"The Shield": Crime and Punishment

Hell's best-kept secret is that we create it for ourselves. Mackey connived, threatened, hoodwinked and betrayed to get this cubicle. It is nothing but an existential nightmare. 

Others also receive punishments befitting their great sins. Mackey's one-time sidekick, Shane Vendrell kills his own wife and child, then kills himself. But not before Vendrell realizes the enormity of his crimes, and comes to true contrition. 

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In a subplot, a sixteen year old serial murderer is caught. A haunting reminder is made that this boy could have grown up to be Vic Mackey, and there is little moral difference between the boy murderer and the ex-police cop. Both operate on the same ethic.

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Robert Frost wrote that torment by ice can be much more painful than by fire, metaphorically contrasting passionate torments with death by hatred. Mackey's fate is death by ice,  frozen into a bland cubicle, with no hope of redemption.

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What is the best way to punish a depraved guilty man?  To punish him? Or just possibly, not punishing the guilty be even worse pain. 

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Dostoevsky also believed that punishment, was essential to redemption of the human soul. Mackey escapes being caught, and loses his one remaining chance, and he must endure a long unhappy life.

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Shakespeare, repeated over and over variations of a single story, namely, murder, guilt and consequences. Could Macbeth have endured a hollow life if he had survived as tyrant, surrounded by luxuries won by murder? Macbeth preferred his head on a pike to life in bloody Inverness. Something tells me that Mackey would have been much happier ending everything in single combat.

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Shakespeare granted the release of death as the greatest boon to both homicidal heroes and villains.  Hamlet, Vendrell and Mackey all lived in worlds "rotten.” The ghetto's of Los Angeles have much in common with Hamlet's Denmark. 

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"To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all." Vendrell, paralyzed beyond Hamlet, not even able to ask "to be, or not to be,” instead murders what he loves.

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