Losing them, fixing them, forgetting to put them in
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This is the fourth in a series of essays inspired by the principles of A Course in Miracles. The Course is a one-year, self-study curriculum that guides its students toward an instinctive, utilitarian spirituality by restoring their contact with what it calls the “Internal Teacher.” Published in 1976, the Course was written down over a period of seven years by Columbia University research psychologist Helen Schucman, who claimed to hear a soundless voice giving her a compelling “inner dictation.” Schucman, who died in 1981, never claimed authorship of the Course. The voice of the Course identifies itself as the living consciousness of Jesus Christ and offers a number of corrections to modern Christian beliefs.
As a psychological discipline, the Course encourages the transformation of personality through the constant practice of forgiveness. As a spiritual training, it insists on a complete reversal of ordinary perception, urging acceptance of spirit as reality and the physical world as illusion. “This course,” says the introduction, “can therefore be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
The previous essays in this series are “Back to the Real World” [Issue 153], “Climbing the Stone Face of Fear” [Issue 164], and “Homeless” [Issue 166].
— D. Patrick Miller
Robert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. The execution ended fourteen years of legal wrangling over Harris’s fate, capped by four overnight stays of execution.
Five minutes before the cyanide gas was released, Harris twisted against the straps confining him and looked back over his shoulder to catch the eye of Steve Baker, the father of one of the two teenage boys Harris had killed in 1979. Through the windows of the soundproof chamber, many of the forty-eight witnesses to the execution saw Harris mouth the words, “I’m sorry.” Baker nodded his head sharply in acceptance of the apology. Within twenty minutes Harris was dead, his asphyxiation videotaped to help authorities determine whether execution by gas constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Marilyn Clark, the sister of Harris’s other victim, attended the execution to honor her deceased mother, who had wanted to be there but died of cancer the year before. According to the Los Angeles Times, Clark had had a vivid dream a few weeks before the execution, in which Harris’s death unleashed a cloud of “black gremlins” that shrieked and flew in circles around his head before descending, tornado like, into hell. On the morning of April 21, Clark was deeply moved by Harris’s last-minute apology to Steve Baker.
“I looked at him and I saw just another human being,” Clark told Times reporter Alan Abrahamson. “So I tried to reach out in a . . . spiritual way, and tell him I could forgive him because he was giving his life like that, accepting it like a man.”
When Harris’s head rolled down to his chest, Clark reported feeling “this rush of being at peace with myself. I never thought in my life that this would come over me. All the hatred inside me totally disappeared. It was like the miracle of forgiveness. Before I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t forgive him. And then I did.”
Do not underestimate the intensity of the ego’s drive for vengeance on the past. It is completely savage and completely insane.
— A Course in Miracles
The life history of Robert Alton Harris, as reported by Times writer Dan Morain, reads like a surreally brutal recipe for the making of a callous murderer. The fifth of nine children, he was born two months premature in a Fort Bragg, North Carolina, army hospital after his drunken father kicked his alcoholic mother in the stomach. The man didn’t believe Robert was his progeny and made the boy the special object of his hatred. He would beat him with a bamboo cane and taunt him with a loaded gun, telling him to run. When Robert’s eldest sister was arrested for theft shortly after the family’s arrival in California in 1962, she told of her father’s sexual abuse; he was convicted of being a sex offender and went to jail for eighteen months. By now Robert was ten, and he was questioned by police investigating the killing of cats. He claimed that he’d only watched others do it.
God and nature get off the hook for apparently committing murders because we have no way of punishing either of them. Human murderers don’t get off the hook because we can punish them.
By 1967, Robert’s mother Evelyn had left her husband and driven off with her four youngest kids and a boyfriend, leaving fourteen-year-old Robert to fend for himself. He made his way to Oklahoma to live with his sister Barbara and brother Randy and was expelled from the eighth grade after his first day at school. Robert stole a car and was arrested in Florida, winding up as a ward of federal reformatories for the next four years. During this period he attempted suicide and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Released at age nineteen, he moved near his father to Chula Vista, California, where he found work as a welder, married, and fathered a son.
A few years later, in 1975, Robert was unemployed and drinking heavily. He and his older brother Kenneth decided to show a neighbor, James Wheeler, how to fight. Fistfighting led to Robert dousing the man with lighter fluid and setting him on fire; Wheeler died. Pleading guilty to manslaughter, Robert served two and a half years in the state prison at San Luis Obispo. Soon after his release in 1978, he drove from San Diego to Visalia to attend a Fourth of July picnic with his family; his mother, serving time for bank robbery, was out on parole. Robert and his brother Daniel, then eighteen, decided to rob a bank themselves. They stole guns from a neighbor and returned to San Diego to shoot at targets for practice. They also dropped by to visit their father, who clubbed Robert in the head with a wrench.
On July 5, Robert and Daniel Harris kidnapped John Mayeski and Michael Baker, both sixteen, in order to use their car for the getaway. Robert joked and laughed with them awhile, then told them to start walking away. He shot them dead and then finished their fast-food lunch: Daniel told police about the killings while he and his brother were being held for the robbery, which netted them $3,009.
Any concept of punishment involves the projection of blame, and reinforces the idea that blame is justified. The result is a lesson in blame, for all behavior teaches the beliefs that motivate it.
