by Ross Bishop
“Only loving thoughts are true. Everything else is a cry for help.”
It would take volumes just to list the research that has been done on the origins of crime and violence, beginning with two landmark studies in the 1880’s. Not only has the subject been studied exhaustively, there is general agreement as to its conclusions. And yet, after so much research clearly pointing to the need for change, society remains largely unmoved.
Face it, we don’t like law breakers and we are happy to have them locked up. Although this is understandable, it gets in the way of reform, and criminals don’t have a lobby in Congress. And there is not much blowback for throwing some low life habitual offender – even if he is innocent, behind bars. The social situation presents a real catch-22. We haven’t seen any system of reform really work, and we don’t want to take the risk and mess with a prison system that is “working.” (More about that in a minute.)
Society generally views crime as a racial minority issue which is endemic to the Bronx, South Chicago or East LA. While 1 in 100 white people can be considered criminals, the number is closer to 1 in 11 for African Americans. But there is ample research on the deleterious effects of things like poverty, dysfunctional and absent parents and dim future prospects to dispel the racial explanation. But, it makes the “Incarceration Industry” remarkably impervious to change and deaf to criticism. Criminologists, conservative politicians, judges, the police and the prison industry must bear the brunt of the criticism here, but social indifference is also a major contributing factor.
During the Reagan years, law and order politicians sold Congress on a program of more prisons and longer sentences as a deterrence to crime. So we adopted a mass incarceration approach, increasing our prison population from 200,000 to 2.4 million. While the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the world’s incarcerated. And although crime rates in the U.S. are comparable to the rest of the industrialized world. The U.S. incarcerates far more people than any other country. In fact, our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most other countries. Politicians were eager to jump on the anti-crime bandwagon. The problem is, like trickle-down economics, that it simply didn’t work, either.
Despite the dramatic increase in number of prisoners and the imposition of mandatory lengthy sentences, the number of crimes during the period rose dramatically. The number of violent crimes doubled from 1970 to 1998. Property crimes rose from 7.4 million to 11 million. Apparently longer prison sentences had little effect on discouraging criminal behavior.
What is ironic is that the recidivism rates of America’s penal system have always been truly appalling. But because prison release happens in the shadows, the public is largely unaware of it. Two reports on long-term recidivism show that almost 45% of former prisoners are re-arrested within one year of release, 68% are arrested within three years and 83% are re-arrested over the next nine years. Our prisons are simply warehouses that turn unreformed and unrepentant criminals back out onto the streets.
Caging miscreants so that they can no longer break the law is referred to as incapacitation. And given with the present situation, only a fool would deny that high-risk offenders should not be incapacitated. Incapacitation has been widely justified on the grounds that locking up offenders is effective at protecting public safety. This assertion deserves to be scrutinized. Is it rooted in scientific evidence or a reflection of mere hubris? And until we decide to address the causes of the problem, instead of merely treating the symptoms with expensive band aids, the situation will continue to fester and grow worse.
This whole business of courts and jails and prisons came out of an antiquated 16th and 17th century mentality where confinement became both the means and ends of criminal justice. In Victorian England if you stole, even if you were starving, you went to jail. End of story. European colonists in North America considered crime and sin the same thing. They believed evil spirits possessed those who did not conform to social norms or follow rules. To maintain social order in the settlements, persons who exhibited antisocial behavior had to be dealt with swiftly and harshly. The culture of the age was set on retribution.
The thing is, in what other governmental institution would we accept an 85% failure rate? If our schools, medical care, airlines, fire departments or police had a comparable failure rate, we would be out in the streets, screaming for change! That is in addition to the nearly $300 billion we spend annually to police and incarcerate criminals. I am certain that if the public were to realize the number of criminals turned out every year, and what the public was paying for this broken system, there would be a significant outcry for reform.
The big glitch in all this is that society, conservative politicians and our legal system has forced us to put the cart before the horse. We could address a great many of our problem children in grade school, before they become incorrigible cases. Instead, we wait until they become hardened criminals after their beliefs and attitudes have been set in stone. And intervention at that point is very difficult. And even then, the help we do offer is paltry, to say the least. Even so, in spite of the almost insurmountable barriers, some programs for convicts are showing positive results.
Domestic violence presents a little different picture. It is a crime, but instead of waiting for a violation, most jurisdictions now sanction intervention by social services when there is a threat of violence instead of waiting for the the actual commission of a crime. We need to recognize that this is the same rageful behavior that drives other crimes. I hope to demonstrate a connection that begins with school bullying, leads to petty crime, drug abuse, domestic violence, burglary and then often more serious illegal acts. Still, there is little real treatment for the source of the problem, just punishment.
If we were to chart the origins of violence and crime, we would begin with childhood feelings of shame and unworthiness. So yes, crime begins at home. in the 1980’s Cleckley identified a “cycle of violence” or pattern, found in family histories. A “cycle of violence” is where people who grow up with abuse or antisocial behavior in the home will be much more likely to mistreat their own children, who in turn will often follow the same pattern.
On our chart as our young person grows, we would either see the collapse into shame (to become unconsciously ashamed of the idea of someone taking care of us – we feel that we don’t deserve it. “I don’t want to bother anyone.” ”I don’t want to be a burden.” “I can’t show my struggle.” “It is safer not to need anyone.”) Or, in more of a masculine response, an escalation to expressions of dysfunctional behavior and bullying. Then as we progress further we often find sexual issues and alcohol or drug abuse. Think about it – why do youngsters act out? To get our attention – they are trying to tell us that something is wrong in their world.
If we further complicate the the situation by adding in neglect, outright abuse, rejection or abandonment, to the feelings of unlovability, we can create considerable rage on the part of our subject. That rage pushes some people past the social boundaries that restrain the rest of us. It can cause them to to take their rage out on society, “Violence has been done to me, you weren’t there to protect me, so fu@k you!” The incidence of crime in a society can be considered a measure of the care society members have for each other.
Usually it begins with shoplifting or petty theft. If the social conditions are right this can then escalate into gang activities like selling drugs, robbing convenience stores, stealing cars and burglary. (Initiation into some gangs requires the commission of a murder, by the way.) These feelings will more than likely migrate into substance abuse and domestic violence at home.
Over time, most criminals will stick with things like stealing cars, dealing drugs and robbing convenience stores. They maintain that the payoff for these activities is much better than having a regular job. The smarter ones will move up to crime management, the Mafia or maybe even white collar crime. If their inner turmoil is extreme, we end up with school shooters and serial killers.
Now the reaction of conservatives is that I am just another liberal bleeding heart. Conservatives, it seems, have a need to exact retribution for violations of the social order. In my 35 years of dealing with troubled people, I can tell you that EVERY ONE of the clients I have ever dealt with struggled with the same core issue. All the behaviors I describe have as a common root – a profound need to feel loved, at almost any price, and the rage that results from being repeatedly rebuffed. And this is all driven by a very wounded inner child.
If you go to an AA meeting or talk to gang members, if you listen carefully underneath the surface babble, you will hear over and over a profound and desperate longing to be loved and accepted. Gang members will tell you that the gang feels like family. Doesn’t that tell you something?
The point is that what these people need is help. And the most critical time for that assistance is when they are young, before their negative attitudes and beliefs become crystalized and hardened. We can identify a great many of the potential problems early in their careers in grade school. Speak to teachers, school counselors, ministers or policemen and they can identify the troubled kids, (future gang members) in their communities.
Troubled families could be offered guidance in parenting and the kids placed in programs that offer character building and provide community support. You go at this sideways through programs like Big Brothers or Big Sisters, organized basketball, martial arts – there are many ways to help these youngsters. The goal is to get these young people into programs that create self-esteem and self confidence, to give them support from others in the community besides their families. This is not a new idea.
By way of contrast, in some tribal communities, when an individual commits a “wrong,” the whole community comes together in a great “group hug,” encircling the perpetrator at the center, with statements of love and offers of support. It is amazing how this demonstration of community support, instead of ostracizing and condemning the individual, shares their pain and acknowledges the difficulty he or she is having, without judgement. The “problem” still must be addressed by the tribal elders, but all in all, this is a healing process, as opposed to our system of ostracism and condemnation.
But politicians are reluctant to propose invading the sanctity of the home to require an intervention, especially before a crime has been committed. This deprives them of the precious political cover they so desperately need. And if the approach doesn’t work, they will have expended huge amounts of political capital and left themselves vulnerable to attacks from law and order politicians on the right. The point is, that it is generally not considered worth the political risk. And organizations like the ACLU would have a field day over the violation of civil rights where there may be disfunction, but no crime.
And even if we were to merely offer help, some of these families are the least likely people in society to accept it. On the other hand, I have heard from many single family mothers who feel that their children are out of control and they do not know what to do with them. And the fact remains that some of the families in our communities are dysfunctional factories that crank out damaged children. And there are also families who fly under the radar, where substance abuse or mental illness drives dysfunctional parenting, but the children of these households will eventually pop to the surface, if we look for them.
If we fail to get to these young people before they become anti-social and hardened, some of them will be very difficult, if not impossible, to reach. We may have to incarcerate them, but still incarceration should still come with a large amount of social intervention and emotional support. As it stands, we not only have the process totally backwards, we do not even provide the vital and desperately needed social intervention.
Today we must deal with the reality that past officials have chosen for us. The consequences of not doing anything different today guarantees that the cycle will continue into the next generation. It is immoral for us to leave that legacy for those who will follow us.
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