Here's another creative vision.
This week's thought experiment isn't terribly deep philosophically, but I loved it because it gave me a chance to watch a classic movie from a genius director. It's amazing what you can do with creative vision.
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The Home Secretary had been told in no uncertain terms that his plan was "politically unacceptable." But just because it was similar to something a well-known novelist had described in a work of dystopic fiction, that was no reason to dismiss it out of hand.
Like the Ludivico process in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the new Crime Aversion Therapy programme took repeat offenders through an unpleasant, though not lengthy, treatment that left them repulsed by the very thought of the types of crime they had committed.
To the Home Secretary it seemed not so much a win-win situation, as a win-win-win one: the taxpayer won, as treatment was cheaper than prolonged and repeated imprisonment; the criminal won, as life was better outside than inside prison; and society won, because previously troublesome blights on the community were turned into law-abiding citizens.
And yet the civil liberties brigade bleated on about "brainwashing" and denying the essential liberty and dignity of the individual—even though the programme was entirely voluntary. What, thought the Home Secretary, was there to object to?
Source: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1962.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 235.
---------------------------------------------------
At first blush, this new Crime Aversion Therapy may seem unobjectionable. The treatment is effective and voluntary, it is presumably reversible, and from a utilitarian perspective it benefits everyone involved. In the movie, however, we see some critiques and downsides that must be addressed if we want to fully endorse the procedure. As I watched the film last night, I noted five different issues that I think must be considered:
Let's tackle these one at a time.
First, anyone who raises the retribution objection is not looking forward. When I blogged about my thoughts on Justice, I noted this theoretical starting point:
Since justice is a public good, its provider—the government—must have a monopoly on force. Progress is maximized in the long-term when there is freedom from oppression and maximum participation (i.e. a minimization of criminals who in essence defect from society). In a cooperative society concerned with the long-term survival of the species, which understands the workings of evolution and therefore insists on tit for tat justice and never allowing cheaters to win, the various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: restoration, rehabilitation, and finally incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term.
Second, experimentation on prisoners is indeed problematic because "their consent cannot be said to be completely voluntary, due to their compromised and dependant status." However, there are established guidelines that can be followed about how to involve prisoners in research, so it can be done. While Alex was clearly not given such considerate treatment to ensure that his participation was completely voluntary, that doesn't mean we couldn't do better in our thought experiment.
Third, the fear of taking away the prisoner's free will to choose to do wrong seems misdirected when you consider the alternative of incapacitation through incarceration. The criminal cannot be allowed to continue committing crimes in a functioning society, so either he (and it's overwhelmingly "he" according to crime statistics) loses his freedom to take some outside actions, or he loses his freedom to take all outside action. If other forms of rehabilitation do not work, then we can see why a criminal would voluntarily choose the new Crime Aversion Therapy. Once one drops the invented moralistic worries about gods demanding that their creations have free will to choose to love and obey them, then rational decisions can be made about what actually works.
Fourth, the incomplete objection may apply to Alex, but since I don't consider suicide to be a criminal offence, his powers to hurt others actually seems limited to the non-criminal variety. In our theoretical realm of philosophical thought experiments, perhaps we can stipulate that the Crime Aversion Therapy is more accurate than the Ludovico process in A Clockwork Orange.
Finally, however, we come to the most difficult objection—that of Alex's diminished capacities. In A Clockwork Orange, we just don't see anywhere near the level of precision required to stop Alex from committing crimes while still allowing him to be able to defend himself from others' crimes. This is a problem as it's a fundamental feature of humankind that I think would be very difficult to reprogram. In my journal article on morality, I wrote:
Our intuitive moral feelings are often in conflict because of the debates that rage within us regarding the self vs. society, or society vs. the environment, or the short-term vs. the long-term, or just the fundamental choices between competition and cooperation. This is what drives the two faces of humankind. We are neither inherently good nor inherently evil—we are capable of both, a flexibility we must have in order to have the power to choose between alternate paths that are right some of the time and wrong some of the time.