Violence begets violence. The equation is simple and so blatantly clear in human history — and in the daily news — that one has to wonder why our modern society has not yet grasped it. Particularly in America, we seem bent on encouraging the endless cycle of violence feeding upon itself. We continue to hype and glorify violence: as entertainment; as proof of our strength as individuals, as tribes, and as a nation; and finally, as the best or final answer to violence itself.
However much lip service Americans pay to the ideal of ending violence, we refuse to take the required steps to end it. We do not have the political will to cease serving as the number-one arms merchant to the world. We do not want to reduce access to even the most dangerous guns in our own country. We have only begun questioning our fascination with car chases, gun battles, and violent crime on television and in the movies.
In recent years, we have decided, by at least a three-fourths majority according to most polls, that we do want capital punishment administered in due course to convicted murderers. In the simplest terms, we collectively want to kill those who kill. We believe that this will somehow deter violence, despite the lack of evidence to that effect. At a deeper level, we believe that state-sanctioned, ritualized killing will provide us with resolution, emotional satisfaction, and perhaps even a dramatic final opportunity to forgive those who trespass murderously against us.
We seem studiously to avoid many other choices: to forgive without condoning or committing further violence ourselves; to lay down our arms; to turn the other cheek or even to try to love our perceived enemies. These responses embody the spiritual values presumably endorsed by a nation with a Christian majority, yet we do not endorse them. Why? Because we fear that giving these values more than lip service would leave us undefended. Violence might come to us at random, as Harris came to young Baker and Mayeski, and we would be unprepared to protect ourselves or avenge the deaths of the innocent. If we must go down as the victims of senseless violence, we intend to go down with guns blazing. After all, everyone knows it’s a dangerous world.
God does love the real world, and those who perceive its reality cannot see the world of death.
It is a dangerous world because it is a world of death. As the old saying goes, life itself is a fatal disease. If we want to see how angry we are about this unhappy circumstance, we need only look at our treatment of murderers.
When an innocent child is slowly destroyed by leukemia, we struggle to understand “God’s incomprehensible mercy”; but we surely do not attempt the same expansive attitude with mortal killers in our midst. To imagine that Robert Alton Harris dispensed an “incomprehensible mercy” to his young victims would seem to us the height of lunacy; yet the death he dealt was surely no worse than that suffered by a child with a terminal wasting disease. Death is not merciful either way.
If we presume that God brings all “natural” deaths to us, why not exact a death penalty from our Creator? For the simple fact that we cannot: God seems unreachable, unpunishable, the ultimate, invulnerable Boss in an unassailable Heaven. Atheists may substitute “the forces of nature” for the idea of God, but the basic logic is unchanged. Attempting to punish nature for causing death would seem equally ludicrous to anyone, while punishing people for causing death is considered a rational form of justice. In sum, God and nature get off the hook for apparently committing murders because we have no way of punishing either of them. Human murderers don’t get off the hook because we can punish them.
We punish murderers because they are the only beings on whom we can act out our anger about death itself, while still regarding ourselves as civilized. Murderers are our whipping boys and girls for the metaphysical insult of mortality. When murderers torture and slay the vulnerable bodies of their victims, we are reminded of our own tenuous physicality, and we react with a fearful rage. The state formalizes this rage in impersonal and ritualized executions, but it is rage nonetheless. Deep within us seethes a venomous logic that says someone must pay for death. Our sense of civilization requires that this someone be guilty of murder.
Most of us love life enough not to wreak death indiscriminately upon others every time we are ourselves faced with our mortality (or deprivation or suffering, which are often experienced as equally threatening). This love of life gives rise to the deterrent theory behind the death penalty. But in a time when youngsters are murdering each other over athletic shoes, we can presume that many people’s love of life is so weak that the theory of deterrence hardly applies to them. These are the people we must worry about most, of course — those who have decided that they can kill to avenge murder, end their suffering, or solve a particular problem, whether their victim is guilty of anything or not. (To its credit, the state goes to some trouble to determine whether a punishment “fits” the crime, but the freelance agents of personal justice generally don’t worry about such niceties.) Like most of us, killers believe that punishment works.
Who punishes the body is insane.
In recent years, the assignation of guilt in capital murder cases has often hinged on the linked definitions of sanity and responsibility. A last-ditch legal attempt to save Robert Alton Harris turned on the argument that he may have suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. This appeal failed, and Harris went to his death because the justice system determined that he was sane — that is, capable of understanding his actions and their consequences, and therefore responsible for his choices. Had he been judged not responsible because of insanity, he would most likely have been sentenced to life imprisonment and psychiatric treatment.
But the diagnostic approach to defining sanity has a serious flaw: it often flies in the face of common sense. Who would call a man sane who casually kills two teenagers for their car, and then finishes their lunch before going about his criminal business? Even if we conclude that he “knew better” and was capable of not making such a horrendous decision, the fact remains that he did this insane thing — for no discernible reason other than the compulsion of his own horrific past. Taught from the womb onward that the world runs on senseless violence, Harris behaved with a chronic viciousness that clearly suggested he was incapable of making sensible choices. The power of the mad lessons he learned was such that Harris was doomed to commit violence again and again. He might as well have been a brute force of nature, like a tornado.
