See here’s the thing, someone else being an an alcoholic or having addictions isn’t affecting me. As long as it’s not spilling over and harming people who haven’t volunteered to be a part of it, I’m indifferent to it.
But yes, if someone drives drunk and kills someone then I’m wholly unconcerned with giving them a second chance.
And the thing is, the moral preening and saying things like “Justice involved people” instead of “criminals” is the cheapest kind of empathy. It comes at no actual cost to the people who engage in it. The chances are minuscule that an individual drunk driver who gets short probation crashes into the judge or prosecutor. But the cost to the family he kills is—everything.
The judges and prosecutors who kept letting that guy go in North Carolina had no skin in the game. They weren’t going to encounter him on a subway at night. Their empathy was cheap to them, because Iryna Z and her family footed the bill.
And that’s how I look at all of this stuff. This guy in Celina, if I was told— in two years, he’ll be next door to you. How would I feel? This drunk driver, his route home from favorite happy hour overlaps with your teenager’s route home from soccer practice? How do I feel?
If I wouldn’t want it for me, its cheap empathy to give it to people I don’t know.