Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962. Stanley Kubrick’s Hollywood version in 1971 kept to the novel’s theme: changing criminal minds through rehabilitation is the goal for prison.
However, an important question is raised in A Clockwork Orange: when rehabilitative tools cross ethical lines, what then?
A Clock Work Orange looks at a society where crime is running amok, and the penal system is out of date and ineffective.
Society becomes so desperate for modernization to its prison system that it is willing to do away with free will and experiment with a mind-altering drug that stops criminal thinking.
The subject of the experiment is such a vile character that it seems plausible to try the new tactic.
You can’t get any worse than Alex, whose reckless and scandalous escapades continue until someone is killed. Magnifying his deprecation of humanity, after he’s caught and imprisoned, his ethics, mentality and behavior do not improve; they deteriorate.
The government’s fix is Reclamation Treatment, a behavioral modification program that controls thoughts and behavior through a drug that causes severe unpleasant reactions when the person sees something “deemed” criminal or immoral.
Inmates who successfully complete Reclamation Treatment are released from prison.
Thinking he’s gotten a get-out-of-jail-free card, Alex volunteers.
The following passages by the prison warden, then its chaplain, are examples where Burgess suggests that tampering with free will has dire consequences.
Well, these new ridiculous ideas have come at last and orders are orders, though I may say to you in confidence that I do not approve. I most emphatically do not approve. An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you, you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is to say no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust.
You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace…It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good…Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness…in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good. So I shall like to think.
These passages illustrate that using a rehabilitative process that destroys free well is diametric to individualism in human nature, while at the same time, it asserts that vengeance that only punishes an individual forgets that someday the person has to return to the community.
Ultimately, the dilemma posed in A Clockwork Orange, as manifested through the novel’s characters, are that public officials who are charged with implementing reform, rehabilitation or punishment are facsimiles of the warden or chaplain. Wardens have their own ideas of justice—prodded along by the exploitive nature of victim-rights organizations, heavily focused on punishment. Chaplains, the moral compass of society, are made into alcoholics, which metaphorically says that these officials have a diminished capacity to think clearly about the individual nature of mankind.
A Clockwork Orange successfully depicts the negative and mechanical results of negating free will in human beings.
Juan’s Book Review