Who would call a man sane who casually kills two teenagers for their car, and then finishes their lunch before going about his criminal business?
We resign ourselves to the random destruction wrought by tornadoes because we can’t change nature. But Harris was a force of our nature, human nature, which can perhaps be changed by looking deeply at how our beliefs create our behavior.
Human beings presently believe in punishment and vengeance as necessary and inescapable strategies for survival, social order, and personal advancement. We are horrified by the lengths to which people like Harris pursue vengeance, but not to the point of surrendering our own belief in vengeance entirely. One reason that we are fascinated by stories of murders is that most of us can identify with the varieties of vengeance motivating them: jealousy, greed, revenge, momentary blind furies over trifling insults. Haven’t we all been seized at least once by a murderous rage and wondered later what kept us from acting on it? Perhaps we were simply too cowardly to take up a gun or a knife. Does that timidity make us sane?
Wanting to get even is only natural, we tell ourselves. Actually killing someone to get even, however, is crazy. But wait a minute — the law says you’re crazy only if you don’t know any better than to kill. If you know better and do it anyway, you’re not crazy — just guilty. If you’re guilty, you deserve justice, which is to be killed; if you’re crazy, you deserve treatment. This formula is so confusing that it may seem simpler to forget about defining sanity and rely instead on the fundamental logic of vengeance: if you kill, for any reason, you deserve to be killed. That policy would surely stop all the killing, wouldn’t it?
The only genuine alternative is to give up the ideas of punishment and vengeance entirely. If we presume that this surrender is impossible, we ensure that killers like Harris will always be with us — as the most extreme perpetrators of our collective belief in vengeance. Giving up the death penalty for good would mean challenging some of our most personal, most firmly embedded beliefs, as well as our social policies. Even the most pacifist among us may be disquieted to realize how deeply the belief in vengeance is rooted. For instance, nearly everyone harbors self-hatred of a complex nature, including the petty and the profound. Most people have judged themselves harshly for their mistakes, their desires, and their dark secrets. Moreover, most people believe that their “sins” deserve serious punishment someday; in fact, a great many people inwardly punish themselves every day with chronic guilt and anxiety. No doubt some people find it easier to oppose capital punishment publicly than to confront their own self-condemnation privately; they may believe that if murderers can be saved, they may be worth saving, too.
But the most effective political stance against capital punishment will be firmly grounded in an ongoing process of self-forgiveness. This process eventually will feel shattering to the ego and one’s sense of reality because real forgiveness will actually undo the world as we see it. In short, a political stance against the death penalty must be metaphysically daring. To stop the death penalty once and for all, we must be willing to question the reality of this world of death.
Only the self-accused condemn. . . . If you did not believe that you deserved attack, it never would occur to you to give attack to anyone at all.
David Magris is the son of an Italian father and Puerto Rican mother who were unmarried at the time of his birth in 1948 in Vallejo, California. He was raised by his maternal grandparents and was not told who his real parents were. But around age ten Magris learned that the man in the photographs around his house was his biological father — a bad man, he was told, who was in prison for murder, a Mafioso whose brothers and sisters were pimps and whores. None of this was true, Magris knows today, but he asserts that the idea that he came from criminal stock was a powerful influence on him. In adolescence, he emulated criminal role models and became involved in narcotics and petty crimes, which eventually led to involvement with drug syndicates.
But Magris lived a double life. “I was leading an exemplary life in the daytime as a dancer,” he recalls. “I was determined to be a star. But at night I was doing burglaries, drinking, taking and selling drugs.”
At fifteen, Magris stole the dance school’s car to run away from home with a fourteen-year-old girl. Crossing the state line into Nevada, he was arrested and removed from his home to juvenile hall, then placed in foster care with a cousin. He joined the Marines in his senior year of high school and narrowly avoided service in Vietnam because of his aged parents’ health and the pregnancy of his young wife. Later divorced, Magris ended up in a crash pad where drugs were sold to subsidize the rent. Arrested on a drug charge, he managed to avoid additional prosecution for running a burglary ring only because there was insufficient evidence to convict him. After sixty days in jail, Magris was free briefly before being brought up on burglary charges, for which he received a suspended sentence.
On his twenty-first birthday, his credentials as a petty criminal well established, Magris and his pals decided to do a robbery. Magris recalls, “I had a gun, and I gave it to one of the other three guys to do a service station. We wound up kidnapping someone, and the victim was murdered. When I got my gun back, we still didn’t have enough money, so we went to do another robbery, where I wound up shooting a fellow named Dennis Tapp, who survived, thank God.”
Magris was arrested several hours later and charged with murder, kidnapping, robbery, and attempted murder. Magris claims, “The irony is that I was the trigger man on the attempted murder I was acquitted of, and not the trigger man on the murder I was found guilty of.” Sent to San Quentin’s death row for the murder, Magris was also given a life-without-parole sentence for the kidnapping. In 1972, when the death penalty was overturned in California, Magris’s death sentence was changed to life imprisonment; in 1977, it was reduced from life without parole to life. In 1985, having become a model prisoner who earned an associate of arts degree from the College of Marin and talked often to youth groups outside the prison, he was released from San Quentin.
