The Old, Bad Ebenezer Scrooge Would Oppose Sentencing Reform Retroactivity, but the New, Good Ebenezer Scrooge Would Support it.

Along with Die Hard, I make a point each Christmas season to watch the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol, starring George C. Scott. The film is one of dozens of adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novella by the same name, which was originally published in 1843. The Carol tells the story of the transformation of the book’s central character, Ebenezer Scrooge, from “mean-spirited solitude” to “openhearted sociability.”

And mean-spirited he was! Dickens describes Scrooge as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster . . .” And if that weren’t enough, Scrooge threatens a young boy singing a Christmas carol, compares employees taking a paid day off to “picking a man’s pocket,” and suggests that the poor should die to “decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge views the world through exactly one lens — what furthers Scrooge’s interests is good; what doesn’t is either bad or irrelevant. Scrooge dismisses Christmas as a holiday for “fools” and “idiots” who can’t see that celebrating the holiday does them no financial good.

But we all know what happens next. On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts — the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. These spirits show him how he contributes to unnecessary suffering — his own, his family’s, his colleague’s family’s, and society’s — and how his hostility and isolation will lead to his demise (“lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself,” as described by one of the thieves who insult his memory as they pick through the possessions that had been his only concern in life). This experience leads to a transformation in Scrooge’s character, and by the end of the story he has become a sincerely happy, joyous, and generous person.

While reading a piece in the Tampa Bay Times the other day, it occurred to me: the old, bad Scrooge would oppose sentencing reform retroactivity, but the new, good Scrooge would support it. Here’s why:

Part 1 — The Lesson of A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is superficially about exposing the problem of poverty. But I think the story is actually about how, upon being forced to confront the exigent suffering of his fellow human beings, Scrooge sheds the emotional and intellectual barriers that had allowed him to live his life in deliberate ignorance of this suffering. It’s about the bad faith strategies we erect as defense mechanisms to absolve ourselves of any obligation to care about other people, and the wonderful things that happen when we tear them down.

Scrooge’s key weapons in protecting himself from exposure to others’ suffering are his intelligence and wit. He is clearly bright, and he’s funny, too. He’s quick on his feet, and clever with rhetoric. But instead of using these gifts in a way that lifts up others around him, he uses them as a defense mechanism.

For example, when two gentlemen ask Scrooge to contribute to a fund for the poor, Scrooge does not pause to reflect on his relative privilege, or on the absolute misery of those for whom the fund is being raised. Instead, he uses the opportunity to debate them:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

The men realize they’re wasting their time, and leave. Scrooge “resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.”

Scrooge was given an opportunity for earnest contemplation. He could have reflected upon the reality of others’ suffering, and how he might help relieve it. He chose shallow rebuttals instead, turning the discussion into a contest which Scrooge “won” simply by outlasting his opponents’ patience. Then he leaves the exchange feeling better about himself! Scrooge (subconsciously?) employed his defense mechanism to prevent being exposed to others’ suffering, then deludes himself into pretending his indifference was not only not grossly immoral, but actually praiseworthy.

This kind of indifference to suffering, and the consequences that follow from it, is the overarching theme of the Carol. Consider my favorite character, Jacob Marley.

Marley is Scrooge’s old business partner, who has been dead as a door-nail seven years when the story begins. He’s also the first ghost to visit Scrooge. After trying to dismiss the ghostly Marley as a trick of his senses, Scrooge finally admits Marley’s reality, and asks why he’s there:

“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world — oh, woe is me! — and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

Marley explains that his experience in death is nothing more than constant regret about how he spent his life, and frustration that he cannot now “make amends for [his] life’s opportunity misused.” Death is “No rest, no peace. The incessant torture of remorse.” Remorse for what, Scrooge asks. After all, Marley was always a good man of business.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

When Marley appears, Dickens describes him as having a chain “clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” Marley explains that this is the chain he “forged in life” through his indifference to others, and notes that Scrooge’s chain was as long as Marley’s seven years ago, and is even longer today.

Marley tells Scrooge he doesn’t know why Scrooge can see him now, as he has “sat invisible next to [him] many a day.” He tells Scrooge to expect his coming haunts, and warns him that these ghosts represent the only “hope and chance” Scrooge has of escaping Marley’s fate.

After Marley leaves, Scrooge looks out of his window and sees the air “filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.” They all wore chains like Marley’s; “none were free.” One “cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step.” And here’s the critical point:

“The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.”

Marley’s lesson is that we all have limited opportunity to do good. Some have more opportunity — or power — than others, and the degree to which one has such opportunity or power is the degree to which one has the obligation to use it. And if one is deliberately indifferent to others’ suffering, or refuses to use one’s power and privilege to relieve it, one is condemned to spend eternity in regret, fettered by chains and heavy steel.

