Injustice in Vermont

Mark Hulett was convicted on Wednesday by a Vermont court of "repeatedly raping a little girl countless times starting when she was seven," according to Vermont's WCAX-TV Channel 3 News.

Hulett's prison sentence: two months.

Judge Edward Cashman, who delivered the sentence, explained that he does not believe punishment is a legitimate goal of the judicial system. He was more concerned with rehabilitating Hulett through sex offender treatment, which was unavailable in prison.

Cashman argued that long prison terms were expensive, and meting our punishment in anger "corrodes your soul."

Cashman's verdict has obvious problems We throw rapists in prison so they can't rape anybody anymore, issues of punishment and rehabilitation aside. Cashman is criminally negligent in letting a serial rapist loose so soon after his conviction.

But Cashman's verdict has a deeper problem. He assumes there is a fundamental tension between punishing the rapist and saving him. Gone, apparently, is the thought that one saves a criminal by punishing him, attempting to hammer moral sense into him through the last resort of physical force, let alone the thought that punishment may have an value in itself apart from any end towards which it is a means.

Cashman could have pointed out that our prison system is poorly designed to rehabilitate through punishment, but he didn't say that. He would also be right to say that vengeance is fundamentally at odds with rehabilitation, and it is our job to seek rehabilitation while "'Vengeance is mine; I will repay' saith the Lord." But he didn't say that either. He simply, merely, abdicated all responsibility to punish, and therefore to really rehabilitate, Mark Hulett.