One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when youโre part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.
It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.
Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "youโre going to regret this!โ
Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of โhow can this be solved in a way that is just and restorativeโ instead of โthe people who caused this are going to pay.โ
How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?
Please.
OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "youโre going to regret this!โ [emphasis mine]
Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you're saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you're an idiot and you should be punished, probably"
contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them
and if you don't think you should have to worry about that: why not?
I teach Intro to Psych, and Iโm lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:
When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesnโt work very well on animals (because it doesnโt), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.
And it wasnโt until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESNโT. And research absolutely backs that up.
Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesnโt mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And thatโs when you get any change at all.
Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.
Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isnโt nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)
If youโre telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESNโT.
I just want to add that this is just...so obviously true. I teach 4-year-olds English. That means that at the beginning of the year I get 13 little monkeys who don't speak English at all, and without using their mother tongue, I teach them English. Truly, it is like a magic trick, and even I am surprised at how they unbelievably fast they learn. By midyear we are fully having conversations.
When I started, I used to try to strongarm them into doing what I wanted in the classroom and had 'consequences' for 'misbehavior' like time-outs and telling their parents they were naughty. But actually, you know, it was never that they were naughty, it's that they were 4, and new to classrooms, and maybe not quite ready to be there, and 'consequences' absolutely did not work at all, and mostly only revealed to them the limits of my authority. Punishing and cajoling them weakened my ability to manage my classroom, and it did not make them any more likely to engage with me or my planned agenda.
But here's the thing: 4-year-olds want to please you. They want to communicate with you! They are absolutely dying for you to love and approve of them. It's their biggest motivation in life to please and engage with you. Praising and encouraging them, laughing at their jokes and making them feel like they please you? That fucking works. That is what gets them to go along with me and engage with my plans. There are no punishments in my class, only a recognition of the fact that they are who they are, and they are fucking babies. I convince them to join me responsively, and it works. Every year my classes get better and more successful because I no longer fight or punish them.
Like, I'm not a scientist or a psychologist, but... Punishment is a tool of hierarchy and a sign of weakness.
Oh man this happened to come back across my dash at the right time, bc I just had this conversation in my class on Mondayโฆ
We were talking about motivation, and I was showing research on how much more effective meeting peopleโs needs is than punishment, like the effect of giving people a steady job along with their therapy on drug addiction rates or the effect of UBI on crime rates (in one study it dropped all crime by 20% and violent crime by like 27%, when three strikes laws only drop it by like 2-3%).
And one girl asked if we know all of this works, why donโt we do it? Why do we rely on prison and other ineffective and expensive punishments? And well, first I had to say that this is a very big question whose answer has to do with a lot of societal systems interacting, and not something I can give you a quick one-slide answer to in an intro-level class. But aside from that, a lot of people are just more focused on retribution and criminals โgetting what they deserveโ than on actually reducing crime. And the reasons for that are also complex, but in the end it often just feels good to make someone โpayโ for what theyโve done, and we as a society let ourselves be distracted by that.
I love this entire post and I am kissing it on the mouth and I would like to add the story I always think about when this discussion happens
Suppose a hypothetical man who, at twenty-five, murders someone. Maybe his parent, for the inheritance. Maybe a business rival. Maybe his wife or girlfriend, accidentally out of anger or jealousy; doesn't matter, cool story still murder. And he doesn't get caught. And he gets married and has kids and coaches the local softball team and helps start a homeless shelter and is overall a good and upstanding citizen and never commits another crime, at least not one more serious than a traffic violation. And then, half a century later, when he's 75 and planning his granddaughter's wedding, incontrovertible proof of his murder is uncovered. Maybe DNA has been invented, maybe a video turns up, whatever, it's absolutely clear that it was definitely him.
Do you just...not do anything about this? Do you just say, "well, he's not gonna do it again, we might as well let it go"?
This is not a gotcha; I believe in non-retributive justice! From a practical perspective it's pretty clear he isn't a risk to society, he's clearly already learned that murder is a bad way to solve problems, what else could you possibly do to the guy that would have any purpose other than vengeance? But oh man it feels BAD to not do anything. It feels like saying "it's cool to do a crime if you can get away with it long enough."
And that's the thing you need to reckon with when overhauling your ideas of justice and punishment: this is not purely a cultural bias towards sin and punishment, but a deep seated human inclination. In no society in human history has "it's cool if you never do it again" been a working legal principle.
(It sounds weirdly cold to modern sensibilities but I've always liked the weregild approach to justice, which is still the one we use for deaths caused by governments or corporations - if you take someone away from their family, you've taken not only an irreplaceable person but a source of material support and resources, and the person is irreplaceable but you can pay them for the support they no longer have. Obviously this doesn't work if you have massive income inequality, but if you don't, it seems better than most of what we do today.)
