INDIVIDUALIZING VERSUS INDIVIDUATING
October 31, 2014
Ernst A. Wenk and Robert L.
Emrich published what remains for me the most authoritative study of the
potential for predicting individual behavior to this day: “Assaultive Youth: an
exploratory study of assaultive experience and assaultive potential of California
Youth Authority wards,” Journal of
Research in Crime and Delinquency 9 (July 1972), pp. 171-196. The 4,146 youths admitted to the CYA’s
Reception and Diagnostic Center 1964-65 were followed up for 15 months after
release on parole, when 104 of them became violent parole violators. The 104 violators and the rest of the sample
were randomly split in two. One half
were used to infer a weighted series of 18 variables predicting parole
violation, from prior history of violence to months incarcerated. The predictors were applied to the other
sample. False positives and false
negatives were calculated as successive predictor variables were added to
prediction equations. At all levels,
trade-offs between falsely predicting “recidivism” and failing to predict it
were substantial. More significantly,
the predictors added to the equation, the more errors there were overall—the
worse the trade-off. (I discuss the
significance of this study at length in chapter 10 of my 1980 Crime Control Strategies book.)
At the time the study was
published, I had just met and was about to become team-teacher with Leslie T.
Wilkins. Les and Herman Mannheim had won
the British Statistical Society’s research award for their study of Prediction Methods in Relation to Borstal
Training (HMSO, 1955). By the time I
met him, Les had long since renounced his own quest to predict behavior,
concentrating on decision-making. He was
working with Don Gottfredson to design the first federal parole guidelines
(which design later became perverted into parole prediction). My recollection is that Les gave me a reprint
of the Wenk and Emrich article the day I as a new assistant professor at
SUNY-Albany walked into Les’s office to introduce myself. He pointed out that he had written a foreword
to the article, which read in part:
Something different must be attempted
if we are to seek to control the behaviors we find repulsive….Perhaps this
study should be “the last word” for some time in the attempt to “predict”
violence potential for individuals.
Les got his two years of post-secondary
education in engineering during his period analyzing
plane
crashes for the Royal Air Force during World War II. As he explained the systems analysis he
applied, “the question was whether to reconfigure the instrument panel or
replace (i.e. blame) the pilot.” From
WWII he went to the Statistical Unit of the British Home Office, thence to the
UN research unit in Tokyo, thence to a brief stint in the closing days of the
School of Criminology at Berkeley, and thence to become a founding member of
the School of Criminal Justice at Albany in 1968, where we met and spent a lot
of time together for our four years together.
He was a true mentor.
Les taught me to recognize it
fundamental to statistics—generalizing from one situation or sample to a larger
population—rest on units of variance, which require that you have a sample of
at least three data. This took me back
to the beginning of my intro statistics course (in grad school): the probability
attached to any point on a sampling distribution is zero. Translated into human science, as E.F.
Schumacher (creator of the concept of “appropriate/intermediate” technology)
put it in Small is Beautiful: economics
as if people mattered, individual behavior is in principle unpredictable.
The dominant culture in my part
of the world is individualism.
Individualism is a paradox. On
one hand, as in blaming, holding accountable, holding liable, holding
responsible, punishing, rewarding, correcting, treating, disciplining, evaluating,
diagnosing and grading individuals as discrete bodies. On the other hand, it reduces each individual
to a classification based on prior behavior.
As individuals, at our scientific frontier, as in criminology, we seek
to correct that individual by evidence-based best practices, for what has
worked for more individuals who have the same profile, who are treated as “like
that” group of persons in the latest Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, or in that
“risk group.” As Les Wilkins pointed
out, this modeling of human behavior is deterministic, as against the
stochastic modeling he found “useful.”
Survivors who had adapted to
severe, repeated childhood trauma by “splitting” into “multiple personalities”
or “dissociative identities,” many of whom had in safety “reintegrated” their
“parts” or “alters” with a core sense of self, made me aware that in myself, as
in other “onesies,” there are also many parts that are variously “triggered” by
circumstance, that may for example act out in anger, as though a piece of the
past is present. For the survivors,
healing entails learning to differentiate between the circumstances that
brought out angry or submissive alters in the past and this or that present
relationship. As they build trust in
some relations, to distinguish these relations from those they defended
themselves against, they come to know and let out other parts that can afford
compassion, empathy, responsiveness to the needs and sensibilities of others in
that context. More subtly, less
consciously perhaps, from moment to moment within relations let alone among our
relations, different parts of ourselves get triggered, or more consciously get
acted upon. As we get to know and accept
one another in many respects, as Nils Christie proposed in his 1981 book Limits to Pain, we become less capable of
pigeonholing what kind of person we are dealing with, in particular less
capable of inflicting pain or punishment on them for being a certain kind of
person. In Christie’s terms, we become
less able to punish (or for that matter elevate or reward) someone as that kind
of person. Placing limits on the pain or
control over others we exercise entails individuating our relationships, both
among and from moment to moment in each of our relations. As Les Wilkins recognized, in matters of
conflict resolution, it is how the direction of our relations shifts moment to
moment—apart or together—here and now rather than there and then. In my criminological career, I have most
strikingly noticed this in the many relationships I have had with
(ex-)prisoners. In my first year as a
student public defender in law school, I had had the uncomfortable duty of
doing intake interviews with detainees, which of course, began with offense
charged and prior record. And so, by the
time I met Fred Villaume who volunteered to teach a “project group” in my
criminology class the spring quarter of 1971, I figured I no more wanted to ask
an “offender” what s/he had done than I would ask anyone else I met about
her/his personal past. In Fred’s case,
we eventually learned a whole lot about each other’s past, including his
telling me, a year before he died, that he had shortly after we met killed a
guy and his buddies to save me from being killed as a suspected narc. If I am writing in support of a prisoner’s
release, knowing about the “offense” matters.