This power to do the exact same thing for evil or for good is a flexibility that makes us humans extremely adaptive. It makes us extremely dangerous too. But taking away that power without taking away our flexibility seems impossible. I know I closed Monday's post on this thought experiment, though, by saying the following:
We're told by philosophers that the rules for their thought experiments demand that we have to suspend concern about the likelihood of something happening, and that we must consider the events depicted as long as there is even a slim chance that the events in the thought experiment could occur. It seems to me that the development of a scientific treatment that could strongly influence the future behaviour of people is at least theoretically possible.
So, if some new Crime Aversion Therapy comes along that really can overcome all the objections I've listed, then sure, why not? We non-criminals seem to successfully navigate moral dilemmas all the time, so why can't we figure out how that happens and replicate it for habitual criminals? Again, I think this is exceedingly difficult, but not impossible. In the meantime, we're left wondering what reader John A. Johnson asked about in the comments to my blog post on Monday:
Indeed, we cannot foresee all of the consequences of techniques to reform criminals, but what is the alternative? To try nothing at all? Clearly, the criminal justice system is already engaging in practices that it hopes will reform criminals.
John's right so let's close this fun thought experiment by looking at some of the options we already have for improving the criminal justice system. Currently, the best practices are being seen in something that criminologists call Scandinavian Exceptionalism. One way to see the outcome of this exceptionalism is in the relative numbers of the prison population rate per 100,000 of national population in economically developed countries:
Scandinavian Countries
Sweden 60
Norway 72
Denmark 73
Finland 58
Iceland 47
European Countries
England & Wales 148
Germany 78
Italy 100
Belgium 108
Spain 144
North American Countries
Canada 142
U.S.A. 707
The Scandinavian countries have roughly half as many incarcerations as European countries. And OVER TEN TIMES FEWER than those in America! (This is what American exceptionalism really looks like.) But there's a differences in prison conditions too:
(1) Nordic prisons tend to be smaller,
(2) officer/inmate relations are better and more egalitarian,
(3) the quality of prison life is better (the quality of the food provided, the hygienic conditions, the amount of personal space and the quality of visiting arrangements are all superior in the Nordic prisons),
(4) prison officers are better trained, and
(5) prisoners in the Nordic countries are more likely to be involved in education or vocational training programs that are more often directed at preparing them for life after release.
These are all part of a holistically different approach to social and criminal justice that just works. Recidivism rates—the focus of this week's thought experiment—are 20-30% in Norway vs. 40-70% in the United States. So until we can get the (near) impossible of a Criminal Aversion Therapy that works, we should really look at Why Scandinavian Prisons are Superior. Please follow that link to read an outstanding article in The Atlantic on this issue, but here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:
Powerful. More powerful than Crime Aversion Therapy? Maybe not. But we already have it.
If only we'd use a little creative vision.
---------------------------------------------------
The Home Secretary had been told in no uncertain terms that his plan was "politically unacceptable." But just because it was similar to something a well-known novelist had described in a work of dystopic fiction, that was no reason to dismiss it out of hand.
Like the Ludivico process in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the new Crime Aversion Therapy programme took repeat offenders through an unpleasant, though not lengthy, treatment that left them repulsed by the very thought of the types of crime they had committed.
To the Home Secretary it seemed not so much a win-win situation, as a win-win-win one: the taxpayer won, as treatment was cheaper than prolonged and repeated imprisonment; the criminal won, as life was better outside than inside prison; and society won, because previously troublesome blights on the community were turned into law-abiding citizens.
And yet the civil liberties brigade bleated on about "brainwashing" and denying the essential liberty and dignity of the individual—even though the programme was entirely voluntary. What, thought the Home Secretary, was there to object to?
Source: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1962.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 235.
---------------------------------------------------
At first blush, this new Crime Aversion Therapy may seem unobjectionable. The treatment is effective and voluntary, it is presumably reversible, and from a utilitarian perspective it benefits everyone involved. In the movie, however, we see some critiques and downsides that must be addressed if we want to fully endorse the procedure. As I watched the film last night, I noted five different issues that I think must be considered:
- The Retribution Objection — One of the guards in the film was upset that Alex (the main character who was jailed for murder) was going to be let free so soon after his crime. He thought there should be "an eye for an eye." Otherwise it was "brutally unjust" to the victims of the crime. Later, when the unintended consequence of ruining Beethoven for Alex is discovered, the same guard comforts himself by saying, "Oh well. Can't be helped. That's the punishment element I guess."
- The Voluntary Objection — When Alex is officially presented with paperwork to go through with his treatment, he is screamed at by one of the guards who says, "Don't read it! Just sign it!"
- The Free Will Objection — The prison chaplain questioned the outcome of such a treatment. He asked, "Does it really make a man good? A man must choose to be good. Otherwise he is not a man." Similarly, someone at Alex's post-treatment demonstration asks about choice, and worries that Alex can't choose.
- The Incomplete Objection — Once Alex returns home, he discovers his old room has been rented out. He storms off after a fight and gives his parents a major guilt trip. He can still be verbally cruel to others. Later when he is being tortured by someone playing Beethoven's 9th symphony, Alex tries to commit suicide by jumping out a window. He can still be violent towards himself.
- The Diminished Objection — Post treatment, Alex is first tested in front of an audience by having a man beat him up and force him to lick his shoe. Alex cannot fight back. A naked woman approaches him willingly--but he cannot touch her. After his release, he tries to strike someone who is rude to him, but he gags and retches as soon as he raises his fist. A hobo he once beat up recognises him and leads a gang of homeless people to assault Alex, who can only lie there and take it. Policemen come to break up the scene, but they are old friends of Alex who have a grudge against him. They take him to the woods, beat him, and nearly drown him. Again, Alex cannot fight back.
Let's tackle these one at a time.
First, anyone who raises the retribution objection is not looking forward. When I blogged about my thoughts on Justice, I noted this theoretical starting point:
Since justice is a public good, its provider—the government—must have a monopoly on force. Progress is maximized in the long-term when there is freedom from oppression and maximum participation (i.e. a minimization of criminals who in essence defect from society). In a cooperative society concerned with the long-term survival of the species, which understands the workings of evolution and therefore insists on tit for tat justice and never allowing cheaters to win, the various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: restoration, rehabilitation, and finally incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term.
Second, experimentation on prisoners is indeed problematic because "their consent cannot be said to be completely voluntary, due to their compromised and dependant status." However, there are established guidelines that can be followed about how to involve prisoners in research, so it can be done. While Alex was clearly not given such considerate treatment to ensure that his participation was completely voluntary, that doesn't mean we couldn't do better in our thought experiment.
Third, the fear of taking away the prisoner's free will to choose to do wrong seems misdirected when you consider the alternative of incapacitation through incarceration. The criminal cannot be allowed to continue committing crimes in a functioning society, so either he (and it's overwhelmingly "he" according to crime statistics) loses his freedom to take some outside actions, or he loses his freedom to take all outside action. If other forms of rehabilitation do not work, then we can see why a criminal would voluntarily choose the new Crime Aversion Therapy. Once one drops the invented moralistic worries about gods demanding that their creations have free will to choose to love and obey them, then rational decisions can be made about what actually works.
Fourth, the incomplete objection may apply to Alex, but since I don't consider suicide to be a criminal offence, his powers to hurt others actually seems limited to the non-criminal variety. In our theoretical realm of philosophical thought experiments, perhaps we can stipulate that the Crime Aversion Therapy is more accurate than the Ludovico process in A Clockwork Orange.
Finally, however, we come to the most difficult objection—that of Alex's diminished capacities. In A Clockwork Orange, we just don't see anywhere near the level of precision required to stop Alex from committing crimes while still allowing him to be able to defend himself from others' crimes. This is a problem as it's a fundamental feature of humankind that I think would be very difficult to reprogram. In my journal article on morality, I wrote:
Our intuitive moral feelings are often in conflict because of the debates that rage within us regarding the self vs. society, or society vs. the environment, or the short-term vs. the long-term, or just the fundamental choices between competition and cooperation. This is what drives the two faces of humankind. We are neither inherently good nor inherently evil—we are capable of both, a flexibility we must have in order to have the power to choose between alternate paths that are right some of the time and wrong some of the time.
