The criminal in society.

The indispensable offender

The necessity of the delinquent for the evolution of justice — the spirit of the laws.

The traveller who has nothing will pass singing before the thieves. Juvenal, Satires.

The reason for philosophy to live is to damage stupidity. Nietzsche — The Gay Science

As we have just seen on the previous page, the evolution of law results, among other things, from the combined work of the delinquent and the legislator. Thus, between the moment when the human species imposed its first prohibition on itself and the moment when law will have reached its perfection, the transgressor — on the same footing as the legislator — will be indispensable to our evolution.

The absolute has no measure

In the absolute, the indispensable has no scale of value. Two indispensable things have exactly the same importance. In other words, regarding the evolution of humanity, law and justice, the transgressor has the same "fundamental importance" as the judge or the jurist — therefore the same value. And if the transgressor, the judge and the jurist have the same fundamental value, they have fundamentally the same right to equal human respect.

The necessity of punishing the criminal

Respect without laxity

"Equal attention" does not mean "exemption from judgement". Every criminal deserves a respect identical to that of their judge — but for this they must accept a sanction and serve a sentence in relation to the offence committed. Indeed, it is through just, firm and impartial justice — a justice allergic to impunity — that there can be evolution of law and therefore of humanity.

Neither laxity nor harshness

If a society allows a delinquent to transgress law or human morality without sanction (because they benefit from protection or negligence), it prevents humanity from understanding the meaning and the logic of the world. In the same way, if a system applies zero tolerance to the people without applying it to the dominant, it operates a direct return toward the laws of nature. Both mechanisms participate in the regression of humanity toward its primate origins — toward the omnipotence of the natural dominant.

The paradox of transgression

Understanding this paradoxical situation — a transgressor indispensable for breaking with animality, and indispensably condemnable to enable humanity to evolve toward ever more justice and equality — illuminates all the absurdity of the death penalty. It also illuminates the injustice of the degrading gaze cast by society on the transgressor.

The inhumanity of the prison system

It reveals finally all the inhumanity of punishment systems — whether the perverse treatments inflicted by certain states on certain types of delinquents, or the poor conditions of incarceration, a genuine scandal for a so-called evolved society. The humiliation and inhumane conditions of detention inflicted on transgressors are not only counter-productive — they are also unjust if one considers the fundamental contribution of the delinquent to humanity and in particular to law. While ensuring that no crimes go unpunished (since this is one of the conditions of our evolution), humanity must be as compassionate and as educational as possible toward the transgressor — a "worker" in the full sense within this humanity, without whom no evolution would have been possible.

Text from the year 2000

I do not like your cold justice; in the eyes of your judges there always passes the gaze of the executioner and his icy blade! Tell me then where justice is — the justice that is love with clear-sighted eyes?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche