Almost all public conversation quickly turns to transgressors. At the Olympic Games competitors growled about proven and suspect drug users. Many people believed that all Russian athletes should have been excluded from the games. They wanted people found to have used drugs named, shamed and shunned.
This insistence that transgressors should definitively lose their good name and the right to participate is not confined to sport. It is found also in controversy about penal policy, and particularly in the populist cry to lock criminals up and throw away the key. The 'three strikes' policy, by which in some states of the USA offenders can be sent to prison for 25 years or life for a relatively minor offence, is a dramatic example.
In Australia it finds parallels in the introduction of mandatory and indefinite sentences, indefinite detention, the abolition of parole and the outrage when a prisoner who has served his sentence is found to be living in a residential neighbourhood.
In social media the loss of reputation is also definitive and irrecoverable. The same severity can be seen in the attitude to public reputation particularly as this is affected by social media. When people enter public life their past record, including the traces they leave on social media, will be held against them.
The burden this may later place on children whose natural imprudence will be forever on record can only be imagined. People's reputations may be frozen in words and actions that they may have later come to regret. They cannot, and others will not, take away the shame that their past lays upon them.
What are we to make of this unyielding severity? Arguments can certainly be made in favour of it. In sport the reluctance of governing bodies to risk their public standing or financial benefits by dealing firmly with drug use may justify the demand to make examples of athletes who are caught.
Two legitimate goals of penal policy, too, are to assure the security of the community and to show that violent and fraudulent actions are not acceptable.
So if lenient sentencing would result in public acceptance of violent behaviour, and so put people at risk, a case for harsh sentences for particular crimes could be made, even where they would make more difficult the offender's integration with society. The case would need to be based on evidence, however, not simply on assertion.
"If we identify people with the wrong they have done and hold it against them forever, we shall prevent them from making a contribution to society."
But if inflexibility and exclusion become the rule in dealing with aberrant speech or behaviour we find unacceptable, they will impose heavy burdens on individuals and society. The cartilage that allows agility and ease in individual and public relationships is our readiness to let go of our resentment at the wrongs we have suffered, and our confidence that others have let go of the wrongs we have done to them. It reassures us that we can start again without wearing the lead collar of our past.
We all know individuals who have become locked into hatred and resentment, with the result that all their other relationships are infected by their rancour. In family groups where the mistakes people make are never forgotten, children can grow into brittle and defensive adults, unable to sustain good personal or working relationships. To let go of what has happened, and to ask and receive forgiveness, nourish possibility and growth.
In the wider society these human costs are transmuted into the coin of inefficiency and of lost opportunity. When we exclude people you also exclude the contribution they can make to society. By multiplying indefinite incarceration, parole-free incarceration, fixed sentences and mandatory imprisonment, we must spend on prisons the resources that otherwise might build hospitals or schools. And we multiply the likelihood that people will reoffend and again be incarcerated. We will also make it much more likely that the people whom you have incarcerated will reoffend and be returned to prison.
If we identify people with the wrong they have done and hold it against them forever, too, we shall prevent them from making a contribution to society. The cost we shall bear as a community of their alienation and despair will be cashed in treatment for mental and physical illness and in encounters with the justice system.
These are the tangible costs on which policy makers focus. But even more costly will be the less tangible erosion of the qualities that make public life nourishing: the trust, the instinct for a fair go, the empathy that underlies voluntary work and care for the needy, and the civility on which politics relies. A culture which disdains forgiveness shoots itself in the foot.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Russia's Yuliya Efimova looks on as America's Lilly King celebrates winning the women's 100m breaststroke. King said Efimova should not have been at the Olympics after the Russian was banned in 2013.