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  3. Even if we could make it impossible for people to commit crimes, should we? Or would doing so improperly deprive people of their

Even if we could make it impossible for people to commit crimes, should we? Or would doing so improperly deprive people of their

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问题     Even if we could make it impossible for people to commit crimes, should we? Or would doing so improperly deprive people of their freedom?
    This may sound like a fanciful concern, but it is an increasingly real one. The new federal transportation bill, for example, authorized funding for a program that seeks to prevent the crime of drunken driving not by raising public consciousness or issuing stiffer punishments — but by making the crime practically impossible to commit.【C1】______
    The Dadss program is part of a trend toward what I call the " perfect prevention" of crime; depriving people of the choice to commit an offense in the first place. The federal government’s Intelligent Transportation Systems program, which is creating technology to share data among vehicles and road infrastructure like traffic lights, could make it impossible for a driver to speed or run a red light.【C2】______
    Such technologies force us to reconcile two important interests. On one hand is society’s desire for safety and security. On the other hand is the individual’s right to act freely. Conventional crime prevention balances these interests by allowing individuals the freedom to commit crime, but punishing them if they do.
    The perfect prevention of crime asks us to consider exactly how far individual freedom extends. Does freedom include a "right" to drive drunk, for instance? It is hard to imagine that it does.【C3】______
    For most familiar crimes(murder, robbery, rape, arson), the law requires that the actor have some guilty state of mind, whether it is intent, recklessness or negligence.【C4】______
    In such cases, using technology to prevent the crime entirely would not unduly burden individual freedom; it would simply be effective enforcement of the statute. Because there is no mental state required to be guilty of the offense, the government could require, for instance, that drug manufacturers apply a special tamper-proof coating to all pills, thus making the sale of tainted drugs practically impossible, without intruding on the thoughts of any future seller.
    But because the government must not intrude on people’s thoughts, perfect prevention is a bad fit for most offenses.【C5】______Even if this could be known, perhaps with the help of some sort of neurological scan, collecting such knowledge would violate an individual’s freedom of thought.
    Perfect prevention is a politically attractive approach to crime prevention, and for strict-liability crimes it is permissible and may be good policy if implemented properly. But for most offenses, the threat to individual freedom is too great to justify this approach. This is not because people have a right to commit crimes; they do not. Rather, perfect prevention threatens our right to be free in our thoughts, even when those thoughts turn to crime.
[A]But there is a category of crimes that are forbidden regardless of the actor’s state of mind; so-called strict-liability offenses. One example is the sale of tainted drugs. Another is drunken driving.
[B]The Dadss program, despite its effectiveness in preventing drunk driving, is criticized as a violation of human rights because it monitors drivers’ behavior and controls individual’s free will.
[C]And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has already criminalized the development of technologies that can be used to avoid copyright restrictions, making it effectively impossible for most people to illegally share certain copyrighted materials, including video games.
[D]If the actor doesn’t have the guilty state of mind, and he commits crime involuntarily, in this case, the actor will be convicted as innocent.
[E]Perfect prevention of a crime like murder would require the ability to know what a person was thinking in order to determine whether he possessed the relevant culpable mental state.
[F]The program, the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety(Dadss), is developing invehicle technology that automatically checks a driver’s blood-alcohol level and, if that level is above the legal limit, prevents the car from starting.
[G]But what if the government were to add a drug to the water supply that suppressed antisocial urges and thereby reduced the murder rate? This would seem like an obvious violation of our freedom. We need a clear method of distinguishing such cases.
【C4】
选项
答案A
解析 第六段第一句话中作者指出，对于某些犯罪，例如谋杀、抢劫等，法律规定行为者必须具备某种犯罪心理才能够定罪。第七段第一句话指出在这些情况下，使用科技手段阻止犯罪不会对个人自由造成影响，只会更有效地促成法令的实施。这里的“这些情况”是否指的就是第六段中的“谋杀、抢劫”这些犯罪情况呢?显然不是，在谋杀、抢劫等这种罪行中，需要有一定的犯罪心理才能够定罪。那么在这种情况下我们要如何通过技术手段完全阻止犯罪呢?难道要用读心术了解每个人的心理吗，显然这是不符合逻辑的。由此可以判断，横线处作者需要提出另外一种犯罪情况，这种情况下，犯罪者的心理意识不在定罪的考虑之中。因此，本题的正确答案应该选[A]。这里提到了一种犯罪情况，就是严格责任犯罪，这种犯罪是不需要考虑犯罪者的心理活动的，因此可以事先通过技术手段加以预防。而干扰选项[D]是利用guilty state of mind这个短语设置干扰，其实并不符合行为逻辑。
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