Again, the issue in the Carol is deliberate indifference to others’ suffering. Near the end of their time together, the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals two children, a boy and a girl, hidden beneath his robe.

Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge asks the Ghost if the children are his, and the Ghost replied that they are Man’s. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want,” the Spirit says.

Dickens chose “ignorance,” but I think “neglect” would have been better. Scrooge is not a good faith actor who just hasn’t been sufficiently exposed to the reality of others’ “want.” His ignorance is more like yours toward the prisoner class; it is willful. It isn’t that he doesn’t know; he doesn’t want to know.

In any case, it’s clear Dickens thinks this “ignorance” is the fundamental problem:

Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

Scrooge asks: “Have they no refuge or resource?”

By bringing Ignorance and Want face to face with Scrooge, and turning his own rhetoric against him, the Ghost of Christmas Present makes it very clear: your clever turns of phrase will not absolve you, and now you have no excuse.

Part 2 — The Lessons of A Christmas Carol for Florida Sentencing Policy

Imagine that, instead of a businessman, Scrooge were a politician by trade. And imagine that you explained to Scrooge the reality that, right now, hundreds of people were serving disproportionate (and therefore unjust) criminal sentences, unnecessarily deprived of their liberty, separated from their families, and living in conditions that shock the conscience, and then asked for his support for legislation that would allow these people to be resentenced to appropriate sanctions.

The old, bad Scrooge would have shown no empathy. You can almost hear his smirking, glib dismissals:

“If you do the crime, you must do the time.”

“Perhaps she should have been smarter, and taken the plea deal.”

“Surely you’d agree that at some point there must be punishment, and consequences.”

“Should prisons be 5-star resorts?”

And, finally, the most egregiously misleading claptrap of all: “Is there not clemency?”

The old, bad Scrooge would have dismissed sentencing retroactivity because he saw no profit in it. (“What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?”) He would have asked whether retroactivity would yield electoral dividends. If he determined it wouldn’t — perhaps because it would “offend” a powerful law enforcement special interest group — he’d oppose it, and then invent some post hoc justification for his immorality and cowardice.

Scrooge’s transformation was not ultimately about the way he treated people. It was about his finally coming to recognize that other people mattered at all. It was about recognizing that the suffering of others is not an opportunity for debate, or to show off one’s wit, intelligence, or rhetorical skills.

Similarly, the recognition that hundreds of people are right now serving unjust sentences is not about how that information affects one’s political prospects. It is not an opportunity to place an op-ed in a Sunday newspaper, or deliver a speech in a committee room. It is simply the reality of suffering put plainly in front of us.

To be confronted with the reality that hundreds of your fellow human beings are at this moment locked in cages for no good reason, and to be further confronted with the fact that you have the power to free them — to restore their liberty, to reunite them with their families, to give them a second chance to live their lives as free and productive citizens — is to be confronted with a decision. You can act on those truths, and do whatever is within your power to help these people. Or, you can ignore them. To help them is unambiguously the right thing to do. To ignore them because helping would be inconvenient, or politically inexpedient, etc. is exactly the sort of craven, profane indifference from which Ebenezer Scrooge was delivered on Christmas Eve.

Early on in the Carol, a young boy sings a song to Scrooge. The boy was looking to earn some spare change; instead, Scrooge threatens to beat him with a stick. Later, during his visit with the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge begins to regret his choice.

“I wish,” Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: “but it’s too late now.”

“What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.

“Nothing,” said Scrooge. “Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.”

Every single person today who has the power to “interfere, for good” and relieve the unnecessary suffering of hundreds of their fellow human beings will, one day, lose that power forever. Act now, or regret your indifference forever, long after it’s too late to fix it. (Marley’s chains were made of cash boxes; perhaps yours will be made of ballot boxes.)

Christmas is next week, and I pray that between now and then you are haunted by your conscience. I hope the ghosts who sit invisibly beside you — perhaps they are standing near your framed degrees, or your many impressive civic awards — rattle their chains until you are forced to face what you’ve thus far refused to see: a vacant seat at hundreds of dinner tables, broken families, parents who miss their children so much it makes them physically sick, and children forbidden from seeing their parents. I hope you are shown the generations-long cycles of pain, violence, and imprisonment that will undoubtedly occur if those “shadows remain unaltered” by your intervention.

Prisoners and their families are, to use Scrooge’s nephew Fred’s wonderful phrase, “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” The Old, Bad Ebenezer Scrooge would do nothing for them. If you follow his example, you will regret your sinful indifference forever.

I pray you find the courage to do the right thing. When you do, I’m confident you’ll be rewarded, as the new, good Ebenezer Scrooge was:

He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world . . . His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

Merry Christmas, friends, and God bless Us, Every One!