This power to do the exact same thing for evil or for good is a flexibility that makes us humans extremely adaptive. It makes us extremely dangerous too. But taking away that power without taking away our flexibility seems impossible. I know I closed Monday's post on this thought experiment, though, by saying the following:
We're told by philosophers that the rules for their thought experiments demand that we have to suspend concern about the likelihood of something happening, and that we must consider the events depicted as long as there is even a slim chance that the events in the thought experiment could occur. It seems to me that the development of a scientific treatment that could strongly influence the future behaviour of people is at least theoretically possible.
So, if some new Crime Aversion Therapy comes along that really can overcome all the objections I've listed, then sure, why not? We non-criminals seem to successfully navigate moral dilemmas all the time, so why can't we figure out how that happens and replicate it for habitual criminals? Again, I think this is exceedingly difficult, but not impossible. In the meantime, we're left wondering what reader John A. Johnson asked about in the comments to my blog post on Monday:
Indeed, we cannot foresee all of the consequences of techniques to reform criminals, but what is the alternative? To try nothing at all? Clearly, the criminal justice system is already engaging in practices that it hopes will reform criminals.
John's right so let's close this fun thought experiment by looking at some of the options we already have for improving the criminal justice system. Currently, the best practices are being seen in something that criminologists call Scandinavian Exceptionalism. One way to see the outcome of this exceptionalism is in the relative numbers of the prison population rate per 100,000 of national population in economically developed countries:
Scandinavian Countries
Sweden 60
Norway 72
Denmark 73
Finland 58
Iceland 47
European Countries
England & Wales 148
Germany 78
Italy 100
Belgium 108
Spain 144
North American Countries
Canada 142
U.S.A. 707
The Scandinavian countries have roughly half as many incarcerations as European countries. And OVER TEN TIMES FEWER than those in America! (This is what American exceptionalism really looks like.) But there's a differences in prison conditions too:
(1) Nordic prisons tend to be smaller,
(2) officer/inmate relations are better and more egalitarian,
(3) the quality of prison life is better (the quality of the food provided, the hygienic conditions, the amount of personal space and the quality of visiting arrangements are all superior in the Nordic prisons),
(4) prison officers are better trained, and
(5) prisoners in the Nordic countries are more likely to be involved in education or vocational training programs that are more often directed at preparing them for life after release.
These are all part of a holistically different approach to social and criminal justice that just works. Recidivism rates—the focus of this week's thought experiment—are 20-30% in Norway vs. 40-70% in the United States. So until we can get the (near) impossible of a Criminal Aversion Therapy that works, we should really look at Why Scandinavian Prisons are Superior. Please follow that link to read an outstanding article in The Atlantic on this issue, but here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:
- Suomenlinna Island has hosted an “open” prison since 1971. The 95 male prisoners leave the prison grounds each day to do the township’s general maintenance or commute to the mainland for work or study. Serving time for theft, drug trafficking, assault, or murder, all the men here are on the verge of release. Cellblocks look like dorms at a state university. Though worse for wear, rooms feature flat-screen TVs, sound systems, and mini-refrigerators for the prisoners who can afford to rent them for prison-labor wages of 4.10 to 7.3 Euros per hour ($5.30 to $9.50). With electronic monitoring, prisoners are allowed to spend time with their families in Helsinki. Men here enjoy a screened barbecue pit, a gym, and a dining hall where prisoners and staff eat together. Prisoners throughout Scandinavia wear their own clothes. Officers wear navy slacks, powder-blue shirts, nametags and shoulder bars; but they carry no batons, handcuffs, Tasers or pepper-spray.
- An important caveat: Nordic prisons are not all open facilities. I’ve heard men describe Scandinavian closed-prison conditions in ways that echo those of the American prison where I have led a writing workshop since 2006: officials intent on making life onerous, long hours in lockup, arbitrarily enforced rules.
