WHY I STUDY CRIME AND CRIMINALITY NO MORE
September 19, 2014
To prepare a skype visit to a
class, it occurred to me to look at the opening chapter in a 2001 book, A Criminologist’s Quest for Peace, that
Ken Mentor was kind enough to publish for free download, where it remains, at www.critcrim.org. In it, I trace research that led me to
conclude that crime and criminality trends told us about the behavior of the
crime/criminality recorders, and to adopt instead what I came to call my
peacemaking paradigm—whether in their relations, on balance, people were driven
apart by fear, or drawn together in a process I called “responsiveness,” later “peacemaking.” I’ve mentioned and argued for paradigm shift
in criminology many times, but I think this is the most detailed, well
referenced account of how I learned to make the change.
In this blog post, I will attach
pdf files of the chapter and the book references when I circulate it. I will see whether my blog itself will handle
an upload of both documents here in this text.
Otherwise, those who receive this blog post without the attachments can
simply go to critcrim.org.
The chapter makes my case for
paradigm change as fully as any I can recall.
Anyone care to join me?:-) love
and peace, hal
A CRIMINOLOGIST'S
QUEST FOR PEACE
Hal Pepinsky
Chapter 1: LIVING CRIMINOLOGICALLY WITH NAKED EMPERORS* CRIMINOLOGY
AS PEACEMAKING
It has been just
over a decade since I turned explicitly to studying how to make peace instead
of making war on crime and violence. Criminology and criminal justice are
essentially negative enterprises,
about what not to do, about why we do what we should not, about how to stop us
from doing wrong. In studying peacemaking I sought to understand how we get the
kind of human relations we do want. Essentially, I seek to
understand how we become safer in the face of violence. I want to find out what
safety is and how we get more of it with one another. There are many other
words we use for the opposite of being enmeshed in violence--security,
community, compassion...I like "safety" because it is such a plain,
blunt word.
I began my explicit inquiry into
peacemaking by stating a theory that peace supplanted violence whenever
interaction became "responsive" (Pepinsky 1988; expanded in Pepinsky
1991). While violence and the fear and pain it engenders came from people
pursuing their own independent agendas and objectives regardless of how others
were affected, responsiveness was interaction in which actors' personal agendas
shifted constantly to accommodate others' feelings and needs. Responsiveness
was how people acted in participatory democracy, which Paul Jesilow and I had
earlier proposed as the way to "make people behave" instead of
punishing criminality (Pepinsky and Jesilow 1992 [1984]: 127-38).
Thus enterprise
would become safer and more honest if tax incentives and other subsidies
supported worker/client-democratically-owned-and-operated businesses; prisons
would become safer if democratically governed as Tom Murton (1968)--who became
"Brubaker" in a movie--did in the mid-sixties in Arkansas; and
responses to crime and violence like Victim Offender Reconciliation Programs
(VORPS) built safety by encouraging victims and offenders to have community
support in creating their own ways into secure community life--as Christie
(1977) had put it, to own their own disputes. In all our proposals,
democratization was the path to peace.
In Montreal in
1987 at the Third International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA III), I
was also made aware of three parallel streams of thought in action: radical feminism as Kay Harris had propounded
it at ICOPA II in 1985 (revised statement in Harris 1991),
"abolitionism" as propounded by Knopp et al. in 1976 as represented
in her
Safer Society
Program for victims of sexual violence and for offenders (Knopp 1991), and
"restorative justice" beginning under Mennonite auspices with
establishment of VORPs first in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1974, and in Elkhart,
Indiana, in 1977 (Zehr 1990). At about this time, aboriginal alternatives to
prosecution and punishment were beginning to gain recognition; in 1989, New
Zealand adopted Maori ways, offering "family group councils" to all
young people petitioned into juvenile court for delinquency--circles including
family and friends of victims and offenders, sitting in a circle with officials
and lawyers, convened by a social worker (Consedine 1999). All these strands
focused on the harm done by crime and violence in tearing both victims and
offenders from reciprocally trustworthy relations with others, on trying to
repair the damage caused by violence rather than focusing on identifying,
isolating, separating, and punishing the offender. This body of work has been
summarized in a special issue on "The Phenomenon of Restorative
Justice," inaugurating the journal Contemporary Justice Review (Sullivan 1998).
