Disrupting the Offender/Victim Dichotomy
*Elizabeth Kiely
What we have come to know about Christa Pike disrupts the neat offender/victim dichotomies that our criminal justice systems rely on so much to justify punishments in general and not only the ones that are especially cruel and inhuman.
Christa Pike will be known as the woman who committed a terrible crime when 18 years of age, was subsequently sentenced to death, was on death row for nearly three decades and suffered a botched execution in the state of Tennessee. Undoubtedly Christa’s experience raises yet again the use of the death penalty, which is by any standard, a barbaric punishment. However, in countries like Ireland, which does not use the death penalty as a sanction, Christa’s story is instructive for making us think about how criminal justice systems separate ‘offenders’ from ‘victims’ drawing a very clear distinction between them and downplaying the considerable overlap that exists between these two categories, for the purpose of administering a punishment to one of them.
Christa Pike
At this stage most of us have seen the photograph of Christa Pike, the teenage girl crying at court when she was sentenced in 1996. We have also become more familiar with her story due to media coverage of the botched execution. She was reportedly the baby with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, the child who was physically and sexually abused and raped several times; the child who tried to kill herself at the age of 12 years, the girlfriend of the boy, who hit and abused her. Christa Pike also reportedly suffers from bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders.
She was one of three teenagers, who participated in the brutal killing of another young teenage girl, Colleen Slemmer. At 18 years of age, she was the youngest female in recent times in the US to be given a death sentence and the only woman to be put to death by the state of Tennessee in more than 200 years. Through her attorney, she asked the state to kill her by other means, fearful that her execution by lethal injection would be done badly. Christa will now be known as the 50-year-old woman who experienced and survived the botched execution that she so feared.
The offender/victim dichotomy
Before Christa participated in the killing of the young woman Colleen, she would have been seen as a victim/survivor of adverse childhood experiences, who was being failed by family members, other adults and state services. Evidently, her disclosures of sexual abuse in school did not prompt the required action. Before 1996, Christa could have been seen as a child who could really benefit from trauma-informed care, counselling and other therapies. She would have been seen as someone who deserved care, happiness and a chance to have a good life, given all that she went through.
Unfortunately, for Christa and for others, as soon as they become perpetrators of crime, they lose their right to the status of being seen and treated as victims/survivors. In Christa’s case, the long history of victimisation in her short life did not serve as a mitigating factor in her sentencing. The cumulative harm she experienced, which was immense, was to be eclipsed by the harm she inflicted.
In society we typically see victims and offenders as occupying entirely separate categories as our adversarial criminal justice systems rely on such distinctive categories; one cannot be a victim and an offender at the same time; one must be one or the other. It explains why perfect victim and offender stereotypes come to be constructed and to become so problematic for people who rarely fit either of the categories neatly. Victims, who become perpetrators of violence come to be seen very quickly as either, decontextualised rational people who make bad choices or out-of- control; or dangerous people, who deserve a punishment to match the crime committed. In this way, punishment in general and more cruel and inhuman punishments come to be legitimised and naturalised. Punishment permits a strong response in the form of a long sentence in Ireland, or in the US, the death penalty. The individual found guilty must be punished for the harm they have caused.
Yet, the existence of a very significant correlation between victimisation and offending, both violent and non-violent, is a recurring finding in research studies. Many perpetrators of crime, including sexual crime, are themselves victims / survivors of crime, just like Christa. Exposure to abuse, neglect, or violence increases the likelihood of later offending. Violence endured is associated with violence later perpetrated, and in some research, the violence perpetrated is at times less serious than that which was experienced. However, once someone’s guilt is established in the criminal justice system, their victimhood must be hidden from view.
The morality of prosecuting and punishing a person, whose life is known to have been blighted by considerable harm has to be put beyond question. Christa had little or no choice about her life circumstances as a child and neither did she experience proper recognition and protection by law for the many incidences of victimisation she experienced. It is also not evident that her prior victimisation was given credence in the context of her offence or her sentencing, given that she received a death sentence at the age of 18 years.
Blurred boundaries
Christa’s case makes us question how justice is served, when persons’ prior victimisation as children (Christa was 18 years old when she committed her offence) and the circumstances of their lives get disappeared in their interactions with the criminal justice system. Criminal justice systems aim to recognize or to create ideal victims, some of whom do call for a form of justice that sees individual (sometimes victimised) offenders receive the ultimate punishment but others who do not.
Criminal justice systems are best equipped to sanction punishment rather than to put in place non-penal interventions for the people who have offended but have ongoing unaddressed needs due to their own histories of victimisation. Such unaddressed needs subsequently manifest in prison suicides, parasuicides, self-harm, addictions, carceral churn and prison recidivism, phenomena which we know to be part and parcel of our criminal justice systems.
As we see, maintaining neat and distinct categories between victims and offenders and strict boundaries between these categories are central to the criminal justice system’s functioning. Yet it is probably in the criminal justice system’s offender category that we can expect to find the most neglected crime victims/survivors, those who lose the right to ever again be recognised and treated as such.
Transformative justice
The transformative justice philosophy recognises all victims/survivors, including those who cause harm. It recognises that harm and violence happen in societal contexts, and that rather than expending so much of our energy on the punishment of incidences of violence after they have occurred, we need to focus much more on creating the social conditions that make possible their prevention in the first instance. Transformative justice takes note that enactment of forms of violence and harm in punitive sanctions in our criminal justice system have not provided us with an adequate route out of societal violence and harm to safety.
In Ireland we have one of the highest proportions of people serving life sentences in Europe and such sentences are now much longer than they were in previous decades. Our prisons are also known to be unsafe places where significant violence is perpetrated and suffered and where access to different kinds of mental health treatment and provision is limited. At a cost of €103,334 on average for one prison space in Ireland, imprisonment is an expensive way of achieving less public safety, given the evidence of the lack of a deterrent effect of imprisonment itself and of lengthening prison sentences, on crime. Beyond its purpose in incapacitation, prison is probably the place least equipped to meet the needs of those like Christa Pike, who were best known as victims of crime and social harms in their communities before they ever became known to us as offenders.
*Elizabeth Kiely is an
IPAN member and a Professor of Social Policy in University College Cork. Her research in the field of penal policy is concerned with the criminalisation of social policy including poverty, welfare dystopia, the pervasiveness of punitive logics in justice and prisons as necropolitical spaces.
