Clayton Morgareidge, Lewis and Clark College
The public accepts the brutality and the injustice of the prison system because they suppose that the individuals who commit crimes are fully responsible for what they do and so deserve whatever happens to them in prison. A persuasive argument that the responsibility for crime reaches far beyond the individuals arrested for them would help to undermine the support for prisons as they now exist. In this paper, I argue that even if we accept the conservative position that most crime is committed consciously and deliberately by people who have chosen crime as their way of life, it still does not follow that they should bear full responsibility for their actions. Perhaps people do choose the principles by which they will live. But they do not make that choice under conditions they have chosen, but under conditions that often make the choice of violent crime a natural one. So, even if violent people (and other criminals) are responsible for who they are and what they do, many other things -- persons, institutions and conditions -- are responsible as well. Responsibility must be dispersed.