Richard Quinney,
I, and our contributors began drawing these strands of thought and action
together into a field we labeled Criminology as Peacemaking (Pepinsky and Quinney 1991). I have
since tried to gain understanding of basic mundane elements by which people
make peace in place of violence.
I propose from a peacemaking point
of view that we become safe with others essentially when our relations become
empathic, while from a warmaking point of view safety lies in making
individuals perfectly obedient to the commands of proper authorities. I am not
a prophet, and so I don't propose whether at any moment we will do what makes
us safer rather than threatening us with greater violence. I discuss instead
what we can do. I begin with an
invitation to shift the criterion we use to measure progress, from whether
crime and criminality are reduced, to whether our daily lives become more
democratic.
OUR EMPERORS HAVE NO CLOTHES
Rudolph Giuliani was elected Mayor
of New York in 1993, largely on his reputation as a crime-fighting U.S.
Attorney. Under his administration, the police department has instituted a
computer crime-tracking system, CompStat. Weekly meetings are held in each
police precinct to review the latest crime figures. It is made clear to
precinct commanders that they are responsible for doing what it takes to reduce
crime in their territories, or else they will be replaced. This program has
become a model for other big cities nationwide. Mayor Giuliani joins his police
in claiming that since 1993 under his administration, crime including murder
has dramatically declined (see,
e.g.,
www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/om/html/97/sp393-97.html). I
don't believe
it. Chambliss (1999:
43) has argued
that these reductions, including murder, are artifacts of a policy of making
police record less of the crime reported to them. He cites Chilton's finding
that when murder figures first went down, reported suicides (excludable from
"criminal homicide" under F.B.I. guidelines) rose 41 percent
(Chambliss and Chilton, 1998).
I join Chambliss and Chilton in
believing that these crime reductions and comparable
reductions across the country are
artifacts of changes in the organization of policing and police crime
reporting. In the last of a series of field studies of police crime recording I
did in the United States and finally in England, I concluded that
police-recorded crime trends could consistently be explained as trends in
police behavior rather than as trends in the criminality of the public. Having
earlier reviewed the full range of measures of crime and criminality (Pepinsky,
1980), I supposed that trends in measures of crime other than crimes known to
the police and police arrests, notably in victimization and self-report
surveys, would be more an index of changes in surveyor behavior than in
behavior of the surveyed. I suspected then for instance, as I do now, that
continuing decreases in victimization rates result in surveys becoming routine,
and therefore in interviewers and their supervisors becoming steadily,
marginally, less diligent about prodding reports out of survey respondents. I
therefore called for a general moratorium on crime counting (Pepinsky, 1987).
It is often charged that
criminologists are passive servants of state power. One respect in which the
charge holds true is that from the onset of the so-called scientific study of
crime in the nineteenth century, criminologists have relied heavily on a net of
official determinations of where the crime is and who the criminals are, that
has widened from data on prisoners to victim surveys and government-funded
self-report surveys (Pepinsky, 1976). The foundation for many contemporary
explanations of criminality was laid in early studies of how prisoners and then
convicts differed from people who were not in prison. As I wrote my 1980 book
surveying measures of crime and criminality, I was led to suppose that truisms
arising from this early work-such as that criminals came mostly from poor
dysfunctional families-have become so deeply embedded in our culture that even
children responding to self-report questionnaires will respond stereotypically:
A child who gets in trouble in school will report defiance of parents and will
report offenses more than the straight-A student, who will tend to report an
ideal homelife and to deny breaking the law. Poverty may cause crime and
violence, but so do wealth, power and privilege, which increase our capacity
and stake in hiding our own offending and our victimization, especially our
victimization by our nearest and dearest.
