AFF REHABILITATION VS RETRIBUTION

I affirm. Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal justice system.

The value is morality. Morality is immediately defined through the wording of the resolution, specifically ought, which implies an obligation or duty. The point of this debate isn't about solvency, or disadvantages, or economic reasons. I won't block you off from these arguments but it should at least be part of your framework in proving how there is intrinsically no moral good in voting affirmative.

Thus the criterion and framework is Human Worth. Those incarcerated or found guilty within the criminal justice system are victims of the system stripped of their human worth. 2 ways. 1) When confined behind bars the subject will find his autonomy stripped away from him, one of the key features in a human that represents the ideas of humanity. When stripped of autonomy one is incapable of any practices regarding personal autonomy. 2) Retribution which can often times culminate in the death of the subject destroys all human worth in the subject. I don't offer a bright line for human worth but when one is dead, one is clearly incapable of taking advantage of their autonomy, this destroys all human worth and leaves them as simply bodies within in the system.

Contention 1 is Victimage

First, the Negative's affirmation of retribution relies upon the victimage of people. This is a fetish with necropolitics and dehumanizes the enemy. This is the root cause of American interventionism and violence. Engels 10
(2010, Jeremy, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University, The Politics of Resentment a nd the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times, Rh etoric Society Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 303 325, ebsco DH)

In his seminal 1980 Communication Monographs article Images of Savagery in

Americans have been perpetually at war since their founding even as they praise peace as the highest of American idealsby applying Kenneth Burkes theory of the victimage
American Justifications for War, Robert L. Ivie tackles perhaps the foremost paradox of American foreign policy the fact that

ritual to war rhetoric people strongly committed to the ideal of peace, but simultaneously faced with the reality of war, must believe that the fault for any such disruption of their ideal lies with others, thus [v]ictimage rhetoric resolves this potential difficulty by offering redemption through the identification of a suitable and plausible scapegoat The scapegoat, framed through the topoi of force=freedom, irreason=reason, and aggression=defense, serves a cathartic function, squaring the love of peace with the necessity of battle, establishing American innocence, and transforming imperialism into just war President Johnson used the victimage ritual to justify American intervention in Vietnam, an unpopular war that ultimately undermined the aims of his Great Society. For Burke, the victimage ritual is a primary logological reality of human symbolic expression If Order, then guilt; if guilt, then the need for redemption; but any such payment is victimage humans are goaded by a spirit of hierarchy: they crave order. Yet humans are also the inventors of the negative, which entails choice:
. Ivie notes that a and (280). love of war palatable. Thus, Ivie tracks how . He argues in Permanence and Change, leads to Guilt (for who can keep commandments!) Guilt needs Redemption (for who would not be cleansed!) Redemption needs Redeemer (which is to say, a Victim!). Order Through Guilt To Vi ctimage (hence: Cult of the Kill) . . . . (45) For Burke,

. The scapegoat makes Americas terrible

(2845). Or, as he explains in The Rhetoric of Religion: Here are the steps In the Iron Law of History That welds Order and Sacrifice: Order

Action involves character, which involves choice; and the form of choice attains its perfection in the distinction between Yes and No (between thou shalt and thou shalt not) (41). One of the most basic symbolic expressions, associated with order and hierarchy, is the hortatory negative:

thou shalt not. This is the rhetorical form of nine of the Ten Commandments. But order by its very symbolicity involves its negative. Just as hierarchy impli es the possibility of reversal, order begets the possibility of disorder. Order implies choice: and thus the most basic of attitudes are Yes, No, and the intermediate realm of Maybe ( Attitudes Introduction). Humans can say Yes to order; they can say No to order; and they can say Maybe, which for Burke is a delayed yes or no before the moment of conversion. He therefore c ontends that the primary logological fact is that the perfection of choice comes to a head in the formal distinction between Yes and No (Religion 193). In modern societies, authorities are constantly telling citizens thou shalt not for to do this or that is to compromise the structural integrity of order, right, and law. It is not simply the case that order calls and we answer, however. There is always the possibility of disobeying, of not heeding authoritys call. As such, [t]emptation is but a tautological aspect of the idea of Order. It is grounded in the idea of a verbal command, which by its very nature contains possibilities of both obedience and disobedience (194). Because there is always already a temptation toward disorder within order, lawfulness and anarchy are but two sides of the same coin. Insofar as our words exercise a pull, structuring motives as Burke repeatedly insists then there is a structural ambivalence at the heart of The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority

Order entails temptation and then guilt, which must be redeemed. Hence to relieve the pressures of symbolic life, humans project their ills onto a scapegoat that they then sacrifice. The victim serves a curative function, providing purification by dissociation
language and human motives. This ambiguity is choice, for we can always choose to bite the apple. understanding of

, Burkes

victimage

. For Burke,

( Philosophy 202). Victimage arises out of the

ambiguities of order and disorder, yes and noout of the vagaries of symbolism itself. About victimage, Burke concludes, here is the very centre of mans soci al motivation. And any scheme that shifts the attention to other motivational areas is a costly error, except insofar as its insights can be brought back into the area of this central quandary ( Permanence 285). Far from being a primitive or isolated phenomenon,

victimage is central to the discursive practices of social life

in large part

because

it is often successful at easing guilt.

For Burke, victimage passes the pragmatic test of a difference that makes a difference. While he is more skeptical in his assessment of the curative function of Hitlers rhetoric in The Philosophy of Literary

Formputting medicine and curative in quotations and suggesting that Hitlers cure was really nothing more than snakeoil (191, 202, 192)he is less hesitant and more emphatic in works like Permanence and Change. While example of faulty means-selecting, in this work he nevertheless cautions that we must remember that the technique of purification magnificently met the pragmatic test of success. It

victimage was, for instance, quite effective in

may be an error in interpretation, an

unburdening a people of their sins

(15, 16). Thus, in his 19631964 essay Definition of Man, a summary statement of his p hilosophy, Burke concludes that (Language 18).

humans name the enemy in

order to achieve catharsis by scapegoat

****This culture of victimage and sacrifices in American politics dehumanizes both the self and the other resulting in an increase of violence. Denton-Borhaug 10
(2010, Kelly Denton-Borhaug, PhD, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Moravian College in Bethlehem, War -Culture and Sacrifice, Feminist Theology 2010 18: 175, sage DH)

The appearance of sacrificial rhetoric was far from an aberration. In fact, it goes with the territory. Sacrificial rhetoric in the purpose of war-culture has a way of inflating the measurement of real dangers and lifting the specter of peril to a transcendent level . The rhetoric of sacrifice is ritualized speech, and channels and legitimates violence by covering the activities of killing with a sacred canopy made up of values such a loyalty and freedom. It rationalizes war as in the service of the greater glory secular quest for security [is converted] into a prayer for redemption and a sacrament of atonement through the sacrifice of a scapegoat in whom we have invested all the evil of the world. Safety becomes the equivalent of salvation in the rhetorical universe that is US war-culture this rhetoric transforms the idea of safety into a feminized, risky and fragile undertaking, a reality that always is ...vulnerable to the rape of the demonic and demented barbarian if left unprotected. Sacrificial rhetoric in the purpose of war-culture enables dehumanization of those considered the enemy, and depersonalizes those other real flesh-and-blood, complicated and multifaceted human beings who all too often are conflated into a onedimensional portrait We in the US have become deeply acculturated to the rhetoric and logic of sacrifice within war-culture it has become all the more important to take on the pedagogical and political challenge by investigating the site of warcultures intertwined relationship with the rhetoric and cognitive framework of sacrifice . The same relationship electrifies, masks, and sacramentalizes war and war-culture and holds at bay pragmatic critique, ethical discernment and the potential to imagine a different reality . War-culture affects everyone and many, many more who live in countries outside our borders. there is no going back.
during Chinook -gate (as it came to be called by certain members of our campus community) Communication scholars have investigated why this is the case, and how such rhetoric operates. This same over inflation disables critical thinking and pragmatic political critique. of God. Robert Ivies writes, [The] . Moreover, as also is evident from the same economic professors emails, , the troops. Ivie remarks, In war culture, disembodied abstractions and stone monuments supplant living memories of love d ones sacrificed for country and cause...our own soldiers are dehumanized by reducing them to depersonalized heroes. . The predisposition toward sacrificial constructs deeply shapes US citizens perceptions about reality and equally profoundly impacts our response to the realities of antagonism and conflict. If the military-industrial-academic (and on and on) complex is a huge systemic behemoth that must be engaged by numerous groups from multiple sites of intervention, who lives in the United States, Once we become conscious of the deadly links between sacrifice and war-culture,

