Capital Punishment (& Prison Abolition) | Philosophy Tube

[Music] [Music] there is a spot in central london that is euphemistically referred to as tyburn tree starting in the 1100s and proceeding for about 600 years tyburn is one of the places where criminals in britain were hanged hanging was considered a particularly shameful way to die and was reserved for men of the lower classes gentlemen preferred to be decapitated and as for ladies we were burned at the stake which was considered more merciful because it avoided exposing the body because yeah that's the thing i was really worried about at my public execution in the 18th century the site was moved elsewhere in the late 19th century we started executing people inside prisons but britain's final hanging wasn't until 1964 on the 13th of august at 8 o'clock in the morning which seems extra cruel to me i mean if i was going to be hanged i would at least want to lie in first capital punishment is an absolute philosophy 101 classic that people have been asking me to do an episode on since i started this show and following the george floyd uprising of last year the topic of police and prison abolition has been thrust into the spotlight too so since britain has already abolished part of our prison system the part that used to hang people i thought it might be fun to take a look at the discussions people were having then and the discussions people are having now and see if there's any overlap i also thought it might be fun to look at the actual history and see whether the ideas that philosophers had about capital punishment match the ideas that politicians and members of the public did and when i say members of the public i include myself because by researching this video i learned some things that kind of surprised me the british justice system used to be a little bit looser than it is now we had been executing people for thousands of years but the number of capital crimes gradually fell until the late 18th century when it suddenly shot up they added a whole bunch more including stealing fruit from the prime minister's garden which frankly i think if you can get away with that you should probably be allowed to a lot of the new capital crimes were non-violent offenses against property like in 1801 a 13 year old homeless boy named andrew brunning was publicly hanged for stealing a spoon you think oliver twist is a tale of hardship that kid had it easy but not everyone just accepted it there were people at the time who wanted to see big changes in society and it did not escape their notice that stealing a spoon got you hanged but evicting a family of five to freeze to death in the streets that's just good business people wondered if all these executions might have something to do with the fact that rich people made all the laws so sometimes the desire to abolish capital punishment was part of a larger desire to transform society more on that later and there were abolitionists even back then including charles dickens the author of oliver twist and the muppet christmas carol in 1840 he attended the public execution of a man named francois cuvoisier a butler who had cut the throat of his master while he slept that's right the butler did it the story of a servant who killed his master obviously had a lot of rich people looking over their shoulders and it attracted a good deal of attention forty thousand people turned out to watch cuevasier hang the theory was that public executions would deter criminals but dickens described it like this i did not see one token in all the immense crowd of any emotion suitable to the occasion no sorrow no salutary terror no abhorrence no seriousness nothing but ripple tree debauchery levity drunkenness and flaunting vice in 50 other shapes i should have deemed it impossible that i could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow creatures to be so odious officially we had the death penalty for loads of crimes but in practice only about half of those found guilty actually swung which was still a lot of people the rest got pressed into the army or they were given the cruelest fate that english minds can devise being sent to live in australia so justice was less of a rule and more of a vibe and the philosopher william paley who philosophy students will already be familiar with said that's a great system it's nice and flexible it sets the maximum penalty but it allows the authorities to be lenient if they require pearly thought it would be a great way to deter crime because only the most serious criminals who really need to be made an example of get strung up you know people like andrew running the moriarty of tableware paley's philosophy was very influential until another philosopher named jeremy bentham came along and tried to knock him down a peg bentham pointed out that in practice this very harsh and vibes-based justice system meant that whether or not you got f hanged was often pretty arbitrary and therefore the system was very unpopular and easy to corrupt because what is corruption but arbitrariness that someone has paid for bentham thought that having the death penalty for so many crimes would actually undermine the goal of deterrence because juries didn't want to find people guilty they were like well he probably did the crime but i don't know whether he's going to get a slap on the wrist or hanged in front of sainsbury's so i'm gonna vote not guilty in 1830 jurors in london petitioned parliament saying the fact that you can get the death penalty for forgery means nobody ever gets found guilty of forgery so by the 19th century people like dickens are starting to wonder how capital punishment reflects on everybody else who isn't directly involved like is it making us mean or cruel is it suitable for a society that likes to think of itself as civilized and they're starting to ask well does it actually work to stop crime in theory it should be easy to answer that we just need to look at the evidence like in france under the napoleonic code they only had six capital crimes whereas we had hundreds but the french gentleman still found enough spoons to get through their super course in practice however it's a little tricky this is a graph of murders committed in britain since 1971 so just after we abolished the death penalty this is from the office of national statistics and you can see that the murder rate is trending very slightly upwards in no small part thanks to that big spike in 2003 what the hell