So it is that we continue to
believe that those who aim state crime-fighting apparatus at poverty-ridden
ghettoes are aiming at the heart of the crime problem. So it is that we bow to
the claims of emperors like Mayor Giuliani that they are cloaked in the garb
that saves us from crime. So I continue to believe that this garb is an
illusion. These emperors have no clothes. The problem is not that our emperors
are doing a bad job of counting crime. It is that counting crime and personal
violence is an impossible job, and that we make a mistake in believing that it
can and should be done at all.
In this
chapter I recount why the task of crime counting is impossible, and outline the
criterion for the study and control of crime and personal violence that I have
adopted instead.
WHY
CRIME AND CRIMINALITY CANNOT BE COUNTED
Counting
criminality rests on counting crime. An offender is someone who has somehow
been counted to have committed a crime. A recidivist is counted to have
committed a further crime. A career offender is counted to have committed
several offenses. If we cannot count crime,
we cannot count criminality.
Even if we correct for class bias and political instrumentalism in how
we count crime, two obstacles still stand in the way.
One obstacle is that in all
probability the most damaging and traumatizing crime and personal violence, and
the crime and violence which defy stereotypes of who criminals are and where
crime is committed, is the most deeply hidden. To conclude that we know that
there is less crime in one setting than another, or that one of us is less
criminal than another, may just mean that we know less about the one than the other.
The other obstacle is that it
is not the materiality of an act which makes crime or personal violence
repugnant, but the intent which we perceive to lie behind the act. It is not as
we generally suppose behavior itself which makes us fear and reject what we
call crime and personal violence, but the motives we perceive to underlie the
behavior.
Hidden Crime
I have called the first obstacle
"the violence of silence" (Pepinsky, 1988). It has long been apparent
to many criminologists that the loss of life and property caused by elite crime
far exceeds the losses from what we call street crime (Reiman, 1997). When I
first wrote about the violence of silence, I primarily had white-collar and
state crime in mind (Pepinsky and Jesilow, 1992 [1984]), although when I coined
"the violence of silence" I mentioned that Norwegians had cautioned
me that if I perceived life in their country to be relatively free of violence,
I just did not know Norwegians well enough. Then, in 1992, I began to be
introduced to a multitude of cases in which children, adult survivors, and
their advocates including therapists, were reporting violence against children
in all kinds of places normally presumed
safe, such as the homes of highly regarded prominent members of communities, or
schools, or churches (as described for instance in Pepinsky, 2000). I reviewed
mounds of documentation in numerous cases, including photos and medical
reports, and testified in several child custody disputes. Generally speaking,
the violence I joined others in believing to have happened included sexual
assault. On occasion, it involved ritual torture which even extended to
apparent homicide and cannibalism. I joined others like Whitfield (1995) and
Sinason (1994) in finding the vast majority of the reports I heard and read to
be credible and often amply corroborated. I joined others like Herman (1992)
and Freyd (1996) in believing that the trauma in these cases, involving as it
did betrayal of trust by those upon whom children heavily depended, runs far
deeper than the trauma left by what we regard as typical street violence.
These perceptions are hotly debated. Many would refer to
the wave of reports of "child
abuse," "incest,"
and "ritual abuse" that has arisen since C. Henry Kempe et al. (1962)
found many more than one child in a million to be battered to be mass hysteria,
a moral panic, a witchhunt. I have bristled
at such charges,
and indeed been profoundly upset
in particular cases when judges and others have rejected what I
considered overwhelming evidence for instance that a father was sodomizing a
child, or have said that memories and reports of victimization which arose
independently must have been implanted by therapists or mothers. My frustration
has been compounded by recognition that the more gruesome and serious the
violence would be if reports were believed, the greater people's resistance to
hearing, let alone accepting, what I regard as hard evidence. As time passes,
my appreciation grows for the wisdom of a therapist's advice: "Don't try to make people believe the
violence is happening, Hal." I have
learned greater humility about my own beliefs as to who, where and how much
personal, criminal violence is occurring, let along about my capacity to
"prove" to others that what I believe is true.
I also give myself credit for
examining closely not only what others report, but what I know and believe even
about my own childhood. As many of my students do in classes on violence
against children, even after years of psychotherapeutic self-examination
(learning like Fellman, 1998), I feel profound gratitude for the gifts my own
parents and teachers gave me in childhood, and gratitude that they committed no
crimes against me. But I have also personally, let alone through reports of
others, come to believe that we all have layers of victimization that we deny
to ourselves and others unless and until we come to know a confidant a long
time. I contrast the awareness of traumatic human encounter I and especially
those I believe to be survivors of gross and close personal, criminal violence
have developed and shared, to the shallowness of encounters upon which
criminologically accepted reports of crime and criminality normally rest. If
someone older a child knows and depends upon for instance sexually fondles the
child and causes deepseated distress, how on earth could we expect the victim
or the offender to report it in a chance encounter with a stranger in a victim
or self-report survey? The closer to
home and more deeply traumatizing the crimes we suffer, the less likely the
crimes are to show up in our data sets-the more likely our data sets are to
confirm erroneous stereotypes as to where crime and criminality lie.
Perhaps sometime in centuries
to come we can plausibly conclude that we have uncovered the depth and breadth
of crime and violence in one another's personal lives. As of now, our counts of
crime and criminality barely skim our social surface, and are in all
probability heavily biased by stereotypes of race, class, gender, age, place,
and official prior record.
Shifts in Motivation
Count
The other obstacle to counting
crime and criminality is that behavioral definitions are distorted proxies for
the harm and threat which lead us to call action harmful, criminal or violent.
Defining this harm was a long, hard struggle for me. In my part of the world
where English common law prevails, we are taught that crimes have two
elements-an actus reus or harmful
act, done by someone with mens rea or a wrongful mind. Mens rea
is a fuzzy
concept. It is basically a state of mind which makes an actor condemnable for
doing what the law deems wrong or harmful. In law school we study what mens
rea is from cases in which actors are deemed not to have it-killing while
sleepwalking, or as a child less than 7 years of age for instance. Mens
rea is not clearly enough defined to pinpoint what makes an act
condemnable, but it does signify lawmakers' recognition that legal harm does
not lie in behavior alone.
I used to get fits of frustration
trying to define crime or violence in purely behavioral terms. Take shooting
and killing someone as an illustration. The shooting may be deemed murderous,
overreactive, accidental, excusable, justifiable, merciful, loving and kind, or
heroic. It is easy enough to compare attributions across cases and conclude
that these attributions are politically arbitrary (see Quinney, 1970).
Arbitrary as they may be, I could not help thinking that there was some
underlying human perception of threat and harm from which attributions of
wrongfulness and threat spring.
I ultimately derived my postulate
as to what this threat is from a combination of translation of English concepts
(responsibility, accountability, and liability) into Norwegian (ansvar)
and back into English (responsiveness), and from Buckminster Fuller's (1975/1979) operationalization
of "synergy" (Pepinsky, 1991).
These derivations proved hard or impossible for readers to follow. Here I try
another derivation which I hope is plainer and simpler.
On their face, burglary and rape
are two very different crimes, and yet victims and their advocates report a
reaction which in some respects is strikingly similar: Victims are left feeling
invaded, and unsafe. They fear a recurrence of the offense. They fear that in
encounters with offenders, the offenders could kill them. The victims are in
other words mortally afraid. Sometimes, they gain a measure of reassurance, as
by meeting their offenders, that the offenders would not have gone so far as to
kill them. Mortal or not, the threat basically is that whatever offenders want
was not and will not be affected by how it makes victims feel. The basic threat
is that the victims are mere instruments of offenders' will.
Correspondingly, displays of
empathy are our greatest assurance that others are safe to be with (McKendy,
1999). For instance these days I hear many of those who try to treat notorious
sex offenders discuss doing "empathy work," as with victim impact
panels or in writing letters to victims. This is not to say that it is easy to
get people to be empathic, but that empathy is the safety mechanism we seek in
human interaction.
Empathy is more than taking other
people's feelings into account. We may label people "psychopathic"
whom we believe to be incapable of empathy, and yet recognize that they are
masters at recognizing and manipulating feelings of people they victimize.
Empathy implies altering one's objectives or agenda in response to the feelings
and perceived needs of those one's behavior affects. Manipulation means using
the feelings and needs of others to get what you were after in the first place.
Empathy means learning from others' feedback on how you are affecting them to
want or care about something new and
different. Empathy is a higher
level of learning from the feelings and needs of others than
manipulation-learning anew what matters instead of learning how to get what
already matters most.
Instead of counting dollars value
of property damaged or stolen, or numbers of assaults or homicides, let alone
instead of counting numbers of youths or others arrested by police, we should
be evaluating what forms of intervention leave people interacting more or less
empathically. In the remainder of this essay I discuss how to measure the
waxing and waning of empathic relations.
THE BALANCE OF DISCOURSE
I do not propose
that trends in empathy are more readily measurable than trends in crime.
Instead, as physicists infer masses too small or far away to see from movement
around them, so we can observe whether observable social processes are more or less
conducive to empathy.
I draw upon
Miller's (1990 [1983]) explanation of what turns empathy on and off. We are
created spontaneously empathic. Just as we as children learn new languages
spontaneously and readily, so we readily recognize and respond to others'
feelings. When, however, we are punished for expressing our feelings, or made
to feel and believe as others tell us we must "for your own good," we
dissociate. Dissociation means a blocking or loss of capacity to feel. Insofar
as we tune out to our own feelings, we lose capacity to feel what others do, to
empathize. In this state of oblivion to others' feelings, we become capable of
hurting others without being moved by their pain. Whether we are on our own
mission or as in Milgram's (1975) famous experiments following someone else's
orders, we become violent-unmoved or perhaps even stimulated by the pain or
fear we are causing others. Dissociation results from violence, and in turn
causes violence or causes people to accept violence without protest or to do
violence to themselves.
It is not trauma itself which
produces dissociation and violence, says Miller, but the repression of
trauma-having to bury one's feelings about the trauma. So it becomes the task
of those who would help others heal from post-traumatic stress to offer enough
safety that the feelings which have been buried to surface and be shared. The
process of healing from dissociation is one of discovery that one can share
one's most shameful and scariest secrets and feelings, and still be loved and
accepted by those with whom one shares. This is the path by which victims of
violence become survivors who know and feel something wrong happened to them,
rather than feeling that something is wrong with them themselves (Herman,
1992). This is also the path by which people regain empathy and transcend the
compulsion to do violence (Gilligan, 1996), insofar as that transformation
occurs at all (McKendy, 1999). At the most basic level as in dyadic relations,
empathy is the catalyst for breaking through dissociation and restoring empathy
in others.
Navajo tradition
as represented in that nation's peacemaking court is the most comprehensive
elaboration I have found of the structure and process by which empathy is
promoted in the face of violence (Yazzie, 1998; Zion, 1998). As Navajos see it,
violence is imbalance of force or presence. So, in human interaction, violence
means that some have power over others. Human interaction may be defined as
conversation or discourse. In these terms, violence means that some parties to
the conversation are doing more than an equal share of the talking, while
others are forced to do more than an equal share of the listening.
