ABSTRACT: Henri Laborit of France is one of the world's greatest living biologists. Having joined the Radical Party appeal for the abolition of the death penalty, he asked to write an article for this newspaper, which we are happy to publish.

(THE PARTY new - n. 6 - march 1992)

Have you ever noticed that people who support the death penalty are often against abortion? "Let them live," they say. At the same time, across the globe, thousands of men, not "potential" men, but men fully grown, are killed, buried alive by bulldozers, while the death of a man condemned by the justice of men arouses no interest because he is only getting what he "deserves".

In effect, criminals and delinquents must by punished. I personally believe that when it comes to deciding whether a man should be punished or not we can never be sufficiently certain of what constitutes a "civilized" justice or responsibility. I do know that the very notion of "prisoner" is bound up with the concept of punishment, and that behavioural biology can explain the mechanisms of both the prison warder and the prisoner. After all, "justice" is a mechanism established by men in reference to a geo-climatic area and a precise historical moment, and the concept changes as the variables change. This means that imprisonment cannot be considered as punishment. A society has the "right" to protect itself from individuals who do not wish to abide by its prohibitions and its laws.

This right is the right of the majority and the strongest. More people abide by the social rules than flout them. The majority, having decided what is to be the basis of conformism, can decide to remove from their group those who do not want to conform. This is no longer punishment; it is alienation.

Nothing stops us from imagining that a given society, in a given place at a given time, decides to coup up unwanted citizens on a desert island and leave them there to make their own society. This would not be a matter of punishing them: one would have to be either irresponsible or coarse to believe that one knows the truth about the mechanisms of human behaviour.

Not so long ago prisons were indistinct from psychiatric hospitals, leper colonies and vagrant hostels. Until recently, the same sites gathered up the poor, lepers, "lunatics" and murderers, because society could not tolerate them. Prisons are the exclusive preserve of delinquents and criminals, segregated for the purpose of protecting the society that has dubbed them non-conformist.

Rather than discuss the pros and cons of the death penalty, it would perhaps be better to explain the mechanisms that cause a human mind to have a positive or negative view on this measure. One would see that reasoning is never dictated by the logic of cerebral biochemistry, neurophysiology, memory or learning, bur rather by behaviour and judgements, often presumptuous, always biased, and without any value apart from that which our own personal experience, unconsciously, has written into our nervous system. The Bible gave us some wise counsel: "Do not kill". But Christ was sentenced to death, and his execution has made ripples through history. You may tell me that criminals are not all saints. But what would you know? If statistics everywhere show that the death penalty has never reduced violent crime, then beyond statistics and words, the why of it must still be explained.

Criminals are not always what we think they are: "And Semblançay was such a noble old man that people believed his threat to hang Lieutenant Maillard at Montfaucon" (François Villon).

Henri Laborit