Today Magris is married and lives not far from San Quentin. He’s employed as a general manager for a packaging manufacturer and serves as chair of the Northern California Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He has spoken publicly against capital punishment alongside his surviving victim, Dennis Tapp. He also serves as a board member of Centerforce, an organization that manages hospitality houses at state prisons, where the visiting families of inmates are greeted and assisted with child care.
The innocent release in gratitude for their release. And what they see upholds their freedom from imprisonment and death. Open your mind to change, and there will be no ancient penalty exacted from your brother or yourself.
What made David Magris different from Robert Alton Harris and other career criminals? Part of the answer is certainly that his upbringing, however chaotic and confused, was nowhere near as cruel as Harris’s. He also discovered an artistic means of self-expression early in life, so he knew there existed a better channel for his energies than the repetition of the punishments doled out to him.
I asked Magris if anything helpful happened to him in prison.
“Prison was like a rebirth. I saw enough bloodshed, sadness, pain, and degrading and demeaning things to last several hundred people a lifetime. It was very sobering and somber, stark and real, eye-opening.”
For three years of his incarceration Magris served as an institutional photographer, called to duty every time there was an incident between prisoners or contraband was found. “I’d see guys’ lives change over an exchange of bad words,” Magris remembers. “They’d fight and then go in the hole [solitary confinement], meaning their entire prison experience was altered. I’ve seen guys with so many holes in them you couldn’t count them. I saw guys who had committed suicide — who were so determined and brutally sad that I was waking up in the middle of the night still smelling their blood.”
From 1981 until his release in 1985, Magris served as an inside coordinator for a study group on A Course in Miracles at San Quentin. “I saw a lot of changes in other prisoners’ ability to forgive,” he says. “The guys could go into that room and feel that they were in a safe environment where issues and feelings could be aired, without having to worry about going out in the yard and getting a knife stuck in their back. It created a very positive effect on day-to-day living in a place where racial and territorial tensions were still prevalent.”
The real world is the state of mind in which the only purpose of the world is seen to be forgiveness.
Despite his own reformation there, Magris reports that prison is a place where vengeance is both institutionalized and intensified. “Justice in there is swift and sure and very clear. You do somebody wrong in prison and they’re gonna do you the ultimate wrong.” In such an environment, Magris’s turnabout must necessarily be seen as an exception to the rule, if not an outright miracle.
Could things be different? Magris emphatically believes so, arguing that society could be spending money and energy in more positive approaches to rehabilitation, which in the long run would be far more economical. Like a number of other prison reform advocates, Magris would like to see the prisons become more self-supporting by giving inmates marketable skills, and requiring them to pay room and board and help support their families on the outside. Reentry programs would enable prisoners to return to society more smoothly, says Magris, “instead of creating the current mind-set that ‘the only way I can make it is in prison,’ because that’s the only place where they get three meals, a cot, and a monthly pittance to buy cigarettes, potato chips, and drugs. We could be giving people back their dignity, respect, self-esteem, and confidence.”
Magris suggests our scattered and minimal efforts toward such resocialization of prisoners stem from political reinforcement of ignorance about the realities of our criminal justice system. “We have become convinced, largely through our politicians, that everyone’s fear of crime can best be cured by locking people up. But 95 percent of everybody we lock up is going to come home someday, rehabilitated or not.”
Because we recognize the horror of death, we believe that someone should be punished for it whenever possible, failing to recognize that this very belief in vengeance is what drives us to kill, whether as armies or individuals.
I asked Magris what he would say to crime victims who assert that they have a right to see the criminals who hurt them punished. “I’d say you have a right as a victim or loved one of a victim to get resolution,” he says. “But you do yourself an injustice when you feel that your victimization justifies somebody’s execution or degradation in prison. The only true way to get clean and clear, to be of good conscience and right with God, is to deal with the issues as they really are: loss and an incredible amount of pain. You’ve been hurt or no longer have someone you loved, so you feel robbed, cheated, and abandoned, and that makes you angry and afraid. Then you’re ripe for anyone who comes along and says, ‘Well, let’s kill the guy who did it!’ But that doesn’t solve anything.
“The only clean way through is first to forgive yourself for all the pain you’ve gone through and all the things you may not have had the opportunity to say to someone you loved. And then you have to decide to become stronger than your fear. Fear will run rampant in your mind if you allow it, and when it does, it becomes bigger than life. To get past that, you have to confront your fear.”
Without a death penalty, I asked Magris, won’t many people conclude that murderers can get away with it? He replied, “I have a hard time seeing how twenty-five years in prison equals getting away with it. If we treat prisoners more humanely, would they be getting away with it, or would we be doing ourselves a service?”
Since you cannot not teach, your salvation lies in teaching the exact opposite of everything the ego believes. This is how you will learn the truth that will set you free, and will keep you free as others learn it of you. The only way to have peace is to teach peace.
A Course in Miracles defines the ego as that part of our awareness — usually the ruling part — that believes in the reality of the body and its death. Since the body is always vulnerable to damage and destruction, our lives are constricted by our perpetual service to fear, self-defense, and vengeance. The ego and body were created, says the Course, when we decided to separate from God — or, rather, when we mistakenly decided to believe we had separated from God, which the Course asserts is impossible. From this mistaken belief arose an entire illusory world of time and matter, a world in which God is hidden from us because God lives in timeless, indestructible reality. What were our means of creating this vast illusory world? The Course asserts that the world we see veils the answer: “You do not understand how what you see arose to meet your sight. For if you did, it would be gone.”
From this perspective, the answer to the paradox of “God’s incomprehensible mercy” in wreaking natural death is that God has nothing to do with it. We invented death as our answer to God’s invention of eternal life, for our creative powers are God-like, though we have used them to make a chaotic world of beauty and death mixed together. Because we recognize the horror of death, we believe that someone should be punished for it whenever possible, failing to recognize that this very belief in vengeance is what drives us to kill, whether as armies or individuals. The cycle of vengeance will never resolve itself; to end it we must question its foundation — the belief that the body and its death are real.
Such questioning will not immediately yield a deathless world of spirit, for we have gone too deep into our illusions for that. The Course defines salvation as the perception of the real world. It explains that we can begin to perceive the real world by making a simple but very radical choice: “Salvation does not ask that you behold the spirit and perceive the body not. It merely asks that this should be your choice.” Between this choice and its fulfillment lies our most profound learning task, one that can encompass and direct all other forms of learning.
What does this metaphysical perspective have to do with the politics of capital punishment and our vengeful incarceration of criminals? It helps us to understand what forgiveness really is: not the self-sacrificing acceptance of wrongs that have been done to us, but rather the willingness to recover a long-abandoned world of peace by questioning both the sanity and reality of the world we have built on vengeance.
In that sense, political activism in the name of forgiveness can be seen as an important part of a transformational spiritual discipline. To forgive and try to save a killer like Robert Alton Harris does not mean excusing his crimes, but recognizing them more clearly as evidence of the ceaseless cycle of vengeance by which we all live. To have forgiven him would have been to say, “We will no longer teach vengeance to you or your victims. We will try our best to teach you peace, and by learning it, you will teach us as well.”
At the political level, teaching peace means opposing the death penalty and promoting the sort of resocialization programs that David Magris suggests for our prisons: these would decrease human suffering, save money, and provide a truly sensible route to the lessening of crime and violence in our society. At the psychological level, teaching peace means learning to release ourselves from the habit of self-punishment, and to stop creating and projecting blame. At the spiritual level, teaching peace means cultivating the willingness to relinquish the world as we know it, in favor of a peaceful world that is presently beyond both our perception and our imagination.
The more clearly we understand that these levels are interrelated and inseparable, the more effective we will be in whatever mode of activism we choose. To demonstrate or legislate with full force against the death penalty is to acknowledge that we are actually campaigning to change human nature. The alternative is to maintain our belief in vengeance, making our time in this world seem so long and painful that death becomes attractive.
I invite responses at 103 N. Hwy 101, #1022, Encinitas, CA 92024.
D. Patrick Miller
While I agree with D. Patrick Miller wholeheartedly that prisons should exist solely for the positive transformation of their inmates into contributing members of society, I believe he totally misses the point of the death penalty. The death penalty exists so that we may know with absolute certainty that a criminal will never inflict pain and suffering on any other family ever again. For this reason alone, not for vengeance or punishment, the death penalty will continue to be demanded until prison reforms have been so perfected that a criminal is no longer dangerous once his sentence is served.
Like Lewis K. Elbinger, I, too, hope the time will come when humanity attains the state of spiritual realization in which capital punishment is unnecessary. But unlike him I am actually interested in humanity getting there — not endlessly delaying that attainment in order to land one more punch on anybody’s nose. “Education and the great assumption of responsibility by individual citizens” are indeed how we will get to a state of merciful realization. Education and responsibility are what I pursue as a writer and a human being. Thus I am satisfied that my essay did indeed have the effect I intended upon Elbinger: making him question his own belief in vengeance. He would not have defended it with such exasperation had he not been moved to question it. That’s all the effect I can have. Actually surrendering his belief in vengeance is a miracle he will have to induce himself.
It’s absolutely true, as Robert Becker suggests, that killing a murderer prevents him from killing again. But it does not prevent our society from producing murderers. Finding a way to do that would greatly improve the bottom line of our societal bookkeeping. In fact, Becker’s calculations to the contrary, capital punishment is much more expensive than life imprisonment, and it will continue to be unless we so greatly shorten the appeals process that we increase the proportion of innocent people who are executed. Can we afford that write-off? In a vengeful and violent society, there’s a great temptation simply to eliminate the worst byproducts of our cultural mind-set. But facing and caring for what we have created, in order that we might someday understand and undo our violence, is a great collective assumption of responsibility. Societal adulthood is even tougher than Becker thinks.
When I was ten, my parents took in a delinquent boy of fifteen. He deliberately smashed my bicycle; I screamed I would tell my mother. He slapped my face several times, banged my head against a tree, and laughed, “Go ahead, pussy.” My mother said I should be understanding because his father used to tie him up and punch the daylights out of him and that was the only kind of life he knew. Even then I knew her advice was bad. It did nothing to change him and made me into a sacrificial lamb. She must have known it too; that kid was out of our home the next morning, and I never saw him again.