- The most profound difference is that correctional officers fill both rehabilitative and security roles. Each prisoner has a “contact officer” who monitors and helps advance progress toward return to the world outside—a practice introduced to help officers avoid the damage experienced by performing purely punitive functions: stress, hypertension, alcoholism, suicide, and other job-related hazards that today plague American corrections officers, who have an average life expectancy of 59.
- This is all possible because, throughout Scandinavia, criminal justice policy rarely enters political debate. Decisions about best practices are left to professionals in the field, who are often published criminologists and consult closely with academics. Sustaining the barrier between populist politics and results-based prison policy are media that don’t sensationalize crime—if they report it at all.
- Over the past four decades, Republicans and Democrats have waged a “tougher on crime than you” arms race built upon white unease with the disruption of the old racial order brought about by the civil rights and Black Power movements. Once segregation was declared unconstitutional and black activists began to demand equal rights, white fear called out for “law and order.” Seeking votes and profits, politicians and media have encouraged the white public’s worst fears of becoming the victims of black perpetrators. Under the guise of the wars on drugs, crime, and terror, the urban poor and disenfranchised, especially young black men, have been rounded up in mass numbers, largely for non-violent drug crimes, of which middle-class whites have been consistently shown to be equal perpetrators.
- In 1993, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie (a major influence on Scandinavian penal policy) had already unpacked this phenomenon. In Crime Control as Industry, Christie concluded that the more unlike oneself the imagined perpetrator of crime, the harsher the conditions one will agree to impose upon convicted criminals, and the greater the range of acts one will agree should be designated as crimes. More homogeneous nations institutionalize mercy, which is to say they attend more closely to the circumstances surrounding individual criminal acts. The opposite tendency, expressed in mandatory sentencing and indiscriminate “three strikes” laws, not only results from, but widens social distance. The harshness of the punishment that fearful voters are convinced is the only thing that works on people who don’t think or act like them becomes a measure of the moral distance between these voters and people identified as criminals.
- No imprisoned American has to be told she has been left to the whims of under-screened and under-trained staff, most of whom are also from impoverished circumstances. They see staff rewarded with promotion for harsh treatment of prisoners and on the way to solid pensions. They know that it doesn’t matter what potential for shame, for self-castigation, penitence, or desire to make amends resides inside any American prisoner. Parole decisions are made by political appointees who watch the backs of their patrons. The system itself breeds cynical resentment. Witnessing the humiliation, racism, and physical assault perpetrated against prisoners—by staff, or tolerated between prisoners—can overfill the psychological space where reflection and self-searching might occur.
- Now imagine yourself in a prison that commands a view from a tourist brochure. Your cell phone lies on a shelf, next to a TV and CD player, inside a prison that lets you go to paid work or study. There is no perimeter wall. Prison staff will help you with free-world social services to cover a missed month’s rent on your family’s apartment. Another will help you look for work, or for the next stage of education. Imagine yourself a prisoner who knows he is in prison for what he did, not because of his color or class, or because, lacking the resources for a proper defense, he plea-bargained under threat of near-geological years of incarceration. But also imagine living on this lovely island knowing, every minute of every day, that this is not your home, these people are not your family, your friends, your children, and you are always one misstep from a cell in a closed prison. You have strict curfews. In town you carry an electronic anklet. Yet nothing here feels unfair or unreasonable. You have, after all, committed a crime serious enough to make a range of other remedies untenable. Nothing you can see or touch or smell or taste, and no interaction with staff gives you anything to blame or resent about the system that brought you here. This is the polished glass nightmare. Every emotional discomfort, every moment of remorse that you might try to cover with resentment of the system, everything you try to grip onto to crawl away from personal responsibility slides back into the pit of the self. Judges and prosecutors are unelected professionals who are under political pressure only to minimize prison populations. The message everywhere you look and walk is the same. You did this to yourself.
Powerful. More powerful than Crime Aversion Therapy? Maybe not. But we already have it.
If only we'd use a little creative vision.
