A few weeks ago, I argued that violent criminals should be punished by their local jurisdiction, not deported. In the comments, Jack said I had completed missed the point - violent criminals surrender any privilege to living in a community. Here is my response to Jack’s critique.
Let’s say you are walking in the forest, and you see a small fire. Who is obligated to put the fire out? I think the following options are reasonable:
The person who spots the fire has to put it out.
The people who own the forest has to put it out.
The people who have been hired to protect the forest has to put it out.
I think you can provide some good reasons for each rule. And I can imagine specific contexts where each rule can make a lot of sense. At the same time, the following rule for forest fires does not make sense to me:
The person who spots the fire needs to collect the hot embers, put them in a bucket, and drop them off in another forest.
Why does this last option seem so weird? The reason is simple. As humans develop intuitions over safety, community, and property ownership, “take a problem a dump it into some else’s backyard” is usually regarded as a bad rule.
This is my general attitude toward dangerous criminals and deportation. If someone has harmed other people, dumping them on someone else is a very bad idea. To see why, let’s translate the forest fire example to violent crime. Let’s say someone (the Criminal) has harmed you. Who should deal with the Criminal?
The Victim should deal with it - the Self-Defense Rule.
The Community where the crime occurred should deal with it - the Local Punishment Rule.
The Community where the crime occurred should hire someone to deal with it - the Contracted Punishment Rule.
Like forest fires, I can image situations where each rule might make sense. However, the following rule seems incredibly unwise:
Arrest the Criminal and drop them off in another Community - the Deportation Rule.
I can imagine strong objections. One is that you are putting other people in harm’s way. Another is that you are probably under-punishing people. Deportation isn’t a strong enough punishment for murder and really bad crimes. Then, shifting the problem around to someone else is probably a bad idea, just like forest fires.
Let’s get back to Jack’s point. Don’t Criminals surrender certain rights to participate in the community? Sure, but that is not a reason to resort to really bad policies. There are good and bad responses to violence and deportations has lots of problems.
Bottom lines: Communities need to control violence, but that isn’t an excuse to just dump problems on other people.
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Did deportation make more sense when societies like 19th century England had inadequate social controls, but vast, distant tracts it wanted to settle? By most accounts, convicts saw transportation to the colonies as a good deal, preferable to the grim punishments of that time.
(Besides, I thought deportation nowadays is practiced only to send someone back to the country where he is a citizen -- more as triage than punishment.)
Professor,
Thanks for responding to my comment, but I don't exactly agree with your retort.
There is a couple strong arguments here for deportation of criminals that you may have missed.
I'm going to assume that you are talking about a variable country, and not specifically the US.
"The person who spots the fire needs to collect the hot embers, put them in a bucket, and drop them off in another forest. " Something struck me as off about this metaphor, but then I realized that unlike a forest fire, I would assume we don't want to kill every single criminal who is a immigrant.
Assuming that open borders are not going to be something every country eventually does (and even then), you still run into massive issues. Depending on local policy for criminal cases, you run the risk of opening up new avenues of international crime. Yes, international crime happens regardless of border controls. But, suppose that a country doesn't even have the facilities to handle certain influxes of criminals migrating with other immigrants for whatever reason (which under a open border regime, is bound to happen). The country doesn't have the judicial or correctional facilities to deal with the influx of crime? Or simply is too overburdened to then deal with sentencing and jailing migrants over a border they have no control over? What is the solution except for deportation? Sure, they could hire more police and judges and build more correctional facilities, but unless the said country raises taxes/runs a deficit/makes cuts to the national budget to build the institutions (ignoring the fact that building these institutions take time), there is little else a country can do except deport.
And of course, there's a huge incentive for lower income countries to simply ship off their criminals to open-border/non-deport high income countries if they do not want to deal with said criminals (due to economic/political issues). Heck, hypothetically, it could even be used as a method of hybrid warfare in certain cases, abusing the open border policies of certain nation-states to devastate it slowly.
I can also see an argument that a polity might have relatively lax sentencing for certain crimes they are not ready to handle - I can easily see criminals taking advantage of shorter prison sentences (if at all) in certain countries if those said countries have open border/no deportation policies. What's to stop a criminal from going back to their violent/lucrative illicit trade knowing that the sentence they receive for their crimes is barely a stopgap?
Also, it might be more convenient and less disastrous for all parties if said criminal is simply deported. If you have a non-citizen who committed a crime that a plurality to majority of the population is furious about, especially due to cultural/ethnic/religious divides - it would make more sense to be for the local authority to be pragmatic and simply deport said criminal than invite exacerbating latent sectarian tensions in said country. Yes, it would not look great for the said country to deport someone based on criteria such as that, but it's better to do that then have massive civil unrest.
Also, as @thatMikeBishop pointed out, this would ironically make it harder for people to immigrate here. You can say that in an open-border paradigm, immigration cannot be restricted. However, that doesn't mean that local authorities won't adapt to this change, for better or worse. If a local authority cannot deport, they can simply pass laws to punish non-citizen immigrants harsher for lesser offenses to deter immigration.
And, at the end of the day, why should a society that opened up their arms to you and accepted you 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 to keep you if you violated the social contract? You did a crime, and said society has to use their own public dollars - which could have gone towards something else more worthwhile - to then confine you in a space where they have to house and feed you, and keep you away from society? If you were escaping from terrible conditions in your home country, you really have to think about that before you decide to do a criminal act, especially a violent criminal act.
Last point:
"If someone is really violent, why should they be moved to another place so they can terrorize other people? Why not simply put them in jail in the jurisdiction where the crime happened?"
Why should someone come to the place I live at, where me and the community welcomed them with open arms , and be terrorized by them? Why then should my community be responsible for incarcerating said person, and then have to wonder whether or not they will still commit crime if they get out of prison?