What is the nature of punishment? Believe it or not, I began ruminating on this question — one that is hardly ever asked in this country — while looking at a Dennis The Menace cartoon in yesterday’s newspaper. Dennis was in his familiar place in the corner facing the wall, a baseball bat, ball and mitt at his feet. He is saying, “Baseball players are sent to the showers… not the corner!” One can imagine the defiant anger in his voice as he laments his victimhood…
Even at age six, when sent to the corner, Dennis becomes a victim in his own mind. “She did this to me,” his child’s mind thinks about his mother and temporary jailer. There is no hint of the “crime” that sent him to house arrest, except for the likelihood that it was related to that bat and ball. And, as amused as we are at his observation, we also recognize his sense of being the victim, and we feel his pain.
But, without the critical connection between cause and effect, what purpose does his punishment serve? And how do we define it? How do we distinguish between the immediate reaction to behavior we want to correct – that literal slap on the wrist when a child is found with his or her hand in the cookie jar, or the pain one feels when touching a hot stove — and the more deliberately thought-out consequences that are stretched out over time, often involving formal and time-consuming processes before they can be implemented? Our notions of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, are conditioned by those instant responses to the choices we make. In those situations, it is impossible to escape personal responsibility. The nexus between what we did and the response is much too close to permit our minds to justify our acts or to lay responsibility on the shoulders of others.
Formal “punishment,” on the other hand, is a time-consuming process (whether we’re talking hours or years), which allows just such rationalizations to occur, rationalizations which undermine its very purpose — or, at least, the purpose we want to believe it accomplishes. Like Dennis standing in the corner, those we process through our formal system of punishment (for crime) are so far removed from the precipitating cause of the system’s response, they are easily able to recast themselves into the role of victims. And, indeed, they are not wrong. Now, stripped of power to do anything but respond to officials, they are subjected to the indignities that those with newly acquired power over their lives routinely subject them to.
I spend hours every week conducting writing workshops in county juvenile halls where teenagers are routinely sent to “punish” them for selling drugs, for engaging in gang activities, and for carrying and using guns. And yet, though they know they are there to be “punished,” when told what to do by staff every minute of the day (and often subjected to the arbitrary misuse of this corrupting power), these young “criminals” write almost exclusively about how they are victims of the system, about how they are “being played” — by the cops, by the courts, by the counselors, by “the system.” It’s a very rare individual who actually ponders the relationship between the specific acts leading to these long-term consequences and the degrading powerless position they now occupy. Even the ubiquitous “Do-the-crime, do-the-time” response is nothing more than a cliché that prompts no real sense of personal responsibility, the sine qua non of successful punishment, where success is defined as moderating future behavior.
Perhaps it is this disconnect that leads to such astonishing rates of re-offending when it comes to California’s juvenile detainees. According to the California Division of Juvenile Justice, “70% of state-committed youth are re-arrested within two years of release.” (http://www.cjcj.org/pdf/CJJRPBrochure.pdf) The actual rate of recidivism must be even higher, since so many perpetrators escape detection and, therefore, punishment.
No private company — indeed, no other government agency — could long survive with such rates of failure. Yet, we continue this failed structure of crime and punishment year after year after year. Which leads back to the original question inspired by that Dennis The Menace cartoon: What is the nature of punishment? If the system does not work to end or seriously curtail the behavior we claim we are trying to affect, then why do we keep doing it?
The answer might have more to do with us, the punishers, than with the punished. Perhaps we derive some unacknowledged — even unconscious — satisfaction in the suffering of others. Or, perhaps it’s not their suffering we desire as much as the sense of control we gain from exerting official power over others. Maybe the motivation is even deeper, even more sinister, lodged in our reptilian brains, human traits we would rather not explore because they reveal more about us than we want to know.
These are questions without answers, reflections on a topic that we seldom ponder. If we’re serious about creating a safer society, it’s way past time for such serious reflection.
NAM Round Table
5 June 2008
http://blogs.newamericamedia.org/nam-round-table/1256/reflections-on-punishment
