OTHER VOICES

Oscar Pistorius should not be going to jail

Oscar Pistorius was guilty. However gripped by anger, it’s difficult to accept he didn’t know whom he was likely to kill. He had a violent history and his claim that he thought he was shooting a burglar stretches credulity. He killed his girlfriend.

Given the leniency South African courts used to show towards white people killing black people, it is hard to see how the court could show leniency to a white person killing another white person. That said, Judge Thokozile Masipa’s argument for a light sentence of five years was meticulously reasoned. In Britain there is a tendency to lock away famous people just to make an example of them. South African justice has shown a sort of maturity.

Beyond the cause of consistency, imprisoning Pistorius can serve no purpose. The judge said she did not want to “send the wrong message”, a phrase repeated by a thousand judges, but what did she mean? The purpose of depriving wrongdoers of their liberty, now that we no longer hang or flog, should be to rehabilitate them and, if not, keep them from further crime. That it should be “retributive”, a mere expression of society’s rage, is primitive theology. It is trotted out when no other reason for imprisonment can be imagined. Imprisonment is brutalism, reflecting society’s inability to police antisocial acts. The community needs to be protected from those who “cannot stop themselves” from harming it. But that is a tiny minority of prisoners. Most are locked away in fortresses because we can think of nothing else to do with them. We have admitted defeat. It is as archaic a response to crime.