Crime and Punishment
Mar. 4th, 2012 09:02 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslockI was just rereading HBP, “Lord Voldemort Request,” and the final interchange floored me when I finally paid it adequate attention. Twinkles said, and a great sadness filled his face, “The time is long gone when I could frighten you with a burning wardrobe and force you to make repayment for your crimes. But I wish I could, Tom…. I wish I could….”
Excuse me?
The Dumb One had forced Tom to make repayment for his crimes? When had that happened, precisely?
I can only presume that this is Albus’s interpretation of the scene in Tom’s orphanage when the wise visiting wizard cast a charm that made Tom’s private wardrobe first seem to be engulfed in flames, and then to “rattle” from the stolen trinkets hidden within. Finally Tom was forced to display his mean trophies. And then The White Wizard displayed his morality:
“You will return them to their owners with your apologies,” said Dumbledore calmly, putting his wand back into his jacket. “I shall know whether it has been done. And be warned: Thieving is not tolerated at Hogwarts.”
Tom did not look remotely abashed; he was still staring coldly and appraisingly at Dumbledore. At last he said in a colorless voice, “Yes, sir.
“At Hogwarts,” Dumbledore went on, “we teach you not only to use magic, but to control it. You have—inadvertently, I am sure—been using your powers in a way that is neither taught nor tolerated at our school. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to allow your magic to run away with you. But you should know that Hogwarts can expel students, and the Ministry of Magic—yes, there is a Ministry—will punish lawbreakers still more severely. All new wizards must accept that, in entering our world, they abide by our laws.”
“Yes, sir,” said Riddle again.
Let’s assume for the moment that Tom did in fact return his sordid trophies to those still able to reclaim them, i.e. to those of Tom’s victims still alive, sane, ambulatory, and resident at the orphanage.
Now, suppose Tommy had caught me showing off my yo-yo skills to admiring fellow orphans, and used the yo-yo itself in various creative ways to torment me. Perhaps he first made it entangle my hands while my former admirers laughed at my ineptness, and then tripped my feet while they stopped laughing in fear, and then strangled me almost to death with my own toy…. Suppose he then confiscated the toy as a souvenir of the encounter. Had he done some such, I might not, in fact, want the yo-yo back. It would be a memento to me of the encounter, as much as to my tormentor.
Or perhaps the yo-yo was little Billy’s, and its string was what his pet rabbit had been hanged with…. Let’s not even think about what Tom could do with a girl’s thimble. (I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me….)
But leaving such considerations aside, Albus seriously believed that returning a few stolen trinkets would, to Tom’s orphanage fellows, constitute full repayment for his many crimes against them? For years of terror?
Um. You know. That’s a rather unique viewpoint. Really, it gets more unique, the more one imagines what it must have been like to live at little Tommy’s mercy. It gets to be quite a view without compare.
Well, Albus does believe he can’t be understood by the rest of us. In this matter, he's right.
*
What exactly were Riddle’s crimes by the time the Dumb One visited Tom in that beleaguered orphaniage? Mrs. Cole told Albus, “He scares the other children."
"You mean he is a bully?" asked Dumbledore.
"I think he must be," said Mrs. Cole, frowning slightly, "but it's very hard to catch him at it. There have been incidents…. Nasty things…..
"Billy Stubbs’ rabbit… well, Tom said he didn’t do it and I don’t see how he could have done, but even so, it didn’t hang itself from the rafters, did it?... All I know is he and Billy had argued the day before. And then on the summer outing…. well, Amy Benton and Dennis Bishop were never quite right afterwards, and all we ever got out of them was that they’d gone into a cave with Tom Riddle…. And, well, there have been a lot of things, funny things….”
This is as indefinite as it is sinister (and it’s an abrogation of responsibility that the Hogwarts representative chose not to explore more precisely how the child had been misusing his magic), but two definite crimes have been mentioned: killing a pet rabbit, and driving Amy Benton and Dennis Bishop insane.
(See my essay “Accessory after the Fact” for my parsing of the clues that Dennis and Amy had been sent to the lunatic asylum for their “not quite rightness”.)
But even if you don't accept my reading that they'd been transferred to the loony bin, we have Mrs. Cole's statement that they never recovered from whatever Tom did. Tom inflicted long-term, possibly permanent, mental damage on them.
Then there’s Tommy’s own confession to Albus: “I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.”
Tom says, “I can,” which is to say that he had already tested these powers. So he’s confessed to having coerced or possessed animals, used magic to harm people, and caused pain magically.
Further, he told Dumbledore “with ringing force” to “Tell the truth!” and it’s clear that he expected Dumbledore to obey unthinkingly. That was a homegrown version of the Imperius Tom deployed, and he’s clearly experienced at it; when Dumbledore doesn’t react properly, Tom was shocked, wary, and instantaneously demanded, “Who are you?”
Which establishes that Tom has must have used his spell repeatedly, enough at least to know that there has to be something special about Dumbledore if he can resist it.
Tom has thus confessed to or demonstrated homemade, wandless versions of two of the three Unforgivable Curses, folks, and he had already at least one death (of a pet) to his, ah, credit.
To summarize: in the orphanage Albus learned that young Tom had used magic deliberately and repeatedly to cause pain, fear, mental damage, and probably physical harm (“bad things happen”) to his fellow orphans; he had used magic to coerce both animals and humans; he had taken trophies, souvenirs of his most memorable successes in tormenting his fellows. This child had invented and perfected crude (wandless) versions of both the Cruciatus and the Imperius. He had, almost certainly, tortured other children into insanity. He had killed, if only a pet so far.
The other children were scared of him. Gee, why?
And Albus knew all this.
And the Dumb One’s response at the time was to lecture the budding psychopath, “Thieving is not tolerated at Hogwarts.”
Torture, possession, mind-control, telekinesis to hurt people, ARE? Just not theft?
Evidently.
*
But Albus’s attitude makes sense when we adjust for one additional variable.
Twinkles has many admirable intellectual attributes (just ask him, he’ll list them!), but there’s one we readers in this forum seldom grant him:
Empathy for those without his resources. For the weak.
*
And now it all falls into place.
From when Albus was a little boy, he was smarter and more powerful than most of his peers. And he internalized this, accepted this as normal, at a very young age.
And Albus now is emotionally divorced enough not to care much about public opinion—being regarded as mad, so long as he’s simultaneously granted to be brilliant is fine with him. “Nitwick. Blubber. Oddment. Tweak,” and donning a vulture hat at Yule.
If this attitude goes back a long ways, his peers couldn't even have ganged up on him and used humiliation effectively against him. (Compare young Severus's jealousy of his dignity.)
So Albus may have been nearly untouchable by anything others could do even as a child. He certainly is now, and has been for decades at least.
So now circle around to the point when above-it-all Albus met with that orphan. No one around Albus NOW—no one perhaps since Al’s first or second year as a student—perhaps no one EVER—can really bother Twinkles. No one can cause Dumbles serious physical or emotional pain. No one can coerce or possess him.
He fears no person, and perhaps never seriously has. (The one thing he says he fears is confronting his responsibility for killing Ariana.)
But Albus was the custodian of innumerable interesting secrets and trinkets. Whether or not anyone ever succeeded in penetrating his defenses, OF COURSE he expected people sometimes to try.
By the time Twinkles visited Tom’s orphanage, no sane person even tried to harm Albus. But optimistic sorts might still try to steal from him.
So, when he tries to understand that a miscreant might have offended against persons, theft is the only possibility that can actually register for Albus. It’s the only one Twinkles can relate to.
So yeah, Tom caused pain and terror to his fellow orphans, killed their pets, drove two of them insane…. Yawn.
But, horror of horrors, he also successfully stole from them!
Make restitution for that crime, sirrah, and know that some things are not to be tolerated!
Excuse me?
The Dumb One had forced Tom to make repayment for his crimes? When had that happened, precisely?
I can only presume that this is Albus’s interpretation of the scene in Tom’s orphanage when the wise visiting wizard cast a charm that made Tom’s private wardrobe first seem to be engulfed in flames, and then to “rattle” from the stolen trinkets hidden within. Finally Tom was forced to display his mean trophies. And then The White Wizard displayed his morality:
“You will return them to their owners with your apologies,” said Dumbledore calmly, putting his wand back into his jacket. “I shall know whether it has been done. And be warned: Thieving is not tolerated at Hogwarts.”
Tom did not look remotely abashed; he was still staring coldly and appraisingly at Dumbledore. At last he said in a colorless voice, “Yes, sir.
“At Hogwarts,” Dumbledore went on, “we teach you not only to use magic, but to control it. You have—inadvertently, I am sure—been using your powers in a way that is neither taught nor tolerated at our school. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to allow your magic to run away with you. But you should know that Hogwarts can expel students, and the Ministry of Magic—yes, there is a Ministry—will punish lawbreakers still more severely. All new wizards must accept that, in entering our world, they abide by our laws.”
“Yes, sir,” said Riddle again.
Let’s assume for the moment that Tom did in fact return his sordid trophies to those still able to reclaim them, i.e. to those of Tom’s victims still alive, sane, ambulatory, and resident at the orphanage.
Now, suppose Tommy had caught me showing off my yo-yo skills to admiring fellow orphans, and used the yo-yo itself in various creative ways to torment me. Perhaps he first made it entangle my hands while my former admirers laughed at my ineptness, and then tripped my feet while they stopped laughing in fear, and then strangled me almost to death with my own toy…. Suppose he then confiscated the toy as a souvenir of the encounter. Had he done some such, I might not, in fact, want the yo-yo back. It would be a memento to me of the encounter, as much as to my tormentor.
Or perhaps the yo-yo was little Billy’s, and its string was what his pet rabbit had been hanged with…. Let’s not even think about what Tom could do with a girl’s thimble. (I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me….)
But leaving such considerations aside, Albus seriously believed that returning a few stolen trinkets would, to Tom’s orphanage fellows, constitute full repayment for his many crimes against them? For years of terror?
Um. You know. That’s a rather unique viewpoint. Really, it gets more unique, the more one imagines what it must have been like to live at little Tommy’s mercy. It gets to be quite a view without compare.
Well, Albus does believe he can’t be understood by the rest of us. In this matter, he's right.
*
What exactly were Riddle’s crimes by the time the Dumb One visited Tom in that beleaguered orphaniage? Mrs. Cole told Albus, “He scares the other children."
"You mean he is a bully?" asked Dumbledore.
"I think he must be," said Mrs. Cole, frowning slightly, "but it's very hard to catch him at it. There have been incidents…. Nasty things…..
"Billy Stubbs’ rabbit… well, Tom said he didn’t do it and I don’t see how he could have done, but even so, it didn’t hang itself from the rafters, did it?... All I know is he and Billy had argued the day before. And then on the summer outing…. well, Amy Benton and Dennis Bishop were never quite right afterwards, and all we ever got out of them was that they’d gone into a cave with Tom Riddle…. And, well, there have been a lot of things, funny things….”
This is as indefinite as it is sinister (and it’s an abrogation of responsibility that the Hogwarts representative chose not to explore more precisely how the child had been misusing his magic), but two definite crimes have been mentioned: killing a pet rabbit, and driving Amy Benton and Dennis Bishop insane.
(See my essay “Accessory after the Fact” for my parsing of the clues that Dennis and Amy had been sent to the lunatic asylum for their “not quite rightness”.)
But even if you don't accept my reading that they'd been transferred to the loony bin, we have Mrs. Cole's statement that they never recovered from whatever Tom did. Tom inflicted long-term, possibly permanent, mental damage on them.
Then there’s Tommy’s own confession to Albus: “I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.”
Tom says, “I can,” which is to say that he had already tested these powers. So he’s confessed to having coerced or possessed animals, used magic to harm people, and caused pain magically.
Further, he told Dumbledore “with ringing force” to “Tell the truth!” and it’s clear that he expected Dumbledore to obey unthinkingly. That was a homegrown version of the Imperius Tom deployed, and he’s clearly experienced at it; when Dumbledore doesn’t react properly, Tom was shocked, wary, and instantaneously demanded, “Who are you?”
Which establishes that Tom has must have used his spell repeatedly, enough at least to know that there has to be something special about Dumbledore if he can resist it.
Tom has thus confessed to or demonstrated homemade, wandless versions of two of the three Unforgivable Curses, folks, and he had already at least one death (of a pet) to his, ah, credit.
To summarize: in the orphanage Albus learned that young Tom had used magic deliberately and repeatedly to cause pain, fear, mental damage, and probably physical harm (“bad things happen”) to his fellow orphans; he had used magic to coerce both animals and humans; he had taken trophies, souvenirs of his most memorable successes in tormenting his fellows. This child had invented and perfected crude (wandless) versions of both the Cruciatus and the Imperius. He had, almost certainly, tortured other children into insanity. He had killed, if only a pet so far.
The other children were scared of him. Gee, why?
And Albus knew all this.
And the Dumb One’s response at the time was to lecture the budding psychopath, “Thieving is not tolerated at Hogwarts.”
Torture, possession, mind-control, telekinesis to hurt people, ARE? Just not theft?
Evidently.
*
But Albus’s attitude makes sense when we adjust for one additional variable.
Twinkles has many admirable intellectual attributes (just ask him, he’ll list them!), but there’s one we readers in this forum seldom grant him:
Empathy for those without his resources. For the weak.
*
And now it all falls into place.
From when Albus was a little boy, he was smarter and more powerful than most of his peers. And he internalized this, accepted this as normal, at a very young age.
And Albus now is emotionally divorced enough not to care much about public opinion—being regarded as mad, so long as he’s simultaneously granted to be brilliant is fine with him. “Nitwick. Blubber. Oddment. Tweak,” and donning a vulture hat at Yule.
If this attitude goes back a long ways, his peers couldn't even have ganged up on him and used humiliation effectively against him. (Compare young Severus's jealousy of his dignity.)
So Albus may have been nearly untouchable by anything others could do even as a child. He certainly is now, and has been for decades at least.
So now circle around to the point when above-it-all Albus met with that orphan. No one around Albus NOW—no one perhaps since Al’s first or second year as a student—perhaps no one EVER—can really bother Twinkles. No one can cause Dumbles serious physical or emotional pain. No one can coerce or possess him.
He fears no person, and perhaps never seriously has. (The one thing he says he fears is confronting his responsibility for killing Ariana.)
But Albus was the custodian of innumerable interesting secrets and trinkets. Whether or not anyone ever succeeded in penetrating his defenses, OF COURSE he expected people sometimes to try.
By the time Twinkles visited Tom’s orphanage, no sane person even tried to harm Albus. But optimistic sorts might still try to steal from him.
So, when he tries to understand that a miscreant might have offended against persons, theft is the only possibility that can actually register for Albus. It’s the only one Twinkles can relate to.
So yeah, Tom caused pain and terror to his fellow orphans, killed their pets, drove two of them insane…. Yawn.
But, horror of horrors, he also successfully stole from them!
Make restitution for that crime, sirrah, and know that some things are not to be tolerated!
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 10:33 pm (UTC)You're right! And we see very few other wizards actually doing that, do we? Experimentation seems to be very rare (although that could just be the suppressed Hogwarts atmosphere) and scientific thinking certainly doesn't seem to be taught. Maybe it just doesn't occur to wizards that kids could work out how to use their powers deliberately, since very few would think to try?
I wonder if Severus picked up some of that experimental approach from Lily? (To go with his natural brilliance and curiosity of course :) )
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 01:16 am (UTC)Rowling gives us so little regarding Eileen Snape that it is rather a stretch to imagine whatever stories of the wizarding world that she told her son would have been "scarce and bitter".
We know she was captain of the Gobstones Team, so that gives us a clue that her time at Hogwarts couldn't have been completely unpleasant for her, and might have overall been a quite pleasant 7 years for her.
I rather believe that her tales to Severus of her own days at Hogwarts made it seem not only a nice place to be, but somewhere where he'd feel both safe and welcomed for what he was, where he could feel free to be himself.
What bitter disappointment, then, when even before he got to the school he encountered the same mean-spirited bullying he'd gotten from nonmagikal people before.
But I agree that the value system he carried, his sense of justice and of what was right and what was wrong, HAD to have come from the Muggle world and not the wizarding one...
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 02:57 am (UTC)I work as a substitute teacher, and I can tell you that the quality of the principal has an ENORMOUS impact on the quality of a school--far more impact than most people realize. For example, where I live, the schools are divided sharply into three groups: (1) high-quality schools in well-to-do neighborhoods with well-socialized, well-behaved children who come from middle-class families that usually have two parents; (2) poor-quality schools in poor neighborhoods with poorly-socialized and -behaved children who come from families that usually have one parent, or no parent at all (i.e., the kids live with relatives, usually grandparents); (3) good-quality schools in poor neighborhoods with kids from bad backgrounds.
Where principal quality comes in is with the schools in poor neighborhoods. Having a strong disciplinarian as principal doesn't matter a lot when the kids come from stable backgrounds and learned how to behave well at home, but with poorly-socialized kids, strict behavior demands are vital because if the kids won't behave, you can't teach them anything. With a strong, determined principal, the schools in poor neighborhoods can enforce discipline standards as high as the standards in the good neighborhood schools. Consequently, those poor kids have a chance to get an education that's about as good as that at the high-quality schools. In the poor neighborhoods, it's easy for me to tell from the way the students behave whether the principal is strong or not. Strong principals will have students who behave as well or almost as well as the kids in the high-quality schools, and the academic rigor is high, also. Weak principals will have students with a screw you attitude who act like thugs or maniacs, who don't care about learning anything and don't care if you know it.
The fact is, we don't know enough about Hogwarts: The History, to know how good or bad a school it was under anyone other than Fumblesnore. Without other heads to compare him to, we can't know if the schools suckiness in all areas was normal, or the result of his atrocious lack of leadership. I'm inclined to believe it was the latter.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 08:26 pm (UTC)And she was nowhere near as bad as Dumbledore. It's hard to guess what Hogwarts was like before he took over. We knew Tom and his crew terrorized the school in various ways for years, but I wonder whether Dumbledore's comment about how it was never traced back to them mean Dippet and other faculty had tried to trace it back to someone? All the unexplained nasty incidents, I mean, not just the basilisk thing. (Which I'm not sure they did blame on Aragog and Hagrid, since it's kind of obvious when a dead girl has or hasn't been poisoned by a giant spider if you have anyone with any remotely relevant expertise, you would think... but keeping Aragog was illegal regardless, and since the attacks stopped there was nothing else they could do and they probably wondered if maybe they had gotten the right culprits after all.) Maybe Tom aside, Hogwarts was less dangerous in general. At least in not having death traps and murderous teachers every year, which is a good start. On the other hand, if Dumbledore already had a lot of influence and Dippet was a "moron," as Rita put it, maybe not. Maybe Phineas Nigellus was (reportedly) so hated because he did enforce discipline - and if that's the case, it sounds like it wasn't the norm before him either. Hm. Maybe it was just because he was snarky and didn't like kids? Or maybe Hogwarts has been a Lord of the Flies kind of place for centuries, with only brief lulls in the chaos. Scary thought.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 08:03 pm (UTC)Also, Percy took Muggle Studies. He even recommended it to students choosing their electives. Whatever his expectations when he first signed up for the class (and maybe he took it initially because his dad was just getting interested in Muggle stuff and he wanted to have something special just he and his dad could talk about? plus wanting more OWLS eventually, I suppose), I suspect he was very thorough about studying Muggle culture - that's just the kind of student he is - and might just have understood some aspects better than other kids. It clicked for him.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 08:20 pm (UTC)Fair enough, I don't think we see much evidence for 'reason', but Percy isn't driving the whole Ministry himself, and it seems that his attitude is valued there. There must be at least a few other people who care about things like cauldron thickness. Order has some support (just not at Hogwarts!) The law might be a popularity contest but Crouch for example seems to believe you need to pay for what you do (even if in the end he made an exception for his son, against his principles).
Parts of the WW must be less chaotic than we see. All those Hufflepuffs have to go somewhere, after all.
Severus, though - yes. And majorjune, sunnyskywalker and oneandthetruth - yes, yes, and yes.
I love the idea of little Sev reading Muggle school stories :) Would that have been too early for the Worst Witch, do you think?
What about Searle? Could he have read Down with Skool - or hey, St Trinian's? They would have been closer ...
Tom Brown's Schooldays probably wasn't on his reading list, though.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 04:35 am (UTC)Yes! Percy detractors say he should have been A Slytherin, but his alternate House is Hufflepuff.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-14 03:53 pm (UTC)Interestingly, I remember Terri Testing's essay (one of them, anyway) saying that Percy was "socially-insensitive" by the standards of the Wizarding World, and this made him more comfortable with law and order and less with the chaotic life at Hogwarts. I suppose it could be the same as how there are quiet and withdrawn people in a society (such as that in the US) that values salesmanship and being very outgoing and charismatic to large groups. And we see that the Ministry of Magic, at least, takes its laws relatively seriously (barring a few individuals like Bagman or Mr. Weasley) even if it doesn't do a good job of enforcing them or occasionally lapses into tyranny.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 10:57 pm (UTC)The Dementors do seem worse than your average Muggle prison guard, however, and they predate Crouch's rise. Muggles have also invented prisons with different levels of security, so the people awaiting trial for shoplifting aren't thrown in with the serial murderers. Muggle prisons are no picnic, but I'd venture to say Azkaban is up there with the worst, when you consider how many of the prisoners literally die of depression or go insane within a relatively short time. Fudge was shocked that Sirius could have a normal conversation. We wouldn't be shocked that someone who'd spent a decade in San Quentin could still form sentences well enough to ask for a newspaper (and have the energy to read it). Whose bright idea was it to make a deal with the Dementors in the first place? And when? And why don't they have lower-security cells somewhere for people who haven't been convicted yet, or whom they expect to release in a while? Were they more careful about whom they threw in there before Crouch's speed trials, or did the ww just stick with 17th-century conceptions of justice and assume guilty until proven innocent all along? (So to Azkaban with you to await trial! You're probably guilty anyway, so think of this as an advance on your sentence.)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 09:09 pm (UTC)But it still seems like a terrible idea to put anyone into Azkaban that you intend to let out. So if they were doing that in the 1920s, maybe it was a holdover from the days of "everyone rots in Newgate (and pays for the privilege)."
For the sake of argument, though, maybe Morfin and Marvolo, being already someone, er, mentally troubled, would have cracked a bit more even in a Dementor-free prison. Solitary confinement can do that to people, and maybe they were tossed in cells like those underground cave-cells in Alcatraz or something. The Dementors could have been brought in in the 1930s or '40s, in time for Eileen to come to think of them as fixtures of the prison system. Grindlewald doesn't seem to have troubled Britain much, so we might not be able to blame him as the excuse some Crouch-equivalent used to make that particular deal with the devil. But maybe some British wizards were perpetrating minor attacks or instigating teeny riots in sympathy with Grindlewald's movement, hoping to get the Ministry to declare for him? Or maybe originally the Dementors were only for captured foreign spies trying to stir up trouble?