In practical terms, for example, this distinction helps to identify the importance of legal concepts like domestic violence and victims’ rights. Both of these notions deal with crimes against people, and the law views those crimes more severely than crimes against property.
Legal scholar Brian Mackie notes that it is “rare” to have “a judge sentence someone to jail for a property crime” in the United States. Prisons are not “filled with shoplifters, dope smokers, and car thieves.” Instead significant prison sentences are given to “people we should be afraid of.”
Looking specifically at the State of Michigan, Mackie notes “that Michigan is the second most violent state in the Midwest,” with “a violent crime rate more than fifty percent higher than the state of Ohio.” What seem to be high rates of incarceration in Michigan are actually lower, considered as rates, than states like Montana.
Michigan doesn’t “seek jail terms for folks who steal Slurpees,” in the words of journalist James Leopard who reported in 2020 on both Mackie and Mackie’s critics.
Mackie reports that Michigan doesn’t routinely imprison those who’ve committed a crime against property. Instead, “74% of Michigan’s prison inmates are sentenced for a violent crime (a figure which the national ACLU reports).” Those who commit crimes against property are routinely spared prison time, and engage in various forms of rehabilitation or restorative justice.
The tendency to distinguish between ‘crimes against persons’ and ‘crimes against property’ is a tendency that is found in Western Civilization. In other civilizations, there are legal traditions which include severe consequences for theft: the amputation of hands, for example, or the death penalty.
In Western Civilization, the death penalty was and is reserved for only extreme crimes against persons: murder, rape, kidnapping, and treason.
Western Civilization does not allow the capital punishment for burglary, theft, or other forms of stealing. This is a statement about the value of human life.
In non-Western civilizations, capital punishment is meted out for various forms of theft, for adultery or infidelity, and for various ‘thought crimes’ and ‘word crimes’ like blasphemy, defamation, slander, or libel.
The challenge facing the legal system in the United States at present is the growing demand to severely punish various ‘speech crimes.’ This demand represents a departure from Western Civilization, demanding a physical penalty for spoken or written words. This demand would see individuals fined, jailed, or removed from gainful employment because they expressed certain thoughts.
Another challenge to Western Civilization’s value system is the minimizing of rape. Traditionally, rape was considered a serious crime, even in some cases meriting the death penalty. The trend in recent years has been to give lighter sentences to convicted rapists. This undermines the dignity and worth that Western Civilization has traditionally attributed to women.
Likewise, in non-Western civilizations, the status of the victim affects both the legal proceedings and the sentences issued at the end of those proceedings. In some countries, e.g., a driver who negligently kills a pedestrian will be sentenced more harshly if the victim was a man, and sentenced more lightly if the victim was a woman. In Western Civilization, legal doctrine has long decreed that a crime’s sentence — e.g., for negligent manslaughter — should be the same with no regard to the demographic of the victim or of the perpetrator: the sentence should be the same, regardless of gender, age, race, religion, economic status, etc.
This concept, too, is being challenged in the current legal environment: harsher sentences are being demanded based upon the race or gender of the victim or of the perpetrator. This is a direct contradiction of Western Civilization.
The current era will be seen, from the perspective of the future, as a pivotal one: an era in which either Western Civilization’s basic sense of justice held, or an era in which it crumbled.
