Tuesday 28 January 2014

Crime and Punishment in the Terran Empire, by Sean M. Brooks

Much of the text below was copied by me from a letter I wrote to Poul Anderson on Thursday, November 9, 1988.  With some slight revisions to make them read more like an essay rather than a letter.

I would like to discuss the use Poul Anderson made of the institution of slavery in his Terran Empire stories.  In the Empire's third century, Philippe Rochefort reflected: "Well, we're reviving it in the Empire... For terms under conditions limited by law, as a punishment, in order to get some utility out of the criminal.... (THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND, Ch. IV).  Over two centuries later, Dominic Flandry said in "Warriors From Nowhere" (AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE): "If you shoot your neighbor in order to steal his property, you are a murderer and a thief, subject to enslavement."  That same story also mentioned the existence of voluntary debt slavery (at least in remote regions of the Empire).  Anderson wrote that "That kind of sacrifice was not in accordance with law and custom on Terra, but Terra was a long way off and its tributaries necessarily had a great deal of local autonomy."  Chapter II of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS mentions various criminal convicts as being "...sentenced to limited terms of enslavement for crimes such as repeated theft or dangerous negligence."

One convict was sentenced to life enslavement after committing murder. As she said to another character (also in Chapter II of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS): "What else would you do with the wicked?  Kill them, even for tiny things?  Give them costly psychocorrection?  Lock them away at public expense, useless to themselves and everybody else?  No, let them work.  Let the Imperium get some money from selling them the first time, if it can." Treason is also mentioned as carrying the penalty of life enslavement (death was also used to punish treason).

In Chapter IV of ENSIGN FLANDRY, some infractions of military discipline are punished with a device called the "nerve lash."  Forty-two years later, in Chapter XIV of A STONE IN HEAVEN, some rebels who voluntarily surrendered to the Imperial authorities are chastised with nothing worse than a "...bit of nerve lash."  This means that the Empire's criminal code (both civil and military) ruled that some categories of offenses were most appropriately corrected with corporal punishment.

To sum up, for its human subjects, the Empire used both varying terms of enslavement and corporal punishment to control crime.  Obviously, such a system would have to be adjusted to fit the wildly divergent natures and laws of thousands of non-human races in the Empire.  Crimes committed by a member of one race against another might be punished by the penalties set by the victim's species.  Or limited enslavement and corporal punishment could be used when appropriate.  Imperial law also laid down guiding principles, precedents and uniform penalties for such crimes as murder binding on the Empire as a whole.  This would be to prevent, say, a Cynthian court from judging, perhaps, a Wodenite too capriciously.

Although many in our Western society would condemn the Empire's penal system (for using slavery and corporal punishment), I cannot when considering the failures of the U.S.'s own criminal justice system.  Our reliance on prisons, fines, and "rehabilitation" has not worked.  They do not work because many criminals are bad people who like committing crimes. A good argument can be made that all you can do with such felons is punish them and get some recompensational use out of them or remove them from society.  Many of our jurists and penologists are infected with the Pelagian delusion of man willing himself to sinless perfection.

So the slave girl we see at the Crystal Moon described in WE CLAIM THESE STARS need not, strictly, be thought to have endured an unusually harsh fate by the standards of her time and society.  Most likely, she was convicted of a crime carrying only a limited term of enslavement and the Merseians, being bound to obey the laws of the Empire in such cases, would release her at the end of her term.  Unless, of course, she had been convicted of a crime punished by either life enslavement or the death penalty.

I now offer some of Poul Anderson's thoughts on what I wrote above. As he said in his reply letter dated November 19, 1988, "Actually, although the idea of enslavement as punishment for crime was originally something I threw in mention of to add some "local color," its fuller development in later stories about the Terran Empire resulted, paradoxically, from exploring certain possible consequences of libertarianism."

Anderson went on to say libertarians hate the idea of compulsion and would prefer to make contract the basis of all social interaction.  Next, he declared that this was only an ideal which could be at best approximated.  A libertarian society would minimize or abolish prisons, including attempts at "rehabilitation."  Instead, it would focus on restitution.  A man convicted of theft, for example, would have to return the stolen property or its equal value, plus paying damages, etc.

To again quote Anderson: "But, to take a single, perhaps melodramatic example--though, alas, not unrealistic--suppose a man has raped a woman. Probably he can't pay adequate money damages, not that there's likely to be that much money in the world anyway.  Should he then work for her, unpaid? It seems unlikely he'd would have skills she could use, e.g., gardening, and still more unlikely that she would want him around.  So, there is this contract he's signed, to work for her.  She can sell the contract to somebody else who does have a use for this character--or who is a broker.  Thus libertarianism could result in a revival of chattel slavery!"

Anderson ended by saying this was merely a reductio ad absurdum. But admitted that slavery as a punishment for crime has occasionally occurred in real history.  Finally, he stated he was against such an idea but that many things had come to pass he would oppose.

In conclusion, the irony was that the slavery we see in the Terran Empire most likely had its origins during the libertarian era of the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League!

8 comments:

Paul Shackley said...

Sean, Thank you for a substantial article.
Everyone else, Sean is always disagreeing with me. It is time for other people to do so as well!

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

Ha! At least you are nice about how I'm so often disagreeing with you!

I would be interested if you had any further thoughts about crime and punishment and slavery in the Terran Empire. Perhaps you might discover texts I've overlooked!

And I too would be delighted if other persons would leave their own thoughts and comments here. Maybe even a barrister might say something? (Smiles)

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
I will think about crime and punishment in the Empire but I think you have covered it.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

Many thanks! Perhaps I should add that in the letter I wrote to Poul Anderson I mentioned that my thoughts about crime and punishment had been influenced by two books: PUNISHING CRIMINALS by Ernest van den Haag; and LAW IN IMPERIAL CHINA, by Dirk Bodde and Clarence Morris. The first discussed whether or not criminals should be punished and how. The second was an analysis of how the criminal code of Imperial China tried to make the punishment the crime.

Btw, I was kinda hoping somebody would notice the Dostoyevskian allusion in the title of my essay! I refer, of course, to Dostoyevky's novel CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

Sean

Anonymous said...

The noted libertarian David Friedman (son of Milton) has pointed out a problem with slavery or something close to it as a punishment: Making it profitable to punish people adds to the danger that they will be punished whether or not they happen to be guilty. We have seen various abuses resulting from civil forfeiture of property alleged to be connected to a crime, without the owner being proven guilty, or sometimes even accused. If you have a strong stomach, you can read about prison slavery (chain gangs, etc.) in the Jim Crow South, or about how the Soviet Union and other tyrannies sought to use convict labor to enrich and develop their societies.

While I agree that there are problems with the way our society deals with crime, I'd still think twice before imitating the Terran Empire's way.

Regards, Nicholas D. Rosen

Paul Shackley said...

Nicholas,
Thank you for discussion. It is amazing that Anderson implausibly put slaves in his fictitious Empire merely because this was modeled on the Roman Empire and, although this was in no way intended as serious futurology or sociology, it then became an issue for serious discussion both in PA's texts and, eventually, here.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Nicholas!

Many thanks for your comments. I would argue that the examples you made don't fit in with what Poul Anderson was hypothesizing in his Terran Empires stories. Persons convicted of crimes not corrected by corporal punishment were sentenced to VARYING TERMS of enslavement most likely ranging from a year or two to life. It would be more appropriate to say the Empire would have to find means to make sure these slaves were not abused by whoever purchased them. I remember how THE REBEL WORLDS mentions "welfare inspectors or investigators." It would seem logical to think these officials were also supposed to check up on convicts sentenced to terms of enslavement, or if you like that term better, penal servitude.

Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

And that, of course, is one of the strenghts of Anderson's works, that his stories make people think hard and seriously about them. I feel bound to stress that Anderson himself did not wish to punish crime in this manner. He was speculating, wondering what might happen if he worked out certain ideas THIS way rather than THAT way. Which is exactly what he did with certain libertarian ideas.

Sean