remained in place for no less than nine months. During that time, Calocane managed to secure a job at a warehouse, where he assaulted two security guards. In June last year, he stabbed to death a school caretaker and two students from the University of Nottingham. He stole the caretaker’s van and attempted to murder three pedestrians by running them down.

Calocane had been diagnosed with ‘treatment-resistant schizophrenia’ and sectioned no fewer than four times before he was finally arrested. The Crown Prosecution Service accepted his plea of manslaughter with diminished responsibility (for US readers, that’s equivalent to the US plea of Not Guilty for Reason of Insanity). He was committed to indefinite detention at a high-security hospital and told it was ‘very probably for the rest of your life’.

The victims’ families called for a public inquiry to establish whether Calocane should have been stopped. They were understandably upset that Calocane was not convicted of murder. Indeed, the Crown Prosecution Service apparently never explained that they were seeking a manslaughter conviction. ‘[W]e have been let down by the CPS, the National Health Service and also the police’, said the brother of one of the victims.

Kenneth Eugene Smith and a John Forrest Parker accepted $1000 to kill a man’s wife for the insurance payout. They were found guilty as long ago as 1988. Parker was executed in 2010. Smith did not deny involvement but claimed not to have committed the actual murder. He was slated for execution by lethal injection 14 months ago. He lay on a gurney for no less than four hours while medics tried to insert an intravenous line. They quit only after the death warrant expired, leaving Smith in ‘intense pain’. When finally the execution did happen, the method had changed. Smith was forced to breathe nitrogen. Such a method had never been used anywhere in the world before. The execution took so long and was reportedly so horrible to witness that Alabama has been accused on ‘torturing [Smith] to death’.

In the time leading up to his execution, Smith seems to have been in regular contact with a psychiatrist. Here is an extract from his diary: ‘Woke up with a migraine. Saw the psychiatrist. Discussed increased nightmares, depression, anxiety, and having trouble sleeping since getting the date…’

These two cases appeared in the news on the same day. Both involved murder; both involved psychiatric assessment. In one case the system was accused of leniency. Reviews of the other included that word ‘torture’.  We can argue about the rights and wrong of the death penalty. We can argue about the value of deterrence (does it work? Does it matter?) We can even argue about what we hope to achieve by punishing criminals at all. What we will probably not argue about, though, is the fact that the law is supposed to be fair, equal, and impartial. And that we like to believe we punish people only for crimes that they can reasonably be held responsible for.

We can imagine all kinds of incidents for which we do not hold the perpetrators responsible. Imagine someone falls off a building only to land on a car, badly damaging someone else’s property. Or imagine their own car hits black ice, skids uncontrollably, injuring a pedestrian. Psychology doesn’t get involved then. It is not too concerned with falls or ice. It does get involved when the perpetrator’s mental state makes a difference. Does the ‘insane’ criminal – someone, say, with ‘untreatable schizophrenia’ - still possess what we like to think of as ’free will’? Do any of us? Does the idea even make sense?

Not coincidentally, this week’s Crime & Psychology newsletter is about this very topic. I hope you’ll join me on Wednesday for the newsletter entitled How You Became Raskolnikov. I know you can hardly wait, but, remember, Wednesday is only a few days away.

If you don’t read it, how are you gonna understand what all the cool kids are talking about on Thursday?

Want to read some great books about crime, punishment, and the link between the two? Here are this week’s bullet points:

On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria is a book that ought to need no introduction, but probably does. Written in virtually no time at all by an Enlightenment philosopher who did virtually nothing else at all, this book remains the cornerstone of most Western legal systems right up to the present day. Even better, you can read it in an afternoon - it’s very short.

The Principles of Morals and Legislation is not, let’s be honest, exactly Crime & Psychology. It

begins with its author, Jeremy Bentham, telling us how boring it’s going to be. He also tells us that he ‘knows not how to regret it’. The book doesn’t get any more exciting as it goes on, either – but what it does is set out a rational, sane, semi-mathematical model of the way in which a rational, sane, semi-mathematical criminal justice system ought to work. Also, if you get to the end, you receive a special prize. Probably. No one knows, because no one has.

Photo by Loren Cutler on Unsplash

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky was the first book you thought of when I mentioned this list. If you haven’t read one of the most important novels in history, well, this is a perfect opportunity!

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault is just the kind of book that keeps me awake at night, or would do if other things didn’t. Foucault’s prose is dense, repetitive, dull, and virtually unreadable. There, I’ve said it. I wouldn’t much care, except that it has had a massive impact on our educational systems – mostly via academics who, one suspects, haven’t actually trudged their way through their hero’s stuff. I have. I did it because those are academics I rarely agree with, and I wanted to understand why. Some will tell you this is a great book. Try it yourself (go on, I dare you) and let us know what you think!

Finally, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer is, in my very humble opinion, the author’s best. It won the Pulitzer Prize and may very well come to be seen as one of the best books in English of the last century. Bearing in mind that Mailer was one of the more florid of the last Great American Writers, this book’s flat, unemphatic prose style reveals what a master of words he really was. The book deals with Gary Gilmore’s short criminal career and the tidal wave of repercussions that followed his campaign for the right to be executed.

That’s everything for today, Crime & Psychology fans. If you like my stuff, please, click Like, or Restack; Subscribe or Pledge. It helps, it really does. More on Wednesday!