concerning Puritans and criminals

The preceding post reminds me of something insightful that Alexis de Tocqueville said about the different attitudes toward criminals in Europe and the United States. In Europe, he said, criminals are simply viewed as wretched or unfortunate types who need to be cleaned out of the way (along the lines of what Machen’s Ambrose holds). But in the United States, surely due to the Puritan influence, the criminal is viewed as a blazing flame of evil in our midst who must be hunted down with torches and pitchforks by all good citizens. As late as age 21 or so, I lost sleep after entering a convenience store near a mysterious bridge in Annapolis and seeing a flyer with a sketch of some child abductor. You couldn’t escape those things for the longest period of time, and they just gave me the deepest sense of human futility.

And it is true that to some extent we grow up in the United States horrified by criminals as if they were demons from another plane, rather than simply maladjusted or failed and dangerous humans. The “FBI 10 Most Wanted” flyers in American post offices were always among the most frightening objects of my youth, as were those ubiquitous sketches of suspected child abductors, and even the sketches of the abducted children themselves. It felt as though evil was everywhere in our midst, like devils at the breakfast table. It is well know that there’s a bit of this attitude in American foreign policy as well.

It’s easy to see the downside of this attitude. A more interesting intellectual challenge would come from the following question– what’s the upside to it?