Third, this war-culture and sacrifice can generate total war resulting in the mass death of civilians AND environmental destruction Denton-Borhaug 10
(2010, Kelly Denton-Borhaug, PhD, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Moravian College in Bethlehem, War -Culture and Sacrifice, Feminist Theology 2010 18: 175, sage DH)

The intensity of this relationship between sacrifice and the nation state reaches its apotheosis in the development of total war. The difference between this kind of war and earlier war largely has to do with the entry of new and more extensively deadly forms of technology, and mass participants and victims in war . Total wars targets expand far beyond the enemy soldier. Technological development widens the target focus to include centers of the
what scholars term s

production of weaponry and also civilian support; as a result, the dead include larger and larger ratios of civilians in this regard the increasing destruction of the natural world and resulting environmental degradation, accelerating
each soldier killed (one must also mention especially in twentieth century war).

to

Contention 2 is Forgiveness and Recognition

Rehabilitation allows forgiveness of the offender of the victims and a second shot into society. This is essential to destructing what at first seemed righteous in retribution. Rotman
, E. (19

86)

. Do Criminal Offenders Have a Constitutional Right to Rehabilitation? The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminality, 77 (4).

The humanistic model of rehabilitation affirms the concept of prison inmates as possessors of rights . This legal status generates feeling of self-worth and trust in the legal system The conception ultimately leads rehabilitative efforts toward the paradigm of the inmate as a full-fledged citizen. The prisoners legal status reinforces the their eventual participation in the shaping and governing of society.
and favors the possibility of self-command and responsible action within society. Thus prisoners rights can be qualified, using Elys terminology, as representation reinforcing. This continuum of rights culminates in the right to rehabilitation, which can be formulated as the right to an opportunity to return to society with an improved change of being a useful citizen and staying out of prison. This right requires not only education and therapy, but also a non-destructive

The right to rehabilitation is consistent with the drive towards the full restoration of the civil and political rights of citizenship after release.
prison environment and, when possible, less-restrictive alternatives to incarceration.

This culture can be drawn across all of America. Take the metaphor of the crashed Challenger launch. Our confrontation with these dead astronauts, victims to our sacrificial cult deconstructs these optimistic and heroic expectations of space and allows us to expose the extreme violence today and its drive to nuclear war. Revealing this cross-policy cult.

the space program is already finished, dead like its inhuman heroes, the astronauts, whose corpses keep orbiting the planet. The future promised and prefigured by the space program -- i.e., the exploration and subsequent colonization of outer space -- is presented as something deceased, irredeemably past. Dead astronauts in a decaying landscape, symbolizing the death and destruction inscribed in the rocket, born as a deadly weapon, bound to be the carrier of the nuclear apocalypse , insistence on the lugubrious figure of the dead astronaut is not only a way to warn his readers of the sinister implications of the space program; it is also a way to highlight those destructive drives that underlie the program the thanatoid will to power embodied in the Saturn and Titan rockets . The latter, used to launch not only the Gemini capsules, but also ICBM missiles with nuclear warheads.
Ballard takes a different approach, placing readers in a typical sf future where in the words of Paolo Prezzavento, "With a colossal operation of metaphorical reversal, the English writer in fact manages to reverse the relationship between the future and the present. The glorious future of space conquest has become our past" (33; translation mine). notwithstanding NASA propaganda -- probably this is what the bomb carried by astronaut Hamilton in "The Dead Astronaut" hints at. But Ballard's powerful phallic vehicle, as Ballard knew quite well, was Ballard's ironic take on the optimistic, expansionist dreams of classical sf is also