D. Patrick Miller’s essay “A Brutal Sadness” [August 1993], for all its insight and tender heart, disturbs and angers me in exactly the same way. Miller draws from a set of doctrinal preconceptions (A Course in Miracles) to lay a massive guilt trip, not on criminals, who elicit his forgiveness and understanding, but on the innocent people they rape, rob, and mutilate. So we are really violated twice: once by the thug and a second time by the Job’s comforters who tell us how morally retarded we are for wanting to fight back. Miller’s essay is an example of what I would call “idiot compassion”: the well-meaning inability to set limits on predators, disguised as spirituality.
Miller assumes that suppressing criminals is about vengeance. Not necessarily: I couldn’t care less about punishing them. I want them locked up, or killed, to keep their guns out of my face and to save me the expense of hiring guards and turning my home into a fortress, which is what people in my social class had to do before there were prisons. Acts like rape, robbery, extortion, and murder are odious and repulsive, quite apart from the background of the criminal; they destroy the social consensus that makes civilization possible, and we are completely justified in restoring it at the criminal’s expense.
Miller does not want to acknowledge that civilization is founded on armed force. For every monk who devoted his life to God, there were a hundred barbarians whose idea of a good time was to burn his books and throw him down a well. There is always someone willing to terrorize his neighbors for personal gain, regardless of what effort we make to understand him. People like Miller can teach and write only so long as the state has the power to crush thugs. As Robert M. Pirsig points out in Lila, all our laws are nothing but instructions to the army and the police, and if we want a society, as opposed to a battlefield of warlords, we had better make those instructions clear and give the state our unequivocal support in following them.
Miller also assumes there is something inherently wrong with anger and vengeance. That is, we have this five-million-year-old instinct to resist predators, but Helen Schucman, author of the Course, got a message from Jesus, or whomever, that it’s no good and we should throw it out. This is a new-age doctrine of original sin, which teaches us to have contempt for our physical being: we have bodies because we are ignorant, and our instincts and experiences are illusions.
I don’t buy this. And I don’t want to forgive robbers. I want them dead. Miller’s account of David Magris, the reformed felon, gave me profound satisfaction. Why? The best revenge you can have on criminals is to see them kill themselves — not their bodies, the deaths of which are only a shadow gratification, but what offended you: their selfish malice, their contempt for human life, their identity as criminals. Nothing about this identity should be forgiven; it should die.
I agree with Miller that our prison system is an utterly inadequate answer to the problem of crime. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not forgiveness, and it’s not letting prisoners out. Merely crushing them is no answer either; a state that has only force is just as precarious as one that lacks the will to use it.
Cases of murder and rape are so serious that it may be entirely appropriate to kill the perpetrators, not to get revenge on them or to deter anyone else, but simply to eliminate them. If the best they can do in this life is wage perpetual war on the rest of us, then maybe they don’t belong here. A lot of misery would have been averted if the Nazi war criminals had been shot before they ever got power.
But the way the state now practices capital punishment is as inept and insane as the rest of our criminal justice system: it’s impersonal, inefficient, and expensive. Instead we should give the victims and their families the option of either killing their offenders swiftly and cheaply or enslaving them to community service. Native American societies handled murderers this way. One of my New England ancestors killed a sagamore warrior in 1706. The other warriors captured him and gave the dead man’s wife the choice of what to do with his killer. She chose to enslave him, and eventually he won the respect of the tribe through his service. Letting the victim sentence the criminal, within guidelines of course, would personalize the concept of justice, empower the victim, and (if he weren’t executed) allow the offender to make amends by producing wealth instead of draining it.
I doubt we have the collective imagination to implement anything so radical. We could, however, create more community service programs, so that criminals at least have a civilized alternative. Condemning ourselves for feeling vengeful leads nowhere. All it does is alienate us further from our own humanity.
Now let me see if I got this straight: some lady hears voices telling her that the spiritual world is real and the material world is an illusion. She writes down what the voices say, and a guy named D. Patrick Miller reads it and concludes that we all should forgive murderers and eliminate capital punishment and then the world would be a better place [“A Brutal Sadness,” August 1993]. He quotes a confessed murderer who advises crime victims to “forgive yourself for all the pain you’ve gone through.” This is the sort of fuzzy pseudothinking that makes Rush Limbaugh rich.
If we listen to the voice in the Miracle Lady’s head, we will understand that the body is an illusion and, therefore, we need not execute guilty murderers because we’d only be depriving them of their illusory bodies. If I listen to the voice in my own head, however, I conclude that anyone who violates Article 3 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of person”) loses the protection of society in regard to his or her own life, liberty, and security of person and must suffer the consequences.
It is ironic indeed that the murderer quoted by Miller was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit but acquitted of the murder he committed. Rather than interpret this irony as another example of the fallibility of human justice, I interpret it as another example of the perfection of divine justice. The man was, after all, guilty of murder. Society is lucky in that this individual does not seem likely to kill again, but I do not want the safety of my family to depend on luck.
In addition to mercy and compassion, there is justice and responsibility in this world. While Miller may wish otherwise, capital punishment plays a part in the administration of justice at this point in history. I, too, hope the time will come when humanity attains a state of spiritual realization in which capital punishment is unnecessary, but that is an end to be achieved through education and the great assumption of responsibility by individual citizens. Miller seems to have it backward: if we eliminate capital punishment, he argues, suddenly we will have educated, responsible citizens. I don’t think so.