was going on there was there some kind of rage gas released into the streets or something well in fact that spike is largely the work of one man dr harold shipman a serial killer who murdered approximately 250 people over a period of decades he was convicted in 2000 and this graph includes 173 of his murders why only 173 i don't know and they're included in 2003 despite the fact that he didn't kill anybody that year that we know of so the shipment case is just one example of how sometimes crime statistics can have limited uses really those murders should have been spread out over previous years and there's another example if we jump back to 2001 there's another spike because 58 chinese migrants suffocated to death in the back of a lorry in dover the lorry driver got done for manslaughter in the uk some chinese gang members got done for it in the netherlands where the lorry had started the journey but do you count that as a crime being committed here or in the netherlands or in china or all three the point is even when you've got the evidence it can be hard to know how to interpret it even right up until abolition people were still arguing about whether capital punishment works there was always room for them to go ah you know i think we can look at the evidence the other way so the public debate and the practical steps to abolition ended up hinging on other questions and one of those questions which bentham and paley both kind of shied away from is do some people deserve to die in 2011 werner herzog released a documentary called into the abyss about a man named michael perry who at the time was on death row for murder in texas and who was in fact executed before the film's release in addition to interviews with perry himself it features interviews with the families of his victims people who knew him and some of the staff who work on death row i have to confess that as soon as perry started talking i completely forgot that he murdered three people he comes across as a bit energized and slightly off-kilter in that way that a lot of americans do but basically normal though of course had i known one of his victims i expect i would have felt very differently herzog makes the interesting choice to open with the perry interview and only after that does he reveal the details of the crimes which are shocking not only because they're graphic but also because they seem so pointless i mean he killed three people in cold blood just to steal a car hearing about the perry murders and how they affected the community i felt very powerless very empty i wanted to do something i felt very adrift in a hostile world but that's verna herzog for you i suppose he can find a way to make even the most banal things seem horrifying the dirty dish is interesting to me they represent mayhem end death the film reminds me that real people's feelings about capital punishment are sometimes complex and contradictory in ways that a philosophy class doesn't always capture for instance there's an interview with the daughter and sister of two of the victims who says that she doesn't want to see anybody die and she would have been satisfied if perry got life in prison but she is glad that she went to watch the execution and she went as a way to remember and honor her mother and she says that some people deserve to die paley said that what people morally deserve is a matter for god the business of the state is protecting the state so the only real question is does capital punishment deter crime but not everybody thinks of it that way the philosopher louis pojman said that after world war ii the nazi leaders were executed and a lot of people would say that they deserved it and if you agree with those executions well then really we're just arguing about where to draw the line this position is called retributivism and it's coming at the question from a completely different angle than consequentialism the idea that punishment is about achieving some consequence like deterrence or rehabilitation maybe capital punishment doesn't deter crime maybe it makes crime even worse but a philosopher like pogemon would say that's not what the justice system is for the point is that you have done something bad and you deserve to be punished people are going to clip that out of context aren't they it's very easy to dismiss this as bloodthirsty or vengeful but i think it poses some interesting philosophical challenges for instance if punishing criminals is just about deterring crime then why don't we punish innocent people we could probably deter crime by finding an innocent person framing them and giving them a very harsh punishment but we try not to do that why the retributivist can say well because they don't deserve it but if you're a consequentialist you have to come up with some explanation that doesn't involve that retributivism has often been associated with people being tough on crime but it needn't be you could make a retributivist case for improving prison conditions or letting people out sooner on the grounds that this is cruel they don't deserve it my country and several others sometimes imprisons people without trial in facilities that we euphemistically call immigration removal centers a consequentialist would look at that and say oh well we need to figure out whether imprisoning people without trial actually helps from the point of view of deterring them from breaking the law but a retributivist could say well bollocks to that even if it works great you shouldn't treat people like that they don't deserve it another argument for retributivism is if you're gonna say that the purpose of criminal punishment is deterring crime or rehabilitation or whatever you'd better be able to prove that it works if you're telling me that we need to imprison people for just as long as it takes to reform them then how are you going to figure out how long that is are you going to use a fancy algorithm like some prisons are using now oh yeah that sounds great i'd love to spend an extra five years in jail because the computer says my myers-briggs astrology type makes me predisposed to shoplifting retributivism might also push us to be a little bit more honest with ourselves for instance cards on the table i think that consequentialism is a strong philosophical theory but if somebody asked me don't you think the nazis deserved to die there is a part of me that wants to say yes so i have to find a way of expressing that part that doesn't talk about what