Thread by @asymmetricinfo

A quick tweetstorm on my latest column, which asks what, in general we should do with people who commit crimes as teens and are caught decades later.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-…

Obviously, this was inspired by the Kavanaugh accusations. During a dinner-table conversation about it, I off-handedly mentioned that at least one man in his fifties had been tried as a juvenile for a crime committed decades ago. Which inspired me to look up the case.

So I wrote it up, and asked, what should happen to someone who killed more than half his lifetime ago?

While this was inspired by the defense some Kavanaugh defenders have offered--he was just seventeen--I don't think this bears directly on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh's unequivocal denials have ruled that out.

But I do think the intuition a lot of people had--"Even if he did it, he was just seventeen! He's a different person now!" is relevant to the case of Carlton Franklin.

More than half of my commenters seemed to be struggling with that. They simply cannot believe that the column is not one long, sneaky attempt to get liberals to commit to excusing Kavanaugh by making them feel sympathy for a different defendant.

To which all I can say is: I directly said that this doesn't apply to Kavanaugh. I spent the bulk of the column on Franklin. There's no subtext. It's all text.

Others said I was drawing a false dichotomy between public safety and retributive theories of justice; both of them form part of our most ideas of justice. I'm not drawing a binary, however. I'm defining the extremes, and recognizing that most of us fall somewhere between them.

Cards on the table, I fall pretty far on the "public safety/rehabilitation" side. I believe in punishment, but care primarily whether it is effective deterrence and rehabilitation, or in extreme cases, incapacitation, rather than retribution. I think we overpunish most crime

But I recognize that others can legitimately disagree about this. I would just like to persuade them that we should care MUCH more about the suffering and possible redemption of criminals than we do.

To be clear, I do believe in punishment, because public safety is a very important priority. What I believe is that we have a strong interest in finding punishments that do as much as possible to minimize the suffering of criminals and rehabilitation potential.

Even if that means losing some opportunity to avenge the undeserved suffering of victims. An impulse that I certainly understand, but think is too hard to contain in a society where the people imposing sentence don't personally know most of the punished.

I'd close by noting that in both my writing about bankruptcy and crime, I encounter over and over the fear that people are getting away with something. And you know what? Often they are!

Most people who declare bankruptcy did not lead lives of perfect financial rectitude; at the very least, they borrowed to fund consumption in patterns that required every single thing in their lives to go exactly right.

Similarly most prisoners genuinely did something very wrong

But you know what? Almost all of us get away with taking risks that we really, really shouldn't have. Almost all of us have done shameful things that we escaped consequences for.

And often the difference between devastating consequences and "upstanding member of the community" is a combination of luck and how much insulation there is between you and temptation, or you and consequences.

No, I'm not saying that I've committed felonies I got away with. But I had a lot less opportunity to commit felonies than kids growing up without fathers in neighborhoods with a lot of gangs. And my life was scheduled to prevent much opportunity to go wrong.

We need more compassion for people who genuinely made bad decisions. We should want to help them in any way we can, in the way that so many, many people helped us.

Which brings us to the end of another tweetstorm! As always, you should read the column here, which contains entirely new content NOT covered in this tweetstorm.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-…