Hold onto that. This is a facet of humanity I think we want to preserve. The future of civilization is one of empathy, even to those who have committed heinous wrongdoing, who hold dangerous positions or who harbor unthinkable desires.

How we treat the caged devil speaks more to who we are as a society, whether we disregard their humanity entirely and consider them valid targets of our own worst impulses or we commit to the notion that truly everyone should be guaranteed civil rights and dignity no matter who they are or what they did. Better, I think, to contain them with respect if we are unable to reform them, but ideally to seek to return them to participation in society.

(And yes, I did just describe the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or even Twelve Looks Just Like You. The science of psychology is unaligned and can be used an an instrument to promote awareness and well-being or ignorance and obedience. In fact, in our current society, psychology is more used to sell products and promote political campaigns than it is to steer individuals towards self-awareness and functionality.)

Despite our impulses to see the worst of us as deranged or degenerate and deserving of terrible reprisal, ultimately humans are the product of heredity and upbringing. We are not intrinsically parasitic like the One Ring. We’re broken like Narsil.

That said, injustice typically prevails in our legal systems. Those caught possessing drugs are treated worse than war criminals. Whistleblowers serve sentences worthy of first-degree murderers. False convictions serve police and legal careers as much as valid ones, and we don’t test for them despite Blackstone’s ratio, leaving an unknown but substantial number of innocents languishing in prisons lousy with vermin, disease, neglect and violence from its staff. And then elite deviants who cause more harm exponentially than petty crime are left free and above the law.

There’s also the matter of personal privacy and protections against unreasonable search and seizure: Every time a courtroom justifies crossing these lines for heinous crimes, that justification is then used for property crime, or contraband possession, or harassment of minorities, or anything that might offend the current administration. The countless carve-outs to privacy protections we have started to catch a killer or sexual predator, but then was ultimately turned on civil rights activists, religious congregations and marginalized social demographics.

So I can’t speak for today. We’re a long, long way from a society in which justice is fair, in which legal systems aren’t abused by the state. A system in which common speed junkie is treated with the same dignity as Heinz Gudarian, or as OJ Simpson might be centuries off. But I do hope a day will come in which the state recognizes that its purpose is not to mistreat criminals like degenerates, whether militants or fraudsters or self-abusers, but to protect and care for the people, including those in custody.