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Oscar has turned us into awful people

The problem with high profile court trials is that they always seem to end with an anti-climax. Nobody is ever satisfied with the result (that is, if there actually IS a result), and people who follow the proceedings as if it were entertainment usually end up feeling like someone who just spent six hours of a working day playing Candy Crush Saga: groggy, guilty and mourning the loss of precious time they’ll never get back.

Same old, same old with the Oscar Pistorius trial, easily the biggest legal event since we became a democracy. And sadly, maybe even bigger than that. After all, our historic transition didn’t have its own TV channel.

The OP trial was a huge media event – annoyingly huge – because it was a huge people event. Before I knew it, almost everyone around me was emotionally invested in the case, ODing on OP and blabbing on endlessly about minutiae which, in a sane world, should have bored anyone into a coma.

I don’t know about you, but most people I spoke to were certain of his guilt – no question – and leaving the whole murder thing aside for a second, they also thought he was a bit of a dick.

Great, because a convincing villain is essential in any riveting story.

The sentencing was the biggest news story in the world, bigger than Isis, Ebola, the missing Nigerian girls and Renée Zellweger’s new face. We were on the edge of our seats watching nothing happen for DAYS… Then suddenly it was over. And people were pissed off.

Here are a few choice reader reactions to the sentencing from News24 stories (unedited, of course, for your reading pleasure): “Hang the busted!”; “Enjoy the big house, murderer Hope you have your KY......lol”; “ROT IN HELL”; “I wish i whas 1 of those nurses he would have be so so sorry! He ever met me”; “most of us will take bets on how long it will be before he is buggered”.

For people who consider themselves to be decent, law-abiding citizens, they can be quite rapey, don’t you think? And violent. And downright vengeful.

But here’s the thing: that’s not what prisons are supposed to be about. The prison system we have now was largely designed to do away with barbaric forms of punishment, like torture, various inventive and gruesome methods of killing someone slowly and painfully for stealing a chicken, and public humiliation, such as being pelted with slops while nailed to your doorpost.

Sure, it’s a form of punishment, but imprisonment is also about rehabilitation, and where that’s not possible, keeping crazy violent people away from the rest of us.

This is why national prison departments often have the word “correction” in them. Ours, for example, is the Department of Correctional Services and not, you will note, the Department of Suffer and Die Hope You Get Raped LOL.

The fact that the system is irredeemably flawed and prisons are horrible violent places where inmates can get gang raped should shock and disgust you – that is, if you’re a civilised human being who actually deserves to be living in the 21st century.

The “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” mentality brutalises everyone. Pistorius may have killed Reeva Steenkamp but to entertain revenge fantasies about his suffering or gloat over his punishment makes us less than human. It makes us like gods – and we all know how vicious and depraved those entities can be.

Follow Chris on Twitter.
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