Otherwise, even in long-term relations, prior record may no more come up
for discussion any more than I would inquire freely into the past of any other
friend, let alone acquaintance. That is
not to say that I make friends with all prisoners I meet; I have had unpleasant
encounters among relations in all walks of life. I do know enough to know that some of my
friends fit the profile of the serious violent offender, and yet, at present,
whether in or out of prison, are gentle, honest and empathic with others as
they are with me. It reminds me of what Shadd
Maruna found in his 2001 study, Making
Good: how ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives, that those who made
it after release found parts of themselves with others that they liked better
than the parts associated with their incarceration. It is not that (ex-)prisoners become
different individuals; it is that they individuate, drawing on the parts of
themselves that enjoy requited honesty, trust, respect and support. This is individuation at a situational level.
Situational individuation
interacts with interpersonal individuation.
My parents, Harold B. and Pauline N. Pepinsky, taught me the lesson they
sought to teach in their 1954 book, Counseling:
Theory and Practice. In a truly
therapeutic relationship, therapists differentiate their own feelings, their
own sense of right and wrong, of good and bad, of reasonability and sanity
(which requires personal insight on their part), from those of their
clients. In all discourse, individuation
of others from ourselves is essential for honesty, for building and affirming
that relations are trustworthy as against telling others what you think they
want or need to hear.
What in child trauma survivors are called “multiple personalities” exist
more subtly in all of us. I find it rare
at best that what Robert K. Merton called “role sets” don’t exist—distinct
parts of ourselves, things we feel and express, at home, at work, at play, in
public… And different parts of our past
are triggered in some situations rather than others, with some people rather
than others. At all moments, individual
behavior becomes action, a vector of feeling and expression which reacts to an
interaction of relations past and present.
Whether within or among relations, any of us who has lived and feared
even the horrors of sadistic ritual torture, or any grievance, may respond to
offers of understanding, trust and acceptance in kind. That change of attitude and direction is not
a matter of learning a fast code of right and wrong, but of having one’s
awareness and concern for the effects of one’s reactions to others awakened and
returned. In matters of conflict and
human division (as I put it in a chapter of A
Criminologist’s Quest for Peace, 2001, under books at www.critcrim.org), in the face of violence,
empathy works, obedience doesn’t.
Empathy presupposes that at any moment, we individuate our circumstances
and ourselves, treating one another as unique rather than as a defective or
otherwise categorized, unitary individuals.
Becoming safe to others entails
becoming safe with others, entails a sense of belonging with and being accepted by at least a single other
person for being one’s honest self rather than having to defend one’s honest
existence. That in turn entails
forsaking trying to change a whole person or personality, for coming to terms
with matters at hand, which trust itself permits. I see individuating ourselves and others as
being moved by the force of human connection I call love, implying a
give-and-take process of interaction I call peacemaking. I see human interaction as a balance of that
force against the force I call fear, when habituated or institutionalized I
call violence, doing what we feel needs to get done, must be done, or
minimally, should be done. That includes
individualizing social problems—reducing conflict and discord to separating,
correcting, incapacitating, or eliminating entire individuals for their
misdeeds. In the field of criminology,
we seek to suppress target behaviors by an array of physical and medical (from
urinalyses to psycho-tropics) means of confinement, or in the extreme,
extermination. When confinement or
medical suppression ends (professional relations end as well), recidivism is
the individual’s “responsibility,” requiring further confinement or extended
probation.
Fortunately, individualization
cannot entirely suppression individuation within controllers, their
humanity. And so among prisoners as
among survivors of extreme childhood trauma I have known, moments of compassion
and empathy among a range of professionals (other prisoners and students too)
are recognized as catalysts for beginning to form safe and lasting sets of
relations, to find “normal,” fulfilling lives.
Or coming out of prison, some create those lives in spite of the time
they served—often a combination of the two.
The problem with reshaping
people as individual machine models is, as Newton tells us, entropy—distrust,
secrecy, anger, depression, dissociation, manifestations of fear and human
separation. Each time we add an “evidence-based”
program to (re)habilitate offenders as a group, we create failures we call
recidivists or label relapsed. In the
1970s, these failures in a wave of “exemplary” “diversion programs” were
compounded as by three-strikes laws to make the world’s third highest
incarcerator what we now call “mass incarceration.” An expanded, increasingly for-profit
privatized “corrections” industry is increasingly impervious to abolition, if
ever it was. Today US prison populations
are falling some, but we are creating the human industrial fodder for future
record incarceration rates. In the past,
as in the former Soviet region, the only way the upward cycle has been broken
is by mass amnesty or clemency. From
stigmatizing to credentialing one another as by standardizing education, we in
the US are locked tightly into a culture of individualizing our social problems
and our successes…just not entirely.
When we individualize, we treat
one another as categories. When we
individuate, we engage in a process of mutual discovery, mutual learning, about
issues and problems at hand, as in circle processes. In this process that I call “peacemaking,” coming
to terms is a journey with no pre-conceived end, except to build and requite
trust. The less time and attention we
give to individualizing one another, the more time and room we have to
individuate. Love and peace, hal
