America's Obsession with Punishment is Far Past its Expiration Date

A country that feeds on punishment does not a safe country make. To see this principle flourish as if in a lab, look only to PRIMETIME, the dramatized retelling of the rise and fall of To Catch a Predator released by A24 this fall.

Rather than highlighting the psychological terror inherent to watching men prey on children—a fair expectation for what has culturally been dubbed “the pedophile movie”—PRIMETIME turns its attention to the horrors of a justice system that mistakes humiliation for accountability and suffering for safety. At its center is Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen, whose show lures pedophiles to a camera-laden house by way of a “teenage” decoy. Though the men and their twisted expectations vary with every visit, each episode is structured the same: a predator enters the home, the decoy finds an excuse to leave the room, and Hansen walks in to confront the predator. Meanwhile, police officers are staged outside, waiting to pounce (sometimes in a ghillie suit, always in a violent, cheek-to-asphalt fashion) on the predator as soon as he flees.

Starring alongside Pattinson-as-Hansen is Skyler Gisondo, who plays Dan Plumb, a young actor vying for enough credits to join the actors’ union. When Plumb auditions for TCaP, he has no idea it’s for the decoy role; he just knows that the role pays well and that it will bring him a step closer to his goal. His innocence is saccharine: he starts the audition by proudly sharing that he’s just finished a commercial for Toys ‘R’ Us, then plunges into an earnest rendition of “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent. Plumb loves musicals, because of course he does.

Hansen wastes no time declaring Plumb a perfect decoy. It’s no wonder why; with Gisondo’s adorable freckles and his character’s childlike optimism, Plumb can convincingly pass for thirteen, especially if the sicko at his front door is thirsty to believe that’s what he is. But Plumb’s first sting doesn’t go well. Because he has no idea what he’s signed up for—Dan Shrack, the real-life decoy Plumb is based on, thought he had been hired for “dramatic reenactments”—he’s stunned when his first predator yanks his own pants down, masturbates enough to get himself aroused, and sprays whipped cream on that thing like it’s a banana split. Hansen gets the ending he hoped for, but backstage, Plumb is in tears.

It’s after this traumatizing trial-by-fire that Chris Hansen sits down with Plumb to iron out any misgivings he might have about his new gig. Hansen tells the younger man that what they’re doing is good—necessary, even—which comforts Plumb enough to stick it out. That is, until a little later, when Plumb tells Hansen his friends don’t understand what he’s doing on TCaP.

How could they understand, Dan? Hansen asks, proceeding to launch into a story about a long-ago visit to India, where he stumbled onto a story about a chilling chain of unsolved child kidnappings that the government conveniently blamed on wolves. With no village hit twice and no evidence left behind, he says, the region was rife with infighting and lynchings. But Hansen alone was able to track down the predator, who was, in his own words, “not a man—a monster.”

We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil, Hansen says. And this is enough for the budding actor, even as his best friend berates his role and the show’s narrator jokes that he “may never order a hot fudge sundae again.”

If the audience has any doubt over Plumb’s dedication, it’s dissolved by the next sting, during which Plumb boldly decides to confront the predator himself. Here, it appears Plumb has fully assimilated into the TCaP philosophy. Men—too many of them for the show to keep up with—are thirsting after tweens and teens in droves, and one of America’s favorite programs is aiding in the deliverance of “Perverted Justice” (the name of the group that works alongside the showrunners to bait pedophiles) by embarrassing them on national TV before handing them over to the cops.

But while Plumb seemingly grows comfortable with the show’s premise and his role within it, Hansen is having a crisis of conscience. During one sting involving an old perverted rabbi, Hansen is unable to get the guy to “take a seat.” Instead, the rabbi stonewalls for a bit before challenging Hansen’s right to serve as judge, jury, and executioner, turning the TCaP star into a blubbering mess.

Some PRIMETIME reviews accuse the film of going too soft on its predators—himpathy, one review calls it—and in them, this scene with the rabbi is often cited. Rather than stepping up to the task of taking this perv down a notch, Hansen crashes, and the rabbi wins.

But PRIMETIME’s humanization of its predators is crucial to its message. Later, when Perverted Justice finds out that the mysterious “whale” they’ve been chasing is Bill Conradt, chief felony assistant district attorney for Rockwall County, Texas, the film tosses in a brief scene in which the roles are reversed: Conradt is in a courtroom during what appears to be a child sexual abuse case, explaining that while he understands how the public might see the abuser as a monster, “the defendant here is not a monster. He’s a man.”

But PRIMETIME’s humanization of its predators is crucial to its message.

The intended effect here is disgust. Ugh, you think, of course a pedophile is out here defending pedophiles. Blink, and the scene is over; the focus is again on Hansen and his pursuit of TCaP’s whale. But this seconds-long clip is more foreshadowing than ammunition.

Everybody knows what happened to Bill Conradt. In real life, with his house surrounded by camera crews and a SWAT team stomping down the hallway, Conradt pressed a pistol to his temple and fired, turning what was meant to be a TV-friendly takedown into a grisly nightmare. The Hollywood version of Conradt’s final moments is a little different: in an effort to keep his predator engaged, Hansen urges Plumb to speak to Conradt on the phone. They don’t talk about anything nasty, even as Hansen utters despicable lines from Conradt’s chatroom DMs in the background, preparing for his big moment. Instead, they talk about theater. About musicals. About how Plumb might be the only person alive who thinks the film adaptation of Rent is better than the stage production.

