Trapped at Berkeley

A couple of weeks ago, someone vandalized the snack vending machine in my dorm’s recreational room. The perpetrator was not immediately caught, so a $250 reward was posted. There were no attempts to claim the reward.

In desperation, the director of my dorm resorted to threats: he declared that, so long as the perpetrator remained unidentified, the recreational room would be off limits to residents and that most of my dorm’s traditional activities would face cancellation.

I’ve never understood the purpose of communal punishment. In my opinion, it’s an act of resignation: let’s punish everyone and hope that the guilty one gets hurt too. It’s also a sign of an immature or misguided leader. Rather than working with my dorm’s community to determine an appropriate course of action, the director of my dorm acted single-handedly in choosing to indiscriminately punish the entire community.

Let’s analyze the problem. There are only two types of people who could have committed the crime:

Non-residents – If a non-resident did commit the crime, they would be unaffected by the punishment issued by my dorm’s director. Consequently, the perpetrators would go unpunished. In addition, the current punishment’s intended effect, to encourage witnesses to come forward, would also probably fail, since no one might know the perpetrator.

Residents – If a resident did commit the crime, they have already demonstrated their lack of respect for the community. Consequently, they would not care about the punishment affecting the community. Furthermore, whether they acted alone or as a group, it is unlikely that they will be caught because they realize that the consequences of their actions are great and would have already taken measures to insure their safety.

It’s obvious that a blanket punishment rarely succeeds in rooting out a guilty individual. On the other hand, it’s a good way to draw people’s ire. My dorm director’s decision to punish the entire community has given him a bad reputation. The next time a crime like this happens, nobody will be encouraged to cooperate.

Now, why do I care? No longer can I go to the recreational room and purchase a soda in the middle of the night.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2004 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Berkeley, Politics, Rants, Unsorted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.