If you know me, you would know that Black Mirror is one of my favourite shows on Netflix. Recently, I’ve begun rewatching some old episodes, and I came across one in particular that really got me thinking: “White Bear”.

Go on YouTube, and find a newsreel about the worst criminal you can think of. Now, scroll down to the comments section. I expect you’ll probably find a fair amount of anger and disgust, of course, but also probably bloodlust. I’ve read many people’s comments calling for a particular person to endure hell in prison, or be subject to incredible violence or torture in retribution for their crimes against society. I’m not saying I don’t know the feeling, but it points to our need to distinguish between proper justice and sadism. In “White Bear”, the creators of Black Mirror simply take this concept and run with it.

The story begins with a woman who wakes up not knowing who she is, and all throughout her day, she is chased by “hunters” with weapons threatening to kill or torture her while “onlookers” stand by watching her on their phones. She cries for help, but to no avail: they are spectators, nothing more. As you might imagine, she is terribly frightened, but at the end, it is revealed that she is there as punishment for a crime of her own. I won’t describe what she did in too much detail, but suffice it to say, it was horrible, and involved her being an accomplice to the kidnapping and murder of a young girl. When her identity is revealed, she is brought back to the place she began (after being paraded through a crowd of jeering onlookers), and her memory is wiped via some futuristic method of electrocution so that she can begin again the next day. In the post-credits, it’s revealed that she’s at a kind theme park: called a “justice park” where people pay to watch her go through all of this. And while her crime is honestly one of the most appalling things I could think of, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy at the idea that this could ever be called justice.

Cue the debate over whether the aim is to punish or reform individuals. When I looked through online forums to see what other people made of this, there were a surprising number that thought it just, and I read many comments such as, “Imagine if it were your daughter that were killed!” I honestly don’t even want to think about the amount of grief I would have in such a case. But as the convict was being paraded through the stream of angry spectators, I couldn’t help but think about what an un-Christian thing this whole ordeal was. I don’t mean to suggest that criminals shouldn’t suffer any punishment at all, but to think that this happened day after day with no end, and whilst she had no sense of her identity (thus no sense of culpability for her prior actions), I began to wonder about how this completely ignored the possibility of her reform.

The idea of reforming prisoners seems to get less popular the worse someone gets, yet ironically those are the individuals most in need of reform. For those who believe that this life is all there is, then perhaps to exercise reformative measures makes little sense: you are justified in your punishing them harshly, but then I also believe it is difficult to say that their actions were wrong. An action must be able to be called wicked in order that it be able to warrant punishment, and what separates punishment from merely harsh treatment is that punishment is a function of justice; and where does justice come from? It cannot come from the law alone, or else we wouldn’t be able to call laws unjust. Our sense of what is just must come from something that transcends the law: God’s law, which is the highest there is or can be. Thus, one must take this into consideration when they punish someone because only in this way can the act of punishing someone mean anything more than vengeance.

We are at a crossroads in this life, and may choose between two ways: the way of light, or the way of darkness. Luckily, we are afforded many chances in our lives (up until the moment of our deaths, in fact) to choose wisely. Not that all sins and evil-doings are of equal gravity, but everyone has moral failings that they need to reckon with. How awful would it be for anyone to stand in the way of another person’s reckoning when, at the end of the day, their soul remains in need of reform? In other words, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” (cf. Jn 8:7).