Plumb seems to understand what’s about to happen. Conradt’s breaths are shaky, not out of lust this time but out of fear, and Plumb begins to sing. We’ve gone full circle: here is the young actor and his rendition of “Seasons of Love.”

And then Conradt is standing on the other side of the window, killing himself.

In the 2009 Esquire article that inspired screenwriter Ajon Singh to make PRIMETIME, Conradt’s humanity is fully present. Journalist Luke Dittrich opens with a story about Conradt getting wasted at a house party and riding home in a wheelbarrow. The attorney’s dog makes multiple appearances. We see Conradt offering his colleagues help at work. We get to know his taste in clothing; apparently, the guy is so modest in his day-to-day life that wearing a dyed shirt, not a white one, is a little zesty.

Nowhere in the story does Dittrich outright accuse TCaP of wrongdoing, but even if he had, that isn’t the point. You can reason all day long that what TCaP did prior to its 2007 cancellation is ethically wrong or statistically unproductive, and while you’ll probably be right—the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reports that tips related the online enticement of minors for sexual acts more than quadrupled between 2004 and 2007, making the argument that TCaP was an effective scare tactic a dubious one—you still won’t reach the crux of the issue, which is that America is obsessed with punishment that doesn’t work.

America is obsessed with punishment that doesn’t work.

This isn’t a new idea. Scholars like Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and other transformative and restorative justice champions—largely women of color, whose communities are most affected by the criminal punishment system—have spent decades demonstrating how punitive (punishment-oriented) justice is linked to higher recidivism rates than strategies focused on helping survivors heal, rehabilitating offenders, and shrinking the circumstances that, whether overtly or subconsciously, motivate a person to offend. Trauma-informed and survivor-led, these latter approaches may involve acknowledgments of harm, psychological treatment for the survivor and offender, and supervised, assisted reintegration into a community.

punitive (punishment-oriented) justice is linked to higher recidivism rates than strategies focused on helping survivors heal, rehabilitating offenders, and shrinking the circumstances that, whether overtly or subconsciously, motivate a person to offend.

Meanwhile, under today’s system, requiring survivors of sexual crimes to testify and otherwise endure prosecution is so disruptive to a person’s wellbeing and daily life that it’s often called secondary victimization. And seeing the end result doesn’t always make this process worthwhile. As Alexander points out in a 2019 essay for The New York Times, “the number of people who are interested only in revenge or punishment is greatly exaggerated. After all, survivors are almost never offered real choices. Usually when we ask victims ‘Do you want incarceration?’ what we’re really asking is ‘Do you want something or nothing?’”

But punishment has excellent pathos. “When any of us are hurt, and when our families and communities are hurting, we want something rather than nothing,” Alexander adds. It’s the same reason why the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world and executes more offenders than nearly any other country. With our scant opportunities for recourse, the idea that someone would cause suffering and then not suffer in return is, for most Americans, unbearable.

In a 2022 research paper for CUNY Law Review, criminal justice researchers Dr. Alissa Ackerman and Alexa Sardina write: “Equating accountability with punishment is misguided.” But how can we be satisfied with mere accountability when we’ve been trained to crave punishment, even in leisure? Roughly halfway into PRIMETIME, producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) receives an opportunity to jump over to ABC’s TCaP analogue, a “feel-good” hidden-camera show called What Would You Do?. Despite the real-life WWYD’s continued 18-year run the show has never garnered the viewership commanded by any TCaP episode.

There used to be a pillory in every village, Pattinson’s Hansen laments during what is perhaps his biggest moral crashout in the film. Now, there’s a television in every living room.

As a glut of skeptical PRIMETIME reviews have demonstrated since the film’s release, criticizing the ways in which we humiliate, imprison, and dehumanize pedophiles is seen as siding with the pedophiles. It’s a similar sort of logic that leads right-wing politicians to call their opponents “soft on crime” when those opponents are even remotely connected to criminal justice reform.

“I’ve already had people calling me a pedophile because I pointed out that [Chris Hansen] some times [sic] ruined the lives of teens, and that their involvement in certain cases led to them being totally bungled,” one Reddit commenter wrote. Indeed, just before Conradt’s fictionalized suicide, Pattinson’s Hansen tells Plumb: You’re either with me or you’re with him. There is no room for reconsideration or criticism when high-profile crimes are involved.

It’s hard to blame people who feel this way. None of us want to believe a person who commits the unthinkable can be fixed; we’d rather believe some people are monsters and the rest of us are normal. Challenging this dichotomy would require us to accept that a perfect storm of upbringing, isolation, harassment, discrimination, mental illness, physical pain, trauma, internalized bias, economic circumstances, and personal values could lead nearly anyone to do something terrible, including ourselves.

But “successful desistance from sexual offending is as much about the community and society as it is about the individual,” according to a 2021 research paper by criminologists Kelly Richards and Kieran McCartan. “…the people who commit sexual offences are less likely to be abnormal ‘monsters’ and more likely to be likely to be representative members of society.”

It seems that’s exactly what PRIMETIME seeks to convey. Far from a “hit piece” on the real-life Chris Hansen (as some people have called it), the film uses Plumb’s character—the only one to ever doubt whether what TCaP’s efforts are just or worthwhile—to expose a punishment-calibrated, torches-and-pitchforks society that spirals into oblivion in its fruitless search for justice.

Is it taboo to suggest that the humiliation model of criminal justice we rely on now is both harmful and dubiously effective? Apparently. But is it sympathizing with pedophiles to want more for survivors? To want fewer children to be victimized in the first place?

Only until America decides it’s not.

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