I had an interesting conversation with my son recently about the things people think and the ideas they hold. I mentioned that, as odd as it may sound, doing a lot of jail and prison time seems to have given me some advantages (to go along with all the PTSD-type stuff it also gave me). It took me out of the mainstream of free world life, giving me a lot of time to do nothing but think. It was, at times, a lot like being a monk. All the noise and static of everyday life got turned way down for me for extended periods of time.
I once did four solid months in solitary confinement. That is torture, I'm here to testify. It makes people lose their minds. To save oneself in that circumstance demands a mental effort that many aren't up to. That mental effort requires relentless cogitation. I think it helps to be somewhat philosophically inclined. I also think being educated and literate helps a great deal. But there are no guarantees. I think most people either never have occasion to know or forget just how close to crazy we all are. We can all be driven around the bend. It's easier than you might think.
Understanding is a many-fold path and it is easy to get lost, and perhaps even easier not to know it. Virtually everyone receives much of their knowledge/understanding/ideas/attitudes directly from their culture – and much of that material evades scrutiny, possibly because we are so close to it. It's hard to step back enough to gain the perspective that might lead to an ideological paradigm shift. Leopards, as they say, do not change their spots.
Now some might say that I'm all wet, and for all I know I may well be. There's that whole Dunning Kruger effect. Anyone can get caught in that trap. It is way too easy to not know what you don't know. While I am often quite confident in my own thinking, I try to always allow for the possibility of being wrong. I respect that there are more things I don't know than there are things I do know. Knowledge, wisdom and understanding are more about uncharted territory than they are about certainty.
It is easy to be wrong and it is common enough to be considered a feature, not a bug. We are all wrong about many of the things we think. This is true even of our smartest people.
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation . . . Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Perhaps nothing is harder than getting someone to re-examine an old ingrained attitude with which they have grown comfortable. There are so many things, culturally and socially, that are like what lawyers call “settled law,” issues decided and to some extent agreed upon long ago – and these things rarely, if ever, get trotted out for review. This is especially true of our friends on the right. For them, there is only one right answer to any question and once you have that answer, there is never any reason to revisit the question. All the thinking's been done, there will be no further cogitation, the world is black and white, gay is bad, pot is dangerous and communists are monsters who want to steal your money and your wife.
We're all full of the strangest ideas. And just because an idea is commonly held doesn't mean it is the best idea, or even a good idea. Just look at capitalism. Sure it made a lot of people filthy rich but it's destroying the biosphere and has increased human suffering immeasurably. The richest 100 people in the world have enough money to solve world hunger four times over. So, capitalism, good – anything else, bad. That's a very common American idea. Common does not mean good - or wise.
FWIW, I've been thinking seriously about crime and punishment since 1971. My ideas on the subject are often not popular, and no doubt strike some people as daft. I can't prove they aren't, but they've been a long time incubating. Of course I could still be wrong. But I can tell you this, none of my ideas on the subject came from my culture. Nobody handed me these thoughts. They came from my own experience and mental effort for the past forty-some years - again, FWIW.
Crime is a cultural problem. Certain features of our culture produce and perpetuate crime. You may think of crime as the acts of individuals operating under free will, and criminal justice as a matter of bad people getting what they deserve. I think that both of those ideas are not wrong necessarily, but focused on the wrong aspects, too caught up in the trees to see the forest. Again, our culture produces crime.
One of the ways it does this is by taking those members of our society least able to meet the minimum basic requirements and punishing them in the most abusive ways, supposedly to make them better able or more likely to meet the requirements of social membership, all the while ignoring the incontrovertible fact that abusive punishment only makes people less able to meet those requirements. Punishment does not make people better, it makes them worse. Virtually any prison in America proves that concept. The recidivism rate proves that concept. It is the reality of our so-called criminal justice system. Most of the very worst crime that ever occurs comes directly from our prison system. It is a crime factory. That's a flat out fact.
Punishment doesn't work.
So if the law is going to be about retributive justice, if society simply must have its vengeance and that's all that matters, it will have to do so without any hope of improving the situation. And in my humble opinion, that's a crying fucking shame.
If we're okay with a crime-ridden society that imprisons, under the most hideous conditions, more of its citizens than any other nation, we can just keep doing what we've been doing for lo these many decades and centuries. We needn't change if we're satisfied with our horrendous record to date. If we are fine with miserable failure and the untold human suffering it causes, we can just quit now. We're good.
There was a diary recently about a repeat offender being sentenced to 50 years in prison for stealing food.
His having an extensive record of serious prior offenses bothered some, offended them and made them mad. I get that, I think that's the way most people see it. I just think it's the wrong way to look at it. It's simply not helpful. I think we need to change that mindset. From my perspective, the same set of facts just makes me sad.
The dude needs help, he's been punished enough. In fact, he's been punished way too much. It is a major factor, if not the major factor, in why he has done so poorly in society. The answer in these cases, and there are so damned many of them, is not more punishment. Not unless vengeance is the only goal. Again, if we're okay with the horror of the present system, if sheer vengeance is all that matters to us, if we don't care to make anything better, then never fucking mind.
Clinging to these commonly held attitudes causes great suffering.
We need to think about and respond to criminal offenders in a new and very different way. I would suggest that vengeance is a luxury we cannot afford. If we responded to these weakest members of society with compassion rather than vindictiveness, we could change the self-defeating dynamics of the present system. It may offend some peoples' view of “justice,” but helping criminals to rise to the level of social member in good-standing would pay enormous dividends to our entire society. We'd have prisons holding only the most dangerous and out-of-control people, and a system that brings people back into the fold in a way that helps everyone involved - and everyone they touch.
Not everyone can be saved through compassion, but most can. But they need help. If we punish them instead, in service to some notion about “justice” from the middle-ages, we're screwing ourselves. And this is exactly what we've been doing for way too long.
Institutionalized compassion is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.
We've got to wise up and break the vicious cycle of crime and punishment.
Thank you for reading.