To put it

and its

detectable in his specific citation, in "The Cage of Sand," of Theodore Sturgeon's 1959 short story "The Man Who Lost the Sea," which narrates a failed mission to Mars. This sophisticated story, told in a complex, second-person stream of consciousness, culminates in the moment when the dying protagonist realizes that "the satellite fading here is Phobos, that those footprints are your own, that there is no sea here, that you have crashed and are killed and will in a moment be dead" (166). This gloomy ending is, however, r edeemed by the feelings of joy that overwhelm the fading consciousness of the dying astronaut when "he takes his triumph at the other side of death" (166), because after all the enterprise managed to carry humankind to another planet; it was a success from a scientific and technological point of view. Hence the final cry of the protagonist, "God, we made it!" -- which we may compare to the ending of Ballard's story, where Bridgman cries "'Damn it!... We made it!'" (372). The invocation of God is replaced by an oath, though the cry of triumph is the same -- only it is uttered by an insane failed astronaut on Earth, who is being carried away to be locked up in an asylum. Outer space has been replaced by inner space, there is no doubt about that; but this textual move amounts to a fierce satire and demolition of the myths of classical, space-bound sf. As we can see,

Ballard's dead astronaut stories have been since the

beginning a corrosive critique of the "final frontier.

" Hallowed Grounds. I will conclude by pointing out that the celestial tombs of the dead astronauts are "astrologically" connected to a specific place -- the setting of "The

Cage of Sand," "The Dead Astronaut," and "Memories of the Space Age," Cape Kennedy/Canaveral. In the third-named story, we find this telling description of the abandoned space center, a remarkable example of Ballard's postmodern sublime: A threatening aura emanated from these ancient towers, as old in their way as the great temple columns of Karnak, bearers of a different cosmic order, symbols of a view of the universe that had been abandoned along with the state of Florida that had given them birth.... Time was different here, as it had been at Alamogordo and Eniwetok; a psychic fissure had riven both time and space, then run deep into the minds of the people who worked here. (1042) The comparisons here outline a meaningful cultural geography. Cape Canaveral is connected with a sanctuary of ancient Egypt, Karnak, the product of a civilization that was deeply interested in astronomy, also for purely practical

the space center is also connected with more disquieting places -- Alamogordo, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and Eniwetok, the testing ground of the hydrogen bomb looking at the stars we can understand what is happening or is going to happen on Earth . But the stars we have been looking at are artificial comets comets are, it should be remembered, stars of ill omen. The celestial bodies over our heads are actually corpses, the remains of death, the result of an act of hubris: Moreover, violating the heavens with a technology inseparably entwined with violence and death, with our deepest destructive drives, makes the space program a multi-layered, contradictory, and ultimately dangerous assemblage whose overall emblem is the dead astronaut
reasons, and that connected religion and celestial bodies. We might mention as an example Sirius, the Dog Star, which was linked to the myth of the death, dismemberment, and rebirth of Osiris. But Brahe's motto, by , like Merril's "burning catafalque" with its "cascade of vaporising metal... filling the sky with incandescent light" in "The Cage of Sand" (370); they violate the heavens that still are a place of powerful sacred meaning for our not yet fully evolved unconscious. (and the mass-media cargo cult attached to him/her).

. The dead past of Karnak links up with the new scientifically planned and technologically-produced mass death of the nuclear Armageddon via thegantries of Cape Kennedy/Canaveral. Here, I think, is the core of all the dead astronaut stories: paraphrasing once again