Miller’s article did not have the effect on me that he intended. I am glad that Robert Alton Harris was executed because, as the perpetrator of a heinous crime, he deserved to be. Apparently it required being sent to the gas chamber for him to experience sincere remorse for his crime. His victims were not responsible for his unhappy childhood and should not have paid with their lives for the irresponsibility of his parents. Our tax dollars can help care for neglected children and rehabilitate criminals, but we should not forget that the government cannot do it alone; it requires the commitment and responsibility of the people involved. As Rabindranath Tagore said, “If everyone cleaned up his own back yard, the whole world would be clean.”
And another thing: any criminal who advises crime victims to “forgive yourself for all the pain you’ve gone through” should be punched in the nose.
Forgiveness is often mistaken for the passive acceptance of wrongdoing and the denial of anger. But true forgiveness accepts wrongdoing and anger and strives to heal, correct, or redirect them. Thus, forgiveness is an inherently paradoxical spiritual path.
I am not so arrogant as to presume that I understand the ancient “hard wiring” of human nature. I only know about my own experience. When I feel angry and vengeful, I attempt to face those feelings squarely and completely, and then I decide whether I want them to drive my behavior. In the last few years I have taken up a discipline of forgiveness, which means I have decided against vengeance as a guide. This is how I go about changing my own human nature.
This process usually feels like “ego death,” which is precisely what our so-called correctional system should be about — suppressing criminal behavior and changing ways of thinking until criminals, whose egos are often saturated with the belief in vengeance, are liberated from that belief. But as long as society is unwilling to liberate itself from that same belief, it will continue to have a chaotic correctional system that does little more than warehouse and further degrade society’s most dangerous members. Killing a few murderers will not make a bit of difference in lowering our crime rates. It never has.
It is tragic testimony to the current popularity of the belief in vengeance when caring and intelligent people say that they don’t even care whether the death penalty actually deters crime; they just like capital punishment as a symbol. A Course in Miracles suggests a reason that capital punishment is morbidly alluring to so many: “The death penalty is the ego’s ultimate goal, for it fully believes that you are a criminal, as deserving of death as God knows you are deserving of life.”
Miller concluded in “A Brutal Sadness” that “to demonstrate or legislate with full force against the death penalty is to acknowledge that we are actually campaigning to change human nature.” I have scarcely read a more arrogant sentence in print. To change human nature — religions and belief systems and psychology never tire of this rhetoric. In the hard wiring that is human nature, maybe all those contradictory messages that alternately tell us to hit back, run, or stand tall in the face of violence can give us a clue that there is no simple solution.
I used to be against the death penalty, but I’m not anymore. I’m also for abortion rights, while acknowledging that abortion is murder. Women who face the choice of whether to have one hold contradictory feelings of love, hope, and utter despair within them until one feeling rises up and they know what to do. It is a choice they would prefer never to have to make. But when they do choose abortion, with a conscience full of prayer, the very act of their spiritual struggle is a lifting up of the human spirit for all of humanity. I do not mean abortion lifts up humanity. Nor does the birth of an unwanted, soon-to-be-abused baby. Nor does the execution of a convicted murderer. Nor does not executing a convicted murderer.
My point is that there are times when murder is warranted, and it is the conscience with which the murder is committed that makes the long-term difference for human society. Yet what is poignantly missing and systematically suppressed in our society is the voice of our conscience when we face the choice of killing or not killing. Think of how Native Americans prayed to the spirit of the buffalo and thanked it for its sacrifice before and after the kill, and compare that to our meatpacking slaughterhouses, where prayers are absent. Killing has gone on and will always go on. Violence will continue with or without legislation. Our primal human nature will always scream out to fight or flee in response to attack, but we have the conscience to choose thoughtfully how we’ll respond, whether with exquisitely planned, torturous vengeance, or with prayer and forgiveness, or with something else altogether.
There is a chasm of difference between the murderer who is full of remorse for killing someone while driving drunk and the murderer who, having tortured and killed someone, feels no remorse whatsoever. Chikatilo, the Russian criminal who is estimated to have tortured, killed, and eaten more than fifty people, loved to mutilate their genitals. He had orgasms while doing so. He especially liked to boil and eat uteruses, though he ate men as well as women. The fascinating thing is that his face took on the features of a monster. He looked absolutely inhuman. He became inhuman. Shall we keep people with such damaged consciences alive and try to reform them? Shall we study them like lab rats? Give them lobotomies? Turn them into Christians? Or is the most humane action for them and for the citizens who pay for their trials, attorneys, medical care, food, and clothes to kill them as quickly as possible after their conviction and cease this argument that a Chikatilo is somehow like us? There but for the grace of God go I? Absolutely not.
I agree with Miller that the sanity/insanity argument is absurd. Our criminal laws are absurd. Our courts are crowded with unnecessary lawsuits while real crimes go untried. What does one do in the face of such a mess? One makes choices. One makes hard, painful, Solomon-type choices. One gets off one’s idealistic cloud of spirituality and finds a way to make common-sense choices that will benefit the people who are truly innocent. For instance, why don’t we use taxpayer money for programs to prevent children from being tormented by their parents, just as the young Robert Alton Harris was, rather than putting the money into extended stays of execution and the board and care of multiple murderers? The wackos who commit torturous murders are not equal to other human lives. The adult Robert Alton Harris lost his right to live. David Magris took responsibility for his actions and regained his right to live. It isn’t always so clear. That’s life.
There is a point at which someone is a hopeless case in terms of society’s resources. I’m not saying I know what that point is, but common sense tells me that people like Charles Manson, Jeffrey Daumer, and Chikatilo reached it. Maybe to God no one is a hopeless case. But we are not God. We are given the task on this earth of making choices between greater and lesser evils. The choices we may make as individuals are not necessarily the choices that society should make, considering the greater good. So let’s leave the spiritual growth of forgiveness to the individual’s private conscience, and let’s come together as a society that has to find practical and ethical solutions to crime and punishment.
Where is the criminal’s accountability in all of this? Every criminal made choices. Several multiple murderers have said how much easier it was to murder the second time. After crossing the chasm that forever separated them from the social contract, they found some kind of freedom outside the realm of conscience, outside the realm of society. Death is not the worst state for a mind with no conscience or controls.
All lives are not equal; neither are all deaths. Miller’s example of the child who died of leukemia certainly is a different kind of death from the one that Robert Alton Harris dealt his victims. His lack of comprehension that deaths are different must come from a lack of exposure to actual death. I was a nurse for several years and spent hours with people as they died. To die at the hands of someone who hates you is worlds apart from a death (at any age) preceded by an acceptance of your own circumstances of ill health, surrounded by family and friends. Such a death often allows people to let go of this world, to say goodbye to loved ones and allow them to say goodbye to you. Any violent or sudden death, whether through murder or not, is quite different.
Miller also suggests that since violence begets violence, nonviolence must beget nonviolence. But it doesn’t work so nicely. People who idealistically face violence with nonviolence have often been mowed down. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr. Think of Anwar Sadat. Think of the students in Tiananmen Square. Think of Gandhi. Think of Jesus.
The choice for nonviolence is inherently personal and private. It is not a choice an entire society can make. To eliminate capital punishment would not raise the ethics of humanity. It would, however, be a powerful symbol that violence will not be met with death. You might as well invite mass murderers in for lunch and serve yourself on the menu. Give me all the statistics you want to about how it doesn’t deter crime; I’ll keep the death penalty as a symbol of the ultimate consequence the violent must face.
D. Patrick Miller’s essay “A Brutal Sadness” [August 1993] challenges the often-heard but indefensible view that vengeance is justice. When we think about it, most of us know that vengeance isn’t justice, because justice is what we want for ourselves and vengeance is what we wish on people we think don’t deserve justice: criminals, homosexuals, the homeless, people of other races, people who have AIDS.
We know what justice is, unless we are philosophers or lawyers. It is access to the means to a full and meaningful life. We know we must still work for such a life and that we may not obtain it owing to our own failures, misfortunes, and sins. In these cases we think it just that we suffer reasonable consequences and then be allowed to earn another chance. The problem is that we think there are lots of people who don’t deserve the chance to create a meaningful life for themselves. But by denying them justice, we affect our own access to it. By denying criminals justice, we live with a growing underclass of violent, hopeless people. By denying blacks justice, we live with an uneasy armed peace in our inner cities.
A person with mature faith can live a full life under any circumstances, as David Magris’s transformation shows. But the endless crisis of American criminal justice is a social and political problem, requiring a collective response. What are the reasonable consequences of a crime — for criminals, for victims, for society? What are the obligations of each? We cannot even raise these questions as long as we feel vengeful.
D. Patrick Miller too often sounds like a true believer when he applies A Course in Miracles to the body politic. Arguing against the death penalty and in favor of forgiveness and compassion are sensible, humane positions. But our actions must be open to some evaluation in the here and now. If we have free will, we must own the causes and the results of our actions, however complex the relationship. Further, challenging the death penalty by invoking a belief that denies the reality of death is a stretch. If death is an illusion, then executions are illusions. Are the crimes illusions, too? Is pain an illusion? Is this letter an illusion?
We already live in a culture committed to denying the reality of death. Do we need more variations on the Christian pie-in-the-sky viewpoint? For that is what Miller finally offers us, asking us to “relinquish the world as we know it, in favor of a peaceful world that is presently beyond both our perception and our imagination.”
Further, seeing vengeance as the primary motivation for the death penalty grossly oversimplifies. A pragmatic friend of mine views capital punishment as a “bookkeeping function,” coldly arguing that it’s the only way to guarantee that those irredeemable murderers will not kill again. The cold logic of economic analysis produces this intriguing option. If it costs fifty thousand dollars a year to secure a prisoner, that’s one million dollars over twenty years. Capital punishment allows us the choice of spending that one million on food and books and education for a lot of desperate, hungry five-year-olds in this world.
What if you were governor and you had to make this real, immediate choice? The idea of miracles engages the child in each of us and its need for clear, happy conclusions — the necessary stuff of wonder and myth.
Adulthood is tougher.