Julia Shaw

But

That's not the almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we see in the news.

So I think it's always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual.

Very few people want to murder.

They might fantasize about it, but they don't want to go through with it.

And very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance.

Never mind again.

I think in general we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down.

So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that's justice, which is, sure, that's one version where it's an eye for an eye kind of, you know, life for life.

There's obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don't adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of, well, you stole somebody else's life, so you don't deserve to have one.

But there's also the other side, which is if we're looking at prevention, murder is really like,

people aren't going to go out and murder again.

So that's a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually.

And high risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence.

And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer.

And they're in line more just with how we perceive justice to work.

So there's big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.

I think forgiveness is up to the victim's families.

And quite often when you speak with victim's families, there is this divide where you have some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice, which is where what they want is for the person to apologize, the perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened.

Also, quite often, I mean, you look at some of the other consequences in the other context.