E56. "Blackorwhite" - At what point are you old enough to be punished for life?

Named “Top 20 Philosophy Podcast” for 2021!

STORY SUMMARY: The prison medical doctor is called in the middle of the night to take care of Fuzzy, an uneducated, mostly toothless, prisoner who has spent the majority of his life behind bars. Fuzzy, it seems, has gotten into eating cheese, something that strongly disagrees with his stomach and causes severe diarrhea. While the doctor waits for Fuzzy on the toilet and treats him for dehydration he learns Fuzzy’s story. Fuzzy was a young child from a poor family when his brother got him into a small-time gang robbing homes. Fuzzy and his brother wanted to get out of their life and move to Houston to look for legitimate work, but need enough money from a big heist to cover their travel fees. Their final heist goes wrong and the police show up. Fuzzy watches his brother get wrongly gunned down and, in a panic, hops in the van to try to get away. In the process he hits and kills a police officer with the van. The remaining members of the gang are captured and found guilty. Fuzzy, it seems, was able to eat so much cheese as it was his “last meal” on death row and assumed he wouldn’t be around for the results. However, there was a last-minute error with the electric chair so he was forced to face the retribution of his culinary choices. Hearing Fuzzy’s story, the doctor feels greater sympathy for Fuzzy and his life.

DISCUSSION: Fuzzy is an interesting character. Clearly, he is meant to be a sympathetic character, and he is. However, he might be someone we feel empathy for, but don’t all actually like. And who’s story is this? Is it the doctor’s story? We think so. We think the story is the arc of the doctor that goes from seeing Fuzzy as a inmate who forced him out of bed in the middle of the night, to a human being who was wrongly put in jail for the rest of his life for a crime he committed when he was a child. This story, of course, begs the question, what is the purpose of putting Fuzzy in jail for his entire life? It’s clearly not to reform him. It must be simply to punish him as it seems unlikely any of this is a deterrent of any kind to others. We also don’t really know the truth. After 50 years of telling the same story over and over again, he will have crafted every word to be the perfect telling of his version of events. What we do know is the system failed in this case, and the author wants us to understand that that may often be the case for our judicial system.

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