A badge of honor for law enforcement
Penology, the study of
punishment, sees the role of incarceration as being a form of
rehabilitation, as well as removal from society, deterrence and
retribution -- a sort of recompense, a barrier between the good and the
criminal. The struggles against government corruption and serious crime
see only the deterrent element of imprisonment -- "You shall see me, and
you shall not do."
The sentence against
Ehud Olmert on Tuesday deals with the question of which punishment is
most appropriate given the severity of the verdict, since there is no
doubt that this truly covers a man whose status precipitously tumbled.
But in addition, Tuesday's sentence concerns which deterrent message
must be relayed to each and every elected public official in the upper
echelons.
A lengthy prison
sentence will reverberate more than any written sentence, since the
written word is, after today, merely a "dead letter," an object for
engaging comparative research, while a lengthy sentence in and of itself
becomes a living monument attesting to the severity of the corrupt
deeds.
The eight years of
investigations and examinations reached their end by sending Olmert to
prison. In the length of his sentence, the message resonates loud and
clear: When a red line is crossed by a public figure, senior or
otherwise, his fate is his alone, and he should be punished
fundamentally on his deeds. The crime of corruption is the laundered way
of putting what is essentially robbing public coffers. Yet the
deterrent factor, however personal it may be, certainly targets the
system, the organization, the design, the divvying up of positions, a
culture of sealing lips and of "trust me, we can't be touched, we are
immune, impervious to harm."
Honestly, that sense of
immunity was not an illusion even in the slightest. For a long time, it
commanded the highest corridors. When the police inspector-general at
the time invited the sentenced prime minister to his home for Sukkot and
wished him, at the height of the investigation, many more years in his
capacity, the elite get the sense that anything is allowed. The
investigators too get the clear message of which way the wind blows.
How did we make it this
far? As much as we've praised the best investigators, the prosecution
and the audit staff, we must also remember that Tuesday's sentence was
also a result of various complicit agents' changes of heart and
cooperation, whether late state witness Shmuel Dechner, erstwhile
attorney Uri Messer or Olmert's former chief assistant Shula Zaken --
they changed the forecast at clutch time. The entire mechanism would not
have been uncovered were it not for the situational self-serving
assessments of certain individuals, which were astutely and expertly
exploited by courageous leaders in the prosecution and in the police
(I'm not sure this line would have been so tough had Olmert not
responded with such hostile and blatantly personal attacks). Let's not
forget the contribution of such senior officials such as Professor Yaron
Zelekha, who was stripped of his Finance Ministry accountant-general
position and decided to offer police what he had seen -- an example of a
rare breed in these parts.
Tuesday's sentence is
also a message to law enforcement: Corruption has been built into the
system. It is neither incidental nor sporadic; it is organized, and so
law enforcement must work against it with initiative and persistence,
allocating ample resources and not waiting for state witnesses or random
cooperation. Law enforcement must genuinely provide protection to
senior officials and their juniors who shed light on corrupted
mechanisms, instead of exposing them to sequestering and ostracism.
Tuesday's sentence is hardly
Olmert's personal tragedy, or the nation's. When all is said and done,
the sentence marks a badge of honor for the country's investigative
institutions, law enforcement and, above all else, the courthouse where
it was handed down. In simple, intelligible Hebrew, the sentence said:
No more. A corrupted individual's final destination is the state
penitentiary. The severity of his sentence reflects the height of his
position, and for good reason.
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