My favorite radio program,
This American Life, covered the
1982 massacre in Dos Erres, Guatemala. Those few among the perpetrators who have been brought to trial have each been
sentenced to over 6,000 years -- 30 years for each man, woman, and child murdered. And I thought: what if we made them serve it?
I'm not speaking of a fictional world in which criminals live for 6,000 years. I am speaking of a fictional world in which the living remember for 6,000 years. We dig up the graves of Egyptian kings and send their bodies around the world to be photographed and gawked at. Suppose we also kept the bodies of Egyptian murderers, never buried, in locked boxes -- unshipped, unphotographed, and ungawked. "Here stands ____, who on the twelfth day of the third month of a year 3,879 years before the birth of a man later deemed a god did rob, rape, and kill 202 people: ____ and ____ and ____ and.... Not to be released until March 12, 2181."
The living would fail at that project. They have not the fortitude for it. It feels just to say to the families of victims, "The murderer will pay with one lifetime for each he took." But the punishment of the dead weighs lightly upon the dead and heavily upon the living. The criminals would become celebrities, celebrated alongside the kings (even when the two were not the same to begin with). The cost of maintaining them would be astronomical, and within less than a millennium would dwarf that of maintaining living prisoners. And under such conditions, their sentences would inevitably become political chess pieces.
Remembrance is an investment, and grief, and punishment. Each pays its dividends, and each carries its price.
You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another. There is nothing free, except the grace of God.
-- Mattie Ross, "True Grit"