Wagner-Pacifici (1994) showed
that in the confrontation between a group of residents calling themselves MOVE
in Philadelphia and the police, an outbreak of deadly violence by the police
was foreshadowed in negotiations by the fact that MOVE members' voices were
largely cut out of the preceding negotiation process. Inversely, the Navajo
peacemaking court formally culminates in a circle. Parties to a dispute sit in
the circle, joined by their
relatives and friends-by all those expected
to be involved in living
with the aftermath of the dispute. Conversation there is facilitated by
a community member known and respected for skill in listening. The conversation
moves around the circle. No one is required to speak, but each member has an
equal opportunity to speak. Speakers are encouraged to speak from the heart-not
to say what is expected of them, but to say what they truly feel. In turn, each
member shares equal opportunity to listen to others. It is deemed perfectly
appropriate to tell other members of the circle how they have made the speaker
feel, but it is anathema to Navajo tradition for any speaker to tell anyone
else what s/he should feel or do in response. Like Miller, the Navajo see this
as promoting violence-taking away responsibility from each person for his or
her own feelings and actions.
Round and round the circle the
conversation goes, until no one has anything left to say. The facilitator ends
the court as s/he began, with a prayer of thanks and for guidance from the
creator, who has given us the capacity to love and respect one another.
This is my own understanding
of how the peacemaking court works. I see the peacemaking court as paradigmatic
of what might well also be called participatory democracy (Pepinsky, 1991)-the
social process by which empathy is promoted over violence.
Like Wagner-Pacifici in
counting the proportion of various parties' points of view appearing in
transcripts and accounts, one need not apply the Navajo model literally in
order to use it. The point is that in daily life as in formal processes,
violence is promoted insofar as some actors have more say than others, while
empathy is promoted insofar as actors take turns speaking and listening. As
radical feminists like Brock-Utne (1985, 1989) note, this metaphor of taking
turns speaking and listening can be generalized from sharing conversation time
to sharing of physical space and of material resources. This applies even to
applications of force to resist violence-to minimizing the force resorted to to
interrupt violence, and to follow that application of force with an opportunity
for the recipient of the force to be fairly heard in the aftermath. Even Miller
the would-be
empath and a penal
abolitionist like Morris (1995) allow for the necessity of confining "the
dangerous few" who are compulsively violent if left at liberty, but
confinement need not preclude the prisoner's having a voice in how s/he lives
there (Murton and Hyams, 1968).
I propose that
instead of trying to measure whether crime and criminality rise and fall, we
measure instead whether participation in social discourse, setting by setting,
becomes more or less balanced as a result of our intervention. I have heard
criminologists say that our measures of crime and criminality may be imperfect,
but that we need to make do with the best measures we have at hand. As Kuhn
(1974) points out, no logic dictates when to abandon one paradigm in favor of
another, but I for one find much greater promise in studying how to democratize
our way out of violence than in studying how to overwhelm crime and criminals
with force and the threat of force.
Adult
incarceration and juvenile detention rates in the United States continue to
rise astronomically. I discount claims that increased punishment of offenders
has reduced crime and personal violence. Instead, the public remains vulnerable
to pressure to increase punishment of offenders because our most deepseated
victimization, and its attendant fear and anger, remain unrecognized and
unaddressed. Punitiveness and victimization will abate only as we draw victims
and offenders into safe, honest, democratic discourse. In the next chapter I
further explore the pattern of rising punitiveness.
A NOTE ON METHOD
For the most part this volume is a
compilation of articles I have published in recent years in so-called research
journals. I see several redundancies as I look back through chapters one to
six. My first reaction was to think I should edit the chapters to take out the
redundancies. I now see that the redundancies belong in this recent research
record of mine. Five redundancies stand out:
·
Attempts to defend and account for my belief in
stories of survival of organized intergenerational, politically and economically
well-connected, torture of children, and of the penumbra of routine sexual
betrayal of children by adult caretakers.
· Alice
Miller (1990 [originally 1983]) is the European-based theorist of causes of
violence who to me most clearly envisions the difference between violence and
making peace.
· Descriptions
of the way the Navajo peacemaking court is supposed to work have become my most
concrete empirical vision of how peacemaking happens.
·
"Empathy" or
"responsiveness," as opposed to obedience, is the source of all
personal and structural safety-the foundation of all true communities
of human interest.
