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

Social Research, Fall, 2000 by James Gilligan

From the time I first began working clinically with violent people in a prison mental health service, I realized that I had never met a group of people who had been punished as severely, from so early on, as this group had. The first prison inmate whom I ever saw in psychotherapy, a man who had committed several brutal muggings and armed robberies, described how his father had beaten everyone in his family--himself, his mother, his siblings. I thought at first that he was merely a "con artist" who was trying to enlist my sympathy and give himself an excuse for his antisocial behavior. Then I discovered that his father was also in prison--for the crime of murdering his own daughter (my patient's sister). So I learned that whether or not he was untrustworthy in many other respects, on this subject he was not merely telling the truth, he was describing something that had been proven "beyond a reasonable doubt" in a court of law.

Another prisoner's body was covered by scars from scalding water his mother had thrown on him repeatedly during his childhood to discipline him. A third inmate's parents had punished him by locking him into an empty icebox for hours; although he did not die, he was there long enough that he suffered brain damage from anoxia. Another man, who had committed a terrible rape and murder, came into my office in the prison mental health service after he was convicted for his crime, and I noticed that he had small scars, about the size of a dime, on his wrists and ankles. I asked him what had caused them, and he said, "That is where my mother shot me." I asked him what he meant, and he described how his mother, whenever she wanted to punish him, would not merely spank him. She would take out her pistol and shoot him--not where it would kill him, but where it would "teach him a lesson." And of course it did teach him a lesson--that that is how you treat other people. (Not surprisingly, this student, like many students, surpassed his teacher; he did go on to kill those whom he was punishing. Perhaps he was also influenced by the fact that he had seen his father killed in front of his eyes by two relatives ... thus learning that that is how to treat people when you become an adult.)

Another inmate was a multiple murderer who had killed several people in his home town in a southwestern state, and then continued to kill people--his fellow inmates--after a race war erupted in the prison to which he had been sentenced. At that point he was transferred to the Massachusetts prison system, in exchange for a prisoner whom Massachusetts wanted out of its prison system, and entered the mental health program I directed there (following which he has remained completely non-violent). In exploring the roots of his violence, he described how as a child his mother had repeatedly assaulted him by throwing him out the window, attacking him in his sleep with an axe, setting him on fire, and on and on. After recounting this, he stated, more bemusedly than with anger, "I guess she wanted to kill me--but I just didn't die." But of course what he learned from these experiences was to kill other people.