The schedule for Heroes & Icons shows a rerun of the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Canamar” for tonight. I’ve seen the beginning of that episode and the end, but tonight I plan to watch the whole thing, beginning to end.
The main plot concerns Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) and Commander Tucker (Connor Trineer) winding up on a prison ship by mistake after being confused for pirates.
I’m not going to say much about this episode, but one spoiler is unavoidable because Archer and Tucker are main characters. The misunderstanding will be straightened out. But along the way to that resolution, will there be any criticism of for-profit prisons?
In general TV writers seem to be unaware of the issue of for-profit prisons, or they are unwilling to engage it. I vaguely remember episodes of 21 Jump Street and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but in all of Star Trek there might not be anything on this topic.
Still, Star Trek has a lot to say about incarceration specifically and justice in general. Original series and Next Generation creator Gene Roddenberry understood that there will always be crime.
But the framework of the utopian United Federation of Planets reflected his hope that humans would develop a more enlightened way to deal with crime and punishment.
I would go so far as to speculate that this is something Roddenberry decided well before deciding that most humans would have outgrown the need to accumulate material possessions.
Take for instance the incorrigible Harcourt Fenton Mudd (Roger C. Carmel). At least twice, thrice if you count The Animated Series, the con man runs afoul of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) of the Enterprise.
The references to money in all three Harry Mudd episodes can all be explained away in ways that maintain overall franchise continuity, such as saying that maybe Mudd is not so much interested in money as he is in the thrill of lying and stealing.
In The Animated Series episode “Mudd’s Passion,” when Mudd is apprehended after a narrow escape from some dinosaur-like rock creatures, Spock is very certain that Mudd will get “rehabilitation therapy" again.
Though it doesn’t seem to be all that effective for Mudd, it is to be hoped that it is more effective for other criminals.
There isn’t much detail in the original series nor Star Trek: The Next Generation about long-term incarceration. The brig of the Enterprise is strictly a short-term thing.
Surprisingly it is Star Trek: Voyager, sometimes derided as Star Trek Lite, which most often tackled the topic of incarceration, often with the exotic prisons of the Delta Quadrant being clear allegories for prisons on Earth today.
Quite relevant to this topic is “Repentance,” a Voyager episode Heroes & Icons reran last Sunday. Though not as memorable as early Season 7 episodes like “Critical Care” and “Lineage,” “Repentance” stands out as perhaps the only examination of the death penalty in all Star Trek.
On her way home to the Alpha Quadrant, Voyager runs into a Nygean prisoner transport ship on the verge of destruction due to a plasma radiation leak from a ruptured conduit.
Just before the Nygean ship explodes, the prisoners and corrections officers are beamed aboard Voyager, with two persons beamed directly to sickbay. The Voyager crew learn that the prisoners are on their way to be executed.
I was a little skeptical of the story idea of transporting death row inmates to another planet rather than executing them in whatever planet they were sentenced to death. But in real life, death row inmates do sometimes get transported around, sometimes by air.
A page on the U.S. Prisoner Transport Services website, for example, says the company will transport any inmate, including, first of all, death row inmates, followed by violent or high-risk inmates.
Although given that this is followed by “men” and “women,” that mentally ill inmates are listed last is perhaps not an indication of priority, preference or percentage. Regardless of category, the prisoners will be transported.
If it’s more efficient and cost-effective to transport a prisoner by air, U.S. Prisoner Transport partners with commercial airlines to safely and securely move a prisoner from one location to the next.
So yeah, I should not get hung up on the realism of the premise for an episode that later shows the literal birth of a guilty conscience. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
The Voyager brig being too small for the purpose, temporary prison cells are set up in one of Voyager's cargo bays, with Voyager security officers supplementing the Nygean corrections officers.
“Some of the crew may not be comfortable helping to deliver eight men to their deaths,” Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) says after learning the fate that awaits the prisoners.
Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) is troubled but decides that the Federation principle of non-interference in this case is of higher priority than Federation values regarding the treatment of prisoners.
Even the Talaxian Neelix (Ethan Phillips), whose only contact with the Federation up to that point had been with the Voyager crew (and maybe also Lt. Barclay), finds the concept of the death sentence appalling, and soon becomes an advocate for prisoners’ rights.
We could view some of Neelix’s actions in this episode as his using Federation laws to impose his views on the Nygeans. Apparently unprompted by either the Nygean warden or Janeway, Neelix shows up in the cargo bay to serve food to the prisoners.
Warden Yediq (Tim de Zarn) finds the meal Neelix has prepared to be more elaborate than the prisoners deserve, but Neelix invokes Federation law. Feeding the prisoners, Neelix gets an opportunity to talk and listen to them.
Talking to Joleg (F. J. Rio, who played a token Puerto Rican in a Deep Space Nine episode), Neelix learns that Benkarans are over-represented in the Nygean prison population.
Indeed Neelix can see that five of the eight prisoners Voyager is transporting are Benkarans and three are Nygeans. That proportion is not too far off from the statistic Neelix quotes later on, if I recall correctly.
Neelix also learns that in Nygean jurisprudence, the victim determines the punishment (or the family of the victim, in the case of murder). The wealthier convicts can negotiate a financial settlement with the victims and perhaps not have to go to prison or be executed.
Just with Joleg, the episode addresses at least three different real life concerns about our criminal justice system: the disproportionately high percentage of blacks in prison, the ease with which the wealthy can escape harsher punishment (if not completely avoid any punishment at all), and the misguided complaint that our system does not care about victims.
“What about the victims?” is a sentiment that has been expressed on more than one occasion on Law & Order. The Nygean system of sentencing does not seem all that concerned with impartiality.
Hypothetically, under the Nygean system, someone could be executed for stealing a loaf of bread. On one level, executing murderers seems fair. But given all the stories about posthumous exoneration, taking cues from the family of murder victim might be a terrible idea.
And some crimes are so “especially heinous” that a false accusation can be deadlier than an honest conviction. Execution by the state can too easily be a tool for getting rid of inconvenient people.
Lt. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) spent some time in a Federation prison prior to his first coming aboard Voyager. Trying to get Neelix to view the death row inmates’ sob stories with just a little bit of skepticism, Paris tells Neelix that everyone in the slammer has a story.
Neelix asks Paris how many of those people with stories were scheduled to be executed. We are to understand that the answer to Neelix’s rhetorical question is none.
I’m not sure if Starfleet General Orders 4 and/or 7 still stand by the time of Voyager. Far more interesting here, however, is the suggestion in the original series that murder is a crime that merits the death penalty even in the enlightened Federation.
Perhaps it wasn't until after Kirk’s time that the Federation fully eliminated the death penalty. Any death penalty on the books would certainly have helped the Talosians to view humans of the 23rd Century as still quite barbaric.
The story of Joleg in “Repentance” is secondary to the story of Iko (Jeff Kober). At first, Iko is beamed to sickbay, where he takes Seven hostage. The situation is quickly defused, but it underscores Yediq’s assertion that the prisoners are very dangerous men.
Once treated and put back in a cell, Iko threatens Yediq’s family, getting another beating, and getting sent back to sickbay. Janeway is upset by this occurrence. She will still transport the prisoners toward their execution, but while aboard Voyager, the prisoners will be treated according to Starfleet protocols.
The Doctor (Robert Picardo) is also aghast by the whole situation. Iko was almost beaten to death. The Doctor uses microscopic cybernetic components extracted from Seven to save Iko’s life, and inadvertently causes Iko to develop a conscience.
As some Benkarans try to break Joleg out, Iko refuses to participating in the prison riot. The Benkaran ship is chased away and Yediq regains control of the prisoners. In parallel to Neelix being disappointed in Joleg, Yediq is now convinced that Iko deserves the opportunity to plead with his victim’s family for leniency.
It is entirely realistic that the family declines Iko’s request. Having lost a loved one, they would probably not be capable of considering the killer’s plea impartially, and jump to the conclusion that the killer is just saying whatever he can think of to avoid his punishment.
An earlier Voyager episode, “The Chute,” showed a prison that seemed not to have a warden nor any sort of correctional officer. It can be just as hellish as a prison with indifferent guards. Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) and Paris wind up in there, falsely accused of terrorism.
There is an interesting paradox to Paris: in freeing Paris out of the Federation prison and out into the expanse of the Delta Quadrant, Janeway in a sense imprisoned Paris on Voyager.
Paris took every opportunity he could to go on away missions. Aboard Voyager, he spent a lot of time in the holodeck, inventing a quaint Irish village, as if to avoid cabin fever at all costs.
Maybe “prison” is the wrong term for where Paris was when Janeway got him released. If I recall correctly, “penal colony” is the term used in the show. From the glimpse we got of it in the Voyager pilot episode, it looked more like a park than a prison.
How do we get society to have those enlightened penal colonies of Star Trek? Eliminating crimes of need is one important part of it. If everyone's basic needs of survival are met, and someone steals a proverbial loaf of bread, it's for the thrill of the exploit, not hunger.
It’s also important to eliminate the crimes of want, a kind of crime committed by many corporations. Private prison corporations want more profits, so consequently they want more prisoners, both for the dollars from the government contracts and the dollars to be made from the captives’ labor.
We may never get the ability to change the neurological wiring of sociopaths’ brains, but at least we need to progress beyond making hardened criminals out of people caught with trivial amounts of marijuana.
Monday, Aug 21, 2017 · 6:10:55 PM +00:00
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Alonso del Arte
The Deep Space Nine rerun last night was "Prodigal Daughter,” in which Ezri Dax’s brother Norvo Tigan gets 30 years for killing Monica Bilby. As I understand it, the crime happened on a non-Federation world, so the death penalty could have been an option, as well as life in prison.
A commenter rightly pointed out I didn’t really mention Deep Space Nine, which has several relevant episodes for this topic, especially in regards to Cardassian jurisprudence (verdicts are known beforehand, for one thing).
I’m not sure how exactly Garak (Andrew J. Robinson) came to be punished with exile, but whatever Garak has said on the matter is to be taken with a grain of salt.
The Jem’Hadar prisons don’t really count because what we see of them they are really POW camps.
Rura Penthe, seen on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and at least one Enterprise episode, was also in the back of my mind as I was writing yesterday.