· Participatory
democracy is the European-based term I envision to embody the peacemaking
process, which I repeatedly counterpose to "restorative justice," a
globally prominent school of thought and practice often associated with
peacemaking.
I have found
one social research methodology text which advocates the research method I
follow. Lincoln and Guba (1985) call the method "naturalistic
inquiry." Egon was a distinguished
educational research statistician. In this book, he and Yvonna S. Lincoln
radically rethought how meaningful research takes place. Basically, the method
is opportunistic. When the last data you took in raise a question, your first
decision is: Who might most directly
give me an answer? As you will see in
this volume, I repeatedly ask people who are talked about to tell me about themselves.
As readers will see in the chapter on "transcending literatyranny" for
instance, early in my criminological career I began turning to correspondence
with prisoners to find out what the so-called "criminal element," so
laboriously described in criminological studies, had to say for themselves.
Lincoln and Guba do not reject
statistics. There may come points where statistical slices of life answer
questions, for instance about structural violence. In the next chapter, for
example, I examine trends in incarceration rates.
I keep coming back to those
who seem most often talked about and scapegoated, to speak for themselves. My
unrelenting question is: How do we make
peace in place of violence? I try to
learn in every moment. If I am really learning from each moment, I won't know
what I want to know next, until I have processed the data at hand, particularly
from the humblest source.
As among those
who are cited as academic criminologist, I enjoy an empirical advantage, and
suffer an empirical disadvantage. First the disadvantage: While twenty years ago (Pepinsky, 1980) I
tried to survey criminological research findings, I now have little time, as
they say in our trade, to "keep up with the literature."
My advantage
is that I believe that I know a far greater variety of criminological
informants than most of my colleagues. I regularly correspond and hang out with
prisoners, mental health clients, and apparent victims of staggering personal
violence whom my colleagues know only on paper.
Most of all, as
I discuss for instance in the chapter on "educating for peace," I
learn most in my university classrooms. I think of "science" as
"learning." I keep asking
myself: How do the new data at hand either confirm or make me rethink my own theory
of how to make peace rather than contributing to violence?
As far as I can
see not many social scientists share this drive. Instead of being a
contribution to their own basic understanding of how to address a problem like
violence, each research study of theirs needs to stand on its own, as a
self-contained, impersonal contribution to knowledge.
Meaning no offense to the many
talented colleagues I have had whose contributions to criminology have
influenced my thinking, I can over thirty years as a criminology professor
count as isolated occasions I have had to exchange fundamental understandings
of data with other professors. We allow ourselves little time to share our most
basic professional convictions. In the classroom, I am in a position to engage
students in honest, critical response to my research conclusions. I find that
my understanding of violence and peacemaking is most reshaped by classroom
dialogue. Opportunistically, naturalistically, my research findings are
inseparable from my discoveries in "teaching," and for that matter,
in "community service."
A decade ago, Elise Boulding
taught me a lasting research lesson. She is an internationally eminent feminist
sociological peace studies scholar whose work I have long admired (see
recently, Boulding and Mayer, 2000). I asked her to write a foreword to my last
book length attempt at theoretical synthesis (Pepinsky, 1991). She politely
declined. She found the ideas in the book interesting but underdeveloped. She
suggested that I follow the example of her husband, Kenneth Boulding (see,
e.g., 1989). She told me that her also internationally eminent husband
disclaimed having had new ideas for several
decades, and instead,
had tried to rethink and re-explain what to him was
fundamental.
I hope for room to continue to
learn and reshape my ideas, but I also recognize the value of trying to restate
what I know, to continually make what I think I know subject to re- examination
and reaction by others. I have noticed that as I vary explanation of
fundamental findings of mine, that different listeners and readers resonate to
my varying attempts to explain the findings. Especially in the classroom, the
redundant ways I address the five points I list above have made sense to
varying audiences. On one hand, I am curious to hear how readers of this volume
respond to the variant renditions. On the other hand, I find it personally
useful to review these attempts to elