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The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

narratively.com

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Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#11

Post by akiselev »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #6
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made. The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the cas…

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

I too feel that rehabilitation, not vengeance, should be the goal of the justice system but in this case, I think it's a moot point. This is an individual with the means and clear history of organizing and wielding violent armed groups which (I hypothesize) requires a level of emotional intelligence that justice systems are not equipped to rehabilitate by design. The ones that try to rehabilitate offenders naturally err towards giving people the benefit of the doubt in order to make the process fairer for the falsely accused which is very easily exploitable, especially for the well resourced.

I think this individual presents a clear cut case where public safety is more important than the individual's right to rehabilitation post-conviction, in a way that even the worst civilian criminals like serial killers do not. There is just no way to reintegrate him to like a POW of an opposing nation in war or a rebel soldier who joined a movement - he was a primary instigator in the conflict and his enemy was the system he'd be rehabilitated into.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#12

Post by ip26 »

f154hfds wrote: post #8
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made. The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the cas…

There's a sort of disconnect going on in our sense of justice between gaining explanatory power to describe why a person did something, and that person's culpability. We seem to think if we can understand why they behaved in such a way (for instance, they were victims themselves, they had a mental disorder, etc.) they must merit compassion. The converse is perhaps more troublesome: if we can't understand how someone…

I think the short summary is we are coming to understand circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In which cases the nature of justice changes.

if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing...

If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#13

Post by inglor_cz »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #6
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made. The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the cas…

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue.

People in Norway rarely grow up in totally deprived, violent conditions. Maybe they respond to rehabilitation efforts better, in the same way that a healthy person exhibits better wound healing than someone with diabetes 2nd type.

One could make a practical experiment by dumping an assortment of, for example, Islamic State executioners into Norwegian prisons and watching how many of them return to their old habits, but Norwegians wouldn't probably want to try that.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#14

Post by convolvatron »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #6
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made. The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the cas…

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

how much of that is due to basic social safety net?

on the creek behind my workshop, thieves were running stolen copper. they would use boats to come up into businesses storage yards from the SF bay, then dump the copper in the creek. wait until they had a buy lines up and pull it up at their leisure.

they were caught eventually. 5 years later and out on parole. and guess where they came first - back to the creek. no other way of making a living, no basic support.

i think criminality becomes very different when its just a lifestyle choice and not the only way to provide for basic human needs.

sure, focus on rehabilitation. but it doesn't matter if they throw you back on the street when you're out.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#15

Post by hntrader »

ip26 wrote: post #12
f154hfds wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a sort of disconnect going on in our sense of justice between gaining explanatory power to describe why a person did something, and that person's culpability. We seem to think if we can understand why they behaved in such a way (for instance, they were victims themselves, they had a mental disorder, etc.) they must merit compassion. The converse is perhaps more troublesome: if we can't understand how someone…

I think the short summary is we are coming to understand circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In which cases the nature of justice changes. if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing... If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.

The big problem with this is that our recognition that there's extenuating circumstances (e.g a brain tumour in the prefrontal cortex) says more about our capacity to recognise such situations than it does about actual differences in agency between individuals.

For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic brain damage has more agency than the individual with a large brain tumour. But this killer is also very much a slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour individual. They were gifted with psychopathy and an inability to feel remorse, which will undoubtedly come down to concrete brain states that differ in a material respect to non-psychopaths. Just because we can't see any obvious macroscopic markers of this says more about our knowledge limitations than it does about relative levels of agency.

Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or stochastic physics playing out in our brains and environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.

The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than person B.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#16

Post by belval »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #6
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible choices he made. The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood. If that is the cas…

> If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe human society. Or rehabilitated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology) > The effectiveness of Norway's methods is evident as they hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December 2014.

He is not a felon convicted for illegal possession of a weapon or drug dealing, he's a warlord that killed a lot of people brutally. Presenting rehabilitation as a possible solution here is laughable and almost insulting to the memories of his numerous victims.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#17

Post by solutron »

Evil doesn't have to have remorselessness or have awareness of it's evil to be evil. Ongwen is clearly traumatized. But, he is also the trauma. The spread of death and despair by his hand has to be adjudicated. Life in prison is the most morally just outcome for him, regardless of whatever reformations or personal developments he might make. Some things can't be undone and the consequences have to be lived with, forever. Like, he could become an international voice for reforming child soldiers, educating policy makers, and literally every good thing he could do with his experience. Yet, he should still be in prison. Forever.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#18

Post by onethought »

solutron wrote: post #17

Evil doesn't have to have remorselessness or have awareness of it's evil to be evil. Ongwen is clearly traumatized. But, he is also the trauma. The spread of death and despair by his hand has to be adjudicated. Life in prison is the most morally just outcome for him, regardless of whatever reformations or personal developments he might make. Some things can't be undone and the consequences have to be lived with, fore…

Is prison to punish? Rehabilitate? Or both?

I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat prisoners in how they “repay their debt”. Someone like Ongwen could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used...

I don’t know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and have value generated at the same time.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#19

Post by throwanem »

nugget wrote: post #10
marczellm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what the article means: he was a catechist. A priest or a layperson can be a catechist. But lay is the opposite of priest.

Isn’t “a Catholic lay priest” how you’d best describe the person, in colloquial terms, to a readership that wasn’t familiar with the definition of catechist?

No, I'd define the term. That's not hard to do - especially if you're willing, as the article is, to spot the reader knowledge of the difference between laity and ordination.

To be clear, I'm not OP, and I don't judge the quality of the article on this basis. It's commonplace to see a journalist do sloppy work, especially in parts of an article less critical to its thesis. But the article already defines the term 'catechist', albeit incorrectly. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that the same trouble should go toward getting it right.

Re: The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander

#20

Post by Retric »

hntrader wrote: post #15
ip26 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the short summary is we are coming to understand circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In which cases the nature of justice changes. if we can't understand how someone could have done that thing... If we are not aware of a reason they did not posses agency, then we must assume they still had it.

The big problem with this is that our recognition that there's extenuating circumstances (e.g a brain tumour in the prefrontal cortex) says more about our capacity to recognise such situations than it does about actual differences in agency between individuals. For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic brain damage has more agency than the i…

This assumes you define a person as a constant irrespective of everything else. In effect an 8 year olds must therefore be judged as harshly as anyone else.

It’s a consistent standpoint, but justice isn’t about punishment. It’s a belief that the world despite all evidence to the contrary should be fair. As such people’s internal thought process is inherently part of the judgement process, the same action with different causes is judged differently.

You’re for example allowed to break some rules in an emergency therefore belief that something is an emergency is relevant. Punching someone doing a jump scare because you think their a threat is perfectly legal.

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