Flick through the numerous TV channels on Freeview on any night of the week, any week of the year, and you are guaranteed to find endlessly repeated episodes of Top Gear. But you will also just as surely come across programmes that bring you up close and personal with some of the most hardened criminals and gang members serving time in some of the world's most notorious prisons. And these shows - even when fronted by someone as likeable as Louis Theroux - have a phenomenally depressing effect.
It could be, I suppose, that some producers are interested in humane reform and want to shock us out of our complacency by forcing us to think more carefully and more compassionately about the issues and the people caught up within the criminal justice system. But most shows simply seem sensational and exploitative; turning human misery into cheap and voyeuristic entertainment.
Either way, I suspect that many viewers will - like me - come away completely dispirited and despairing about the entire penal system and the deplorable wretches confined within it. And some will find themselves asking what's the point of keeping extremely violent and irredeemable offenders banged up for life behind bars; why not just have them all exterminated without fuss or any further ado?
These viewers are not moral and intellectual monsters and the question is not, I think, completely illegitimate.
Rather, like Lawrence, they have been driven partly by despair and partly by a form of utopianism into thinking such thoughts and into examining their souls for a way forward; they know a new vision of society is needed and that the true criminal should be afforded no place within it; they know that, at a certain point - and due to the very nature of the crimes committed - these shaven-headed, tattooed imbeciles with what Carlyle memorably describes as ape-faces, imp-faces, angry dog-faces [and] heavy sullen ox-faces, have compromised their humanity and, thus, all claim to rights based on such.
I don't even think we should regard their elimination as capital punishment. It's simply pest control; the necessary destruction of vermin who have no interest in rehabilitation, but just want to steal, rape, torture, and murder for personal gain and personal pleasure; individuals who, as Rod Liddle rightly says, couldn't care less about society or its laws.
As Liddle also says, if being nice to criminals worked, we'd all be happy to shower them with kindness. But it doesn't. Nor does being cruel and vindictive and it's here that Liddle and I part company; for what doesn't kill these individuals only serves to make them stronger. And so we might as well be honest with ourselves and deprive them not merely of their freedom, but of their foul lives (though this means of course granting to the State - that coldest of all cold monsters - powers that we might later regret handing over).
See:
D. H. Lawrence, '[Return to Bestwood]', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 13-24. Lawrence places his call for the execution of those he designates as true criminals within a wider programme of state eugenics, justified by his philosophical vitalism.
Rod Liddle, 'The Spectator has gone soft - prisons should be much nastier places', in The Spectator, 26 Nov 2016: click here to read online. I'm grateful to Liddle for the reference to Thomas Carlyle that I made use of above.
