A few days ago, I stumbled across an article by Insider Food showing the last meals of death row inmates.
As I scrolled through the images, I wasn’t sure how to describe what I felt. Their last meals consisted of comfort food – hearty buckets of fried shrimp, cherry Kool-Aid, mint chocolate chip ice cream. Some declined their last meal, perhaps as an act of defiance, a last snub towards the world they were leaving behind. Each picture was captioned with the name and age of each convict, the charges held against them, and how they chose to die. I felt disturbed by the wave of conflicting emotions that hit me. Is it wrong to cry over the death of someone who had 168 counts of murder? Should we have compassion for criminals?
I’ve been thinking about this nonstop. What I think was the source of my uneasiness was that this photography series humanized criminals. In some way, they intimidate us because we don’t see them as part of us. We isolate ourselves from them and treat them like a different species because of the actions they’ve committed. But seeing them have favorite foods that resemble our own favorite meals or wanting to watch their favorite movie while eating as a last wish connects them back to us, and that’s where it becomes scary. They’re no longer the distant convicts that we think are locked up in prison. They regain a bit of the humanizing quality the label of a criminal strips them of.
To try and answer my own question, I believe that perhaps there is a distinction between whether we should have compassion for criminals as a logical standard and as a human standard. Logically, to say that we should have compassion for people who hurt others is to say that we support them and what they do. However, to have compassion for them as a human standard is to extend sympathy and warmness to them for who they are as humans, not criminals, and this is what I believe we should be doing for not only criminals but to everyone.