Punishment and Violence: Is the Criminal Law Based on One Huge Mistake?

Social Research, Fall, 2000 by James Gilligan

There are many other confirming studies. The Gluecks (1950) found severe physical punishment to be one of the major factors associated with delinquency in young boys. Bandura and Walters (1959) found physical punishments and paternal rejection associated with experiencing less guilt, being hyperaggressive, and being in trouble with the law.... Furthermore, they found that "the fathers had been rejecting long before the boys became exceptionally aggressive" (1965, 388-389).

But why would this apparently paradoxical or counter-intuitive relationship exist between punishment and behavior? To answer that question, Brown begins by observing that

   This form of discipline has a peculiar and interesting property: it is
   itself an instance of the behavior it is designed to eradicate. Punishment,
   the response to aggression, is itself aggressive. What will the child
   learn? ... If ... he learns by imitating what others do, he may learn to be
   aggressive. He might even learn a subtler lesson that incorporates all the
   information: Do not be aggressive to parents, since that is punished, but
   do be aggressive to those smaller or subordinate to yourself as parents
   successfully do.

   ... [Many studies, e.g.,] Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1961, have demonstrated
   that children very readily imitate the aggressive actions of another person
   so we cannot doubt that punishing parents could create aggressive children.

   Whichever has priority in the child's history, punishment or
   aggressiveness, it seems likely that in a short time the two variables must
   constitute a mutually reinforcing system [i.e., a literally "vicious"
   cycle]. Punishment by angering the child and providing him with an
   aggressive model must increase his own aggression and that increase would
   stimulate the parents to further violence.

   Thinking of punishment as itself a form of aggression has suggested to us
   that punishment can engender aggression because it constitutes an imitable
   model of aggression. In a parallel manner the "technique" called
   "withdrawal of love" can be reconceived as a model of non-aggression under
   provocation.... [E.g.,] A parent who will not allow himself to hit a child
   or to scream at a child is nevertheless hurt, frustrated and angered....
   Taking care not to "blow up" [is itself a message].... the withdrawal of
   love can ... be described as an imitable model of non-aggression under
   stress, and imitation of the model would produce a non-aggressive child.

   What are the causes of psychopathy? ... The most reliable antecedent of
   adult psychopathy is ... [that] the psychopath was severely rejected by his
   parents and in many cases brutally beaten (McCord and McCord, 1956).

   ... Parents who beat their children for aggression intend to "stamp out"
   the aggression. The fact that the treatment does not work as intended
   suggests that the implicit learning theory is wrong. A beating may be
   regarded as an instance of the behavior it is supposed to stamp out. If
   children are more disposed to learn by imitation or example than by
   "stamping out" they ought to learn from a beating to beat. That seems to be
   roughly what happens (1956, 389).

   ... parents who beat their children for being aggressive nevertheless have
   aggressive children, in fact children more aggressive than those of parents
   who administer no beatings. This is not the way things should go if direct
   reward and punishment were the only determinants of behavior. It is the way
   things should go if children learn by example (1956, 395).

   ... aggressive children learn by the example of their parents and by the
   example of aggression shown by the mass media (1956, 396).