In my previous post where I described terrorism as modern guerrilla warfare, I argued that the technique of terrorism is in part induced by disparity between the technological availabilities of the two parties involved. In other words, pitting David against Goliath means that David uses the sling and jumps about rather than going head to head with the big brute.
Is there a similar influence on the technology selected by victims of crime when they are pitted against criminal attackers? It seems obvious that guns grant a sensation of power and control to their users. Is that to say that those who buy, own and wield them are those who feel most powerless — those who face the greatest power disparity between their own accessible security and the power of a criminal to inflict harm upon them or take their property? This may explain concealed carry permits, a sound administration of justice does little to help the real pain felt from being the victim of a violent attack. So citizens still want to deter getting attacked, or hurt during an attack. The more someone feels likely to be the victim of a violent attack, the more likely they are to invest in weaponry rather than locks as a security precaution.
What about the technology of punishment? The greater the difference between the likelihood of a victim to regain his wealth and property through the criminal justice system, the less likely he is to invest in security devices that track the specific identity of the aggressor. Why invest the extra dollars to install a video camera as part of your security system if the criminal justice system has no means of restoring what’s yours to you? If yous still don’t get your property back even after the criminal has been caught and prosecuted you have little incentive to make investments in devices that explicitly detect the identity of a criminal. Instead, if victims still feel helpless that their security purchases don’t suffice to deter against crime, they are likely to support harsh punitive measures that specifically inflict loss and suffering upon a criminal. Such is the case in the philosophical justifications of deontological and retributive punishment systems. Punishments are much rehabilitations compared to times of the past, and they are certainly not debt-based sentences, punishment is the response to crime because it is unpleasant because the criminal is said to deserve to be punished.
To sum up, it seems that Dog the bounty hunter gets more business in a retributive justice system, while Sherlock Holmes does more business in a restitution-based criminal justice system. I’m not trying to make an explicit claim that we should move from one to the other, though I think it’s worth discussing. I am willing to say that there is significant innovation and discovery in the technological discoveries of peaceful security strategies that gets inhibited, and a significant degree of relatively violent techniques that get subsidized because of the incentives promoted in the current justice system.