Should Lennie be in prison?

As a couple of your thesis statements suggest, Lennie is a threat to women in pretty dresses; he has already abused one woman, so shouldn't he be in prison for his attack on her?

In "Are paedophiles' brains wired differently?" the BBC News reports on the ongoing controversy as to whether paedophiles who abuse children do so because the structure of their brains gives them no choice, or whether they do have control of their sexual urges (2015). Some of the experts the report cites suggest that it would help children more if paedophiles were helped in advance rather than merely being punished after abusing a child.

The similarities with Lennie's psychological abnormality were what initially interested me in this article, although it also reminded me of a recent blog post here in which the author suggested that how children turn out, good or bad, was due largely to the parenting and home environment (Na, 2015). I thought that other factors, such as the genetic and first trimester in utero environment were far more likely to determine what sort of person a child became as they grew to adulthood. The article on paedophilia suggests the same: it's what happens before a child is even born that largely determines not only intelligence, but also personality, along with eye colour, and ear shape; what parents might do or not do after birth is much less influential. And I suspect that a child's friends are also more significant than parents. I do think parents are important and can exert considerable influence, but I also think that that parental influence is sometimes greatly overrated, more so than the evidence supports.

But the real question that I think the sort of facts reported in the BBC News article, and that Steinbeck establishes about Lennie in chapter 1 of Of Mice and Men,  is how we should respond to such horrifying crimes as child sexual abuse. In the past, many countries' legal systems saw passion as a mitigating factor for even murder: if a man came home and found his wife in bed with his best friend, he would likely receive a reduced, or no, prison sentence for the subsequent murder of both his unfaithful wife and cuckolding best friend on the grounds that the extreme passion affected his mind so that he had no control over his murderous actions. I believe that lawyers for the defence still mount such arguments to help their clients, who admit having killed, be nonetheless found not guilty of murder. We don't know exactly what Lennie did to the woman in Weed,  but it sounds as though it was enough to constitute assault according to the law, so should Lennie have been arrested and thrown into prison? And if a paedophile's brain is so structured that he cannot help but sexually abuse his brother's daughter (as the article points out, child abuse is most often committed by family members or trusted family friends), should be be thrown into prison?

George plainly thinks Lennie should not be prison. Do we agree with him? And if so, can we rationally think otherwise about a paedophile who has been made what he is by nature just as Lennie has been made what he is?

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Reference

Are paedophiles' brains wired differently? (2015, November 24). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34858350