Satire of Modern Society's Criminal Policy

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2001)

I enjoy A Clockwork Orange because it is very well done and the scenes brim with satire. Having read many reviews, I think people often miss the point of the film's satire, at least my interpretation of it.
The movie is a satire about how the mixture of politics and the ideology of `political correctness' fails to recognize the existence of and to understand the nature of evil and, as a result, fails to deal with it appropriately. The lesson is that evil exists and it must be dealt with forcefully and effectively. What is being satirized IS today's society.
The main character is an evil person and the government had the chance to lock him away forever (or to actually reform his psychology), but instead he only received a 14 year sentence. Then the government believed that evil criminals could be physically conditioned against violence and that the effects would be permanent. The movie's ending, `I was cured all right', suggests that a person's mindset will eventually triumph over conditioning. The main character got out of jail and he still had an evil mindset.
The end result is that the government invested energy in ineffective treatments (unproductive prison time, brainwashing) that it thought would be effective and ended up releasing a criminal onto the streets for political reasons, just like today's system. After all, the Clockwork Orange government needed space for political prisoners (today's consensual `criminals'-drug offenders, prostitutes, etc) and had to find a way to release the true criminals. In fact, the government went so far as to knowingly turn thugs into policemen. (Is that similar to giving criminals free tuition at colleges while their victims pay for it with tax dollars? This happened in Massachusetts.) If the movie isn't a satire of our modern system where child molesters are released from `correctional facilities' only to later rape and murder children, what is it? The politically correct view denies the existence of evil. It holds that criminals are victims of bad family situations and unfortunate upbringings. Since criminals cannot help themselves, political correctness holds that we shouldn't punish them too hard but should try to be more understanding and tolerant of them.
The movie is horrifying because that anyone could be so senselessly evil is horrifying. My reading of the satire's take home message is that society must uncompromisingly protect itself against evil and that reforming criminals requires the prisons to figure out how to convince them to sincerely choose to want to be moral.