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

Social Research, Fall, 2000 by James Gilligan

Using the average prison time that is served per violent crime as a measure, the National Academy of Sciences' Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior reached the same conclusion: that the tripling of this measure between 1975 and 1989 had had "Apparently, very little" effect on the rate of violent crime overall, which showed no evidence of any decline whatsoever. As they concluded, "if tripling the average length of incarceration per crime had a strong preventive effect, then violent crime rates should have declined in the absence of other relevant changes" (Reiss, 1993, p. 6).

What is clear is that the U.S. experience confirms what the Chairman of the European Council's expert committee on crime and punishment concluded in 1982: "there is no direct relation between the level of crime and the number of imprisonments or [the rate of imprisonment] at any particular point in time" (Hans Henrik Brydensholt, quoted in Christie, 1993, p. 34). That is one reason why the nations of Western Europe have chosen not to rely on imprisonment as their main tool for controlling crime; and that in turn is one reason why their rates of murder and other serious violent crimes are so much lower than ours.

Of course it is true that if we imprisoned all young men between the ages of 14 and 39, we would experience a massive drop in the rates of the kinds of violence that the law defines as criminal, since that is the group that commits almost all such violence. There was very little crime in Mussolini's Italy; indeed, he was the only Italian ruler who was able to control the Mafia. And there was very little crime in Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's Russia. If we created a police state, as those dictators did, and imprisoned enough people, we could conceivably diminish the amount of "criminal" violence in our society. One problem with that type of solution, however, is that the state can commit much more violence, and is much more dangerous, than all the so-called "criminals" put together. When the state has that much of a monopoly on both power and violence, the state itself becomes the criminal, and commits war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other forms of collective violence, rather than the sporadic individual crimes committed by individual murderers. And once a police state loses or relinquishes its power, all the social tensions that had been suppressed rather than resolved erupt in an explosion of violence. This can be seen in the Russian crime wave that followed the end of Stalinism, and the epidemic of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans after the end of Tito's dictatorship.

There is another field of research that also sheds light on the relationship between punishment and violence. We now have at least ninety years worth of research on child-rearing, focusing on the effects of different parenting and disciplinary practices on the development of moral reasoning, conscience, loyalty, honesty, violence and aggression, other antisocial behavior, and capacities for empathy and altruism, and so on. Child-rearing is such an inherently complicated and ambiguous enterprise, and involves so many thousands of different variables not all of which are possible to control, that it is not surprising that there are few findings from research that are consistently replicated. But there is one finding that has been so consistent that there is a substantial consensus among researchers. The more severely children are punished, the more violent they become--both during childhood itself, and later, in adulthood. For example, as Roger Brown summarized this research in a standard textbook on the subject,