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What does it mean to be “crazy?” I’ve spent much of the past few days stewing on the story of Lindsay Clancy. For context, she is a mother who, in the throes of postpartum something-or-other, whacked her three kids. Killing your own offspring is, on its face, an unambiguous evil. Only the most fanatical (and likely also psychotic) of anti-natalists would suggest otherwise. Clancy has not been characterized as an unambiguous evil. The exact nature of her mental illness is still at issue in the trial, but many figures have converged on the idea that Clancy was not of sound mind and thus is not culpable the way you or I would be. I suspect that no matter what her sentence is, a vocal chorus of mental health advocates will decry it as excessive. I sympathize here — having worked with the severely and persistently mentally ill, living with acute psychosis is hardly living at all.
I think this case is an interesting segue into something I’ve noticed more and more about how we adjudicate moral harms in the public sphere. I’d like to soapbox for a moment. Cool? Thanks. The experience of harm, at least colloquially, is limited to two parties: the offender and the victim. These people experience the qualia of the situation with their own eyes, ears, limbic systems, pain receptors, and memory banks. Unless we were physically present, the rest of us schmucks don’t have that privilege. We can only experience the event through language. We describe what happened. We ideate on the nature of the harms, the observed damages, and the more latent impacts. Most importantly, we construct a theory of mind for those involved. We daydream about what they might have been thinking, or, in cases like Clancy’s, if they could think at all. Bluntly, we want to know if we should treat them harshly or if there are, say, intervening factors that reduce their culpability. All of this is mediated by language.
Many of these intervening factors can be modeled on a spectrum. Someone can be more or less psychotic, more or less cognitively impaired, more or less ignorant to their situation. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that Clancy experienced severe psychotic symptoms. In this case, minimal gymnastics are required to describe her nature as such. Clancy is psychotic → therefore she didn’t know what she was doing → therefore she’s off the hook. Thus, it is written. However, how should we treat someone who was a little less psychotic? How about a little less than that? What if they had psychotic symptoms, but they were subclinical or didn’t neatly fit diagnostic criteria? This is where language fails us. Human qualities may be modeled on a spectrum, but language is discrete. And so, the spectrums get “sticky,” and the labels gain outsized importance. A line must be drawn. The person must be sorted.
These sticky spectrums exist for a variety of traits. If you’re “just” poorly socialized and have a blind spot for a particular social norm, you’re expected to do better. If you’re diagnosed neurodivergent, it’s more tolerable to break the norm because you “can’t control it.” If you’ve had a few drinks and crack skulls in a bar fight but are otherwise a normal chap, you’re probably on the hook for assault. However, if you’re a person in the throes of capital-A alcoholism, you can break into a family’s home, sleep on their child’s bed, and avoid charges because you’re burdened by a sickening disease. If your IQ is 70, you can be sentenced to death. If your IQ is 69, you’re much too intellectually disabled for that to be fair. In each of these cases, the mental states at the time of the offense are similar if not near-identical, and yet resulting judgments vary based on how we categorize the offender’s nature. We don’t adjudicate based on “sort-ofs” and “somewhats.” In common parlance, either you’re an alcoholic or not. Either you’re intellectually disabled or not. Either you’re culpable or not. This strikes me as unfair.
I suppose I’m advocating for the spectrums to be less sticky, or for words to have less of a gravitational pull. Clancy will likely receive a modified sentence based on her state of mind. Yet, what ought we to do with people in the midst of mild, manageable psychosis who may still yet have impaired judgment? Maybe they don’t get away with a full insanity defense, but their sentence could be modified accordingly. This is why I oppose mandatory minimum sentencing. The job of the court — and the court of public opinion for lesser matters — is not just to determine what happened, but to determine the appropriate consequence. The question is whether or not this is a utopian suggestion. Is human nature too punitive to implement this mindset at scale? Are we interested in justice or just blood?
Relevant Scott: The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
The problem with discussions like this is always the same thing, we can't decide on what exactly punishment (and jailing someone in particular) is meant to be for. Is it revenge? Deterrence? Rehabilitation? Is it just keeping known dangerous elements locked up? It's all of those to some degree, but also kinda none of them either.
Like imagine for instance a virus is created that causes .5% of the population with a rare biomarker to go and kill the nearest person. They can't control themselves and once they kill they go back to normal and build up an immunity so they can't be infected again with it. These are known and proven results, no amount of willpower can resist it and no one with the killing virus has ever done it a second time. Should we still punish them? I think there's a fair argument towards no, that they are perfectly fine and good people who had their sense of reason momentarily snatched away from them.
Ok now imagine it's say schizophrenia, extreme enough that they engage in violence and murder but we invent a long term cure and 95% of these violent schizophrenics are no longer violent and won't reoffend, should we let them out of jail early since the problem is solved? Are they not too fine and good people who had their sense of reason snatched away, and now restored?
Or what if we believe there's a high chance that a mentally ill killer won't reoffend again if we put them in a nursing home and just have them watched all day? What if the postpartum depression mother, overwhelmed by uncontrollable thoughts and feelings, won't ever hurt anyone else again and with some careful watching of any future pregnancies won't be able to reoffend? Should we punish those people still if the problem is solved?
Of course the real world isn't so clean and simple as thought experiments and erring on the side of caution is what I'd do for real world scenarios, but there's definitely a lot of fair discussion to be had.
Prison has always been a bad solution. Per a comedian on a recent Kill Tony, 1/3 of the people in prison should really be in a mental hospital, 1/3 should be in drug rehab, and 1/3 should be taken out back and shot because they are irredeemable.
Unfortunately, our system of justice has to be 'blind', because society is too large and varied for subjective judgements about people. We can't look at a whole person, their life in the community, their past and future, and determine how best they should be dealt with to make them a useful part of society (even if judges do have some leeway on this). We have to look at the specific crime or law they've broken, and decide how to punish them for that. We have created a system that is as 'fair' as we can make it, even if the end result is a disaster for the individuals in it. In other words, our modern justice system is fundamentally bureaucratic over and above useful or even just.
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