Abstract
Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, suggests that there are some real dangers involved in mocking and demonizing the criminal, even one as offensive as a rapist. What Shakespeare dramatizes in Prospero’s response to the incident with Caliban is the difficulty victims have letting a criminal justice system run its course as they are consumed with anguish, with a torment that is often expressed in hatred and violence, which is perhaps understandable but also regrettable because it extends the injury of the original crime. The challenge of criminal justice on Prospero’s island is the same challenge of criminal justice in our societies, a challenge that is rarely appreciated in popular culture, and even in professional criminology: How do we administer a system of retributive justice when, as a rule, a criminal’s punishment cannot possibly undo the damage, pain, and suffering done to a victim? This is the kind of question Shakespeare’s drama leaves us with – a question, not an answer – for the value of Shakespeare’s art, and the reason it has remained such a popular force in Western culture, is that he brings us to ask such questions, questions that simply cannot be answered once and for all, in some sort of universal salve that might remain true everywhere and always, but questions that must be answered by particular individuals and societies in the context of their particular histories, problems, and aspirations.
Bibliography
Demko, P. (2012, Oct. 5). ‘He was a kid’: Former juvenile sex offenders languish in MSOP. Politics in Minnesota. Retrieved from http://politicsinminnesota.com/2012/10/he-was-a-kid-former-juvenile-sex-...
Greenblatt, S. (1976). Learning to curse: Aspects of linguistic colonialism in the sixteenth century. In Fredi Chiapelli (Ed.), First images of America: The impact of the new world on the old (pp. 561-80). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gruber, S., & Yurgelun-Todd, D. (2006). Neurobiology and the law: A role in juvenile justice? Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, 3, 321-40.
Hamm, M. (2008). Prison radicalization: Assessing the threat in U.S. correctional institutions. National Institute of Justice Journal, 261, 14-19.
Lemert, E. (1951). Primary and secondary deviation. In Social pathology: A systematic approach to the theory of sociopathic behavior (pp. 75-78). New York: McGraw Hill.
Lombroso, C. (1876). The criminal man. (Mary Gibson and Nicole Hehn Rafter, Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lupton, J. R. (2006). The minority of Caliban: Thinking with Shakespeare and Locke. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 22, 1-34.
Pritikin, M. (2008). Is prison increasing crime? Wisconsin Law Review, 6, 1049-1108.
Tannenbaum, F. (1938). The dramatization of evil. In Crime and the community (pp. 17-21). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Tewksbury, R. (2012). Stigmatization of sex offenders. Deviant Behavior, 33(8), 606-23.