Most Kind hearted people would offer people a second chance for many offenses. However that thinking is flawed because it assumes all people are cut from the same cloth and have some sort of moral and ethical compass. The reality is some people with certain personality disorders fail to learn or even grasp the concept of right and wrong and will just offend again and again.
First there are people that break the law by accident. Second there are people that break the law from desperation. Third there are the people who simply think the law does not apply to them and other people are seen as insignificant things to be used. Those people don’t see others as human beings, to them they are just objects to be used and discarded no different than toilet paper.
For the first two giving them a second chance is often the right thing to do if it is their first offence and the crime was not too serious. Many places have that built into the law as a guideline for administering punishment. Community service instead of jail time for the first offence. However the third group of people have to be dealt with a different way.
The third group of people can often be classified as having a narcissistic personality disorder or an anti social personality disorder or just your basic psychopath. Any of those classifiable disorders that describe negative behavior towards others should be seen in the third group. These people have no empathy, nor do they care about laws or bringing harm to others.
This third group of people are not all the same. There is a gradient of behaviors. In example anti social personality disorder can be from simple manipulation of others to being a full blown psychopath as depicted by the Joker in the Batman movies.
In any case the people from the third group would only tend to laugh at the kindness of giving them a second chance and see it as a form of weakness or being a fool thus resulting in encouragement to continue the behavior that got them standing in front of a judge to begin with.
So the decision to be forgiving should not be driven by one’s heart, but instead by understanding the thinking and behavior of the offender. Only then can you best insure doing the right thing by either getting a chronic offender out of the community or to simply be understanding that sometimes people make mistakes.