they deserve and instead i can say something like well i don't feel sorry for them or if i had the power to stop it i wouldn't or even i want them to suffer but all of a sudden i'm not talking about an abstract philosophical theory anymore i'm not talking about somebody else and their crimes those are statements about me and my feelings and i'm learning something about myself and the thing is in a philosophy classroom statements like that might not count for very much because it's supposed to be about why you believe the things you do and whether your reasons are good but in a public political debate you can believe any old you want it doesn't matter if it's a terrible idea as a famous philosopher once said facts don't care about your feelings so the debate about capital punishment in britain rumbled on until we get to the 1950s and there were three big cases that rocked the nation and paved the way for abolition [Music] in 1952 two young men called chris craig and derek bentley were caught red-handed trying to break into a warehouse in london craig had a gun and according to officers on the scene as bentley was being dragged away they ordered craig to hand the gun over bentley as he's being manhandled out of there shouts let him have it chris at which point craig opened fire and in the ensuing shootout killed pc sydney miles the prosecution argued that by saying let him have it bentley was inciting craig to fire and under the law at the time that meant bentley was also guilty of murder for his part bentley denied ever having said that craig denied ever having heard that and the defense said even if he did say it you can't prove he meant let him have it as in shoot him not let him have it as in yes give him the gun craig was 16 so he couldn't be hanged we stopped executing children in 1933 r.i.p andrew brunning but bentley was 19. there were protests there were petitions there was some question as to whether or not he was mentally capable but in 1953 by the 1950s the number of capital crimes had been chipped away at you could steal spoons without fear in theory we still had treason and piracy because britain hates it when people are cool but murder was the only crime that anybody actually swung for and the bentley case raised the practical problem how do you define murder bentley didn't pull the trigger and he didn't intend for pc mars to die but he was still found guilty the fact that he didn't pull the trigger is maybe not as important presumably we would still think that somebody who hires a hit man is responsible for murder even if their hands are clean the deal breaker was the intention at the time under british law we had something called constructive malice which sounds like a dark souls boss but means that if you commit a crime like armed robbery of a warehouse and in the course of that crime you kill somebody your criminal intent gets transferred to the killing that rule has since been abolished so the practical definition of murder has actually changed in a way that might seem very small but would have saved bentley's life the philosophical problem that we're bumping up against here is that crimes even murder vary in culpability all murders are bad some are worse than others but you can't execute somebody a little bit philosophers would say that the punishment is disproportionate which doesn't necessarily mean that it's too harsh it just means that it literally does not vary in proportion to the crime something else that motivated a lot of people was the fact that bentley was 19. even if you've done a terrible thing most people don't love the idea of a teenager being executed some people suggested the minimum age should be raised to 21 but the counter arguments were a a lot of horrible crimes are committed by younger people michael perry was only 19. and b why 21 and not 22 or 20 or 25 wherever you put it it seems arbitrary once you start chipping away at the death penalty it becomes harder to justify having it at all in 1950 timothy evans of notting hill london was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife beryl and their baby geraldine both victims were found strangled and buried in the back garden under interrogation evans allegedly confessed to the murders after a few changes in story later on in the trial he accused his downstairs neighbor john christie of being the real killer which everyone found very implausible because christy was a former police officer and by all accounts a pretty charming guy as opposed to evans who was not the brightest bulb and maybe a little bit weird so evans was found guilty he went off to prison and was hanged for murder case closed good job boys three years later christy moved out and then somebody found three corpses stuffed inside the wall oh christy was arrested not long afterwards in his pockets he had some coins some personal items and a newspaper clipping about the arrest of timothy evans oh police conducted a more thorough search of the building and found some more bodies buried in the back garden which had also been strangled and then christy confessed to the murder of beryl evans oh it turned out that christy was a serial killer he'd been operating for almost a decade strangling and doing various other things to eight women that we know of as is often the case in situations like this he was only prosecuted for one murder something similar happened with harold shipman if you kill enough people the prosecution basically just played a highlight reel because it's more than enough to put you away christy was found guilty of the murder of his wife and sentenced to death when they put the hood on him he complained that it made his nose itch and the hangman said it won't bother you for long the government in 1953 was conservative and pro-death penalty and they had said on the record multiple times that it was a fantasy that an innocent man could ever be hanged in britain so after a little bit of cajoling they held a government inquiry which concluded that no evans was guilty we did get the right man two men lived in the same building murdered women in the exact same way and buried their bodies in the exact same place completely independently of each other so stop asking questions after a little bit more cajoling another inquiry was held by the same people as the first which concluded surprise surprise that the first inquiry was correct we did get the right man evans was guilty so s s stop asking questions the evans case illustrated a couple of things firstly sometimes the wrong guy gets executed even with all the appeals and forensics and everything youtube's own sean has a great video that goes into detail on the evan's case and explains how it happened of course everyone knew there was a chance that an innocent person could be hanged and evans almost certainly wasn't the first but something about this particular case really brought home how tragically things can go wrong beyond just that though because the death penalty is irreversible and the idea of killing an innocent person is so abhorrent it creates a very strong incentive for corruption some american commentators have said this is still a problem in the u.s everybody from the police to the prime minister had a very strong reason to cover up a wrongful execution and that is what they did the evans case led to government corruption at the highest level it wasn't until 2004 that our justice system officially said yeah he was completely innocent we got the wrong guy because if there's one thing we british hate it's being embarrassed [Music] in 1955 a man named david blakely was coming out of a pub in north london when he was shot dead with a 38 caliber revolver the murderer was immediately arrested ruth ellis blakely's ex-lover ellis's case attracted a good deal of attention and sympathy because she was young she was attractive she had children her relationship with blakely had been abusive and she was a woman not only was that rare it meant that what happened next was very surprising the ultimate decision about whether somebody sentenced to death actually hanged came down to the home secretary the home secretary is a british cabinet position they are elected as mps and then appointed to the job by the prime minister our current home secretary is a lady named pretty patel who incidentally has in the past expressed support for bringing back hanging in those days as in days of yore about half of the people who applied for a reprieve got one and ended up doing life in prison instead the fact that it was a politician's job to decide who hanged and who didn't presented some problems whichever way the home secretary decides they're going to get a reputation so they might be influenced even unconsciously by thinking about their career which isn't really relevant to the case especially if it's a big news story which executions always were so although we'd reformed the system a little bit the old concerns about the death penalty being arbitrary and vibes based hadn't completely gone away women who were sentenced to death almost always got a reprieve maybe that's because we tend to commit different sorts of crimes but some people do feel that executing a woman is just somehow worse in the werner herzog documentary he talks to the former captain of a death house in texas who had performed hundreds of executions and tried to always be professional and get the job done but he says the first time he had to execute a woman carla fay in 1998 he fell apart afterwards he was shaking and crying and having flashbacks and he couldn't do any more of them something about having to execute a woman just impacted him differently similarly in britain in 1928 we hanged a woman named edith thompson for murder and in addition to the fact that she was by modern definitions innocent it apparently did not go well there are conflicting reports about exactly what happened but the governor and the prison chaplain were devastated the executioner tried to kill himself two weeks later and afterwards some people suggested that the death penalty be abolished in britain but only for women again that's not really a strong philosophical argument if you abolish death penalty for us you'd presumably have to abolish it for the fellas as well but it is something that in the public sphere carried a lot of weight now i'm picturing some kind of dark british future in which we bring back hanging and a transphobe complains that she has to share a scaffold with me and the slogan would be women can be hanged but they cannot be hung to everyone's surprise though ruth ellis was denied a reprieve and in july of 1955 there was a large protest outside the prison during which people chanted evans bentley ellis which highlights another practical problem with the death penalty it tends to attract large protests that cost resources to manage that's actually why they made you get up so early everybody already knew that innocent people occasionally got hanged but ruth ellis definitely murdered david blakely carla fay murdered two people with a pickaxe despite that in their cases people start to go well maybe the government shouldn't be executing people even if they are guilty teachers from a nearby school said that the impact of the execution on the children was very disturbing they had similar concerns to charles dickens about the effect that executions had on everyone else who wasn't directly involved writing not only was ruth ellis hanged today but hundreds of children were a little corrupted [Music] so at this point it's been a rough few years for the british justice system we've had a teenager hanged who didn't pull the trigger we've had an innocent man hanged who didn't do anything and we've had a woman hanged who was definitely guilty but it made a lot of people very uncomfortable and there were a bunch of other cock-ups that i didn't even mention it seemed like the time for abolition had come but the government was still officially opposed to it so after a lot of pissing about in parliament they eventually passed the 1957 homicide act which limited the number of capital crimes and fiddled with the definition of murder a little bit but didn't abolish it the homicide act was in parliamentary language dog it was a political compromise rather than a well-thought-out set of ideas so it had a bunch of weird loopholes like if you murder someone whilst robbing them will you hang for that but if you murder someone whilst robbing them but they don't have any money on them well you don't hang for that if you rape somebody and kill them so there's no witness you don't hang for that but if you kill somebody with a long bow whilst you're standing on the border of a county and it's tuesday and you do it with like through your legs with one eye like that it did bring the number of executions down but people still got hanged and now it was even more controversial because the whole enterprise just seemed arbitrary this is something some american commentators have noted too in the u.s some states still execute some don't even in the ones that do some counties are a lot more likely to use the death penalty than others so the difference between life and death can come down to whether or not you commit your murders here or at the end of the road british historians brian bloch and john hostetler say it was becoming apparent to many people who were interested in the subject that the more the problem was analyzed the sillier the solutions became and i love that quote i think they should write that above the door of every philosophy department in the world the homicide act was clearly not up to scratch but it still took a general election and a change of government before we finally abolished the death penalty in 1969 nice so to sum up the big philosophical and practical problems that led to the death penalty being abolished in britain were that it occasionally punished innocent people it encouraged corruption it was disproportionate the actual application of it seemed arbitrary people worried that it wasn't good for society generally and at the very least it wasn't clear that it actually worked to deter crime at all never mind enough to outweigh all the other problems all of these issues kind of overlapped in a way that they never do in philosophy class but they do in real life so here's a bit of a peek behind the curtain i used to think that prison abolition was this really out there idea really wild and then i actually read some of the philosophy about it and i realized there's actually quite a bit of overlap prisons as we know them are a relatively modern invention there were places where people were held to awake trial but philosophers like bentham had this dream that by imprisoning people for long periods of time you'd give them a chance to reflect on what they'd done and maybe change it was by no means applied evenly and even from the start there were people who were like that's never going to work but reformation was kind of the dream in practice though it can be a bit tricky it used to be considered unbelievably cruel to imprison somebody for longer than about 10 years but like with the death penalty sometimes people want to look tough on crime so prison sentences have gotten longer and longer and longer and the question of whether or not they actually work is at the very least still on the table philosophers and prisoners and prison guards have pointed out that modern prisons are designed to reduce the threat that prisoners pose and in the name of that they try to control them as much as possible but the goal of controlling somebody is actually in tension with the goal of reforming them we tell them to prepare to rejoin society whilst making them adapt to a very brutal environment that is nothing like the rest of society we tell them to develop the capacity to make better decisions whilst taking almost all their decisions away we tell them to learn and grow whilst putting them in such stressful conditions that many become mentally unwell instead the problem of arbitrariness hasn't necessarily gone away either some british prisoners have described our system as a postcode lottery we don't have any nice prisons but some of them are a lot worse than others and because of things like there not being enough staff you can end up doing longer harder time than somebody who commits a similar offense again love to do an extra five years in jail because the crimes algorithm said i was a hufflepuff another potential fly in the soup is what philosophers call criminalization the process by which people become criminals and you might be thinking well the process by which people become criminals is they break the law surely but what i mean is if you have a high status job and a bit of money and a drug problem you're probably going to get away with it because people look the other way when you're the boss you don't have to commit crimes to fund your habit and you can afford private treatment if you want it but if you work a minimum wage job and you have a drug problem you might end up in jail people break the law all the time criminalization is about who actually gets nicked i mean very lucky people like me can learn about prison by reading a book other people learn at the school of hard knocks the growth in british prison populations has occurred against the backdrop of huge cuts to our public services in particular cuts to mental health services there are parts of the north of england now where there basically are no mental health services at all if you need help you have to travel for about two hours after a six month waiting list and if you can't afford that then you just get worse and maybe eventually you get so bad that you do something anti-social and you end up in prison which is also not really going to help and prison abolitionists ask is this the best way to deal with these problems could we maybe help some of these people before they break the law and once they do could we focus on actually helping them stop doing it like with abolishing capital punishment prison abolition is often argued for as part of a wider transformation of society researching this episode has pushed me to be a little bit more honest with myself and to acknowledge that there is a part of me that does want to see some criminals suffer and would love to latch on to a philosophical theory that not only makes that look justified but also means i don't have to talk about myself and my own feelings but once i realized that those feelings were coming from me i realized i had a choice about whether or not to indulge them and suddenly the intellectual idea of a world without prisons or a world that is working to get rid of them or a world that is working not to need them didn't seem as out there as it did before [Music] it took you seven glances just to notice me i'm not quite i'm not broken but it's out of myself [Music] [Music] make me feel like i'm running out [Music] nobody knows [Music] so we've got some trouble summer there times i'm not meant to call it home and for the record i was just about to run away from home but these teams [Music] these pills [Music] [Music] know nobody knows how long i've been waiting for death nobody knows how long i've been waiting for death nobody knows how long i've been waiting for [Music] [Music] death nobody knows [Music] is the sources arranged haphazardly in the cupboard abandoned just as god has abandoned us

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 762,591

Rating: 4.9327483 out of 5

Keywords: capital punishment, prison abolition, angela davis, philosophy, are prisons obsolete?, hanging, death penalty, priti patel, crime, punishment

Id: TDcwIZzaf-k

Length: 38min 55sec (2335 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MetalNobZolid]

Makes me think...when we getting Contra's "Justice Pt.2"?

[u/DefenderCone97]

"Women can be hanged, but they can not be hung!"

Almost spit out my drink lmao

[u/j-grad]

Username Checks Out

[u/myaltduh]

I feel like the parts of Abigail's videos that I've actually enjoyed most lately are when she discusses historical events or otherwise describes historical figures. She's a very skilled storyteller, good at drawing the viewer in, and I'm sure her professional acting training has a lot to do with that. Another example where this is prominent is her antisemitism video.

The philosophy actually felt a bit secondary to the history lesson in both this an in "antisemitism," and I'm actually not sure that's a bad thing.

[u/st-ove]

If you need more Werner Herzog impressions, Paul F. Tompkins used to do a great one on the podcast Comedy Bang Bang. In this clip he reads a Yelp review for a hotel that he wrote in character as Werner Herzog. Very similar vibe to Abigail’s bit. Okay time to go finish the video

Oh and this clip you get to hear Werner Herzog react to PFT’s character. It’s good stuff. Also be sure to look up the clip where PFT in character as Herzog talks about his ideas for directing Grown Ups 3.

[u/johntheduncan]

If anyone's interested in more in the topic of prison and police abolition, I have this video which goes into a lot of the themes of Abi's video https://youtu.be/Db0k7a1XFio

[u/queerpinata]

Good video, highly recommend Why we cling to the police next for those that haven't watched yet.

[u/radialomens]

The inquiries into the Evans execution with the state patting themselves on the back over and over again was infuriating. It's a prime example of how the government acts out of self-interest.

[u/duckcurve]

She looks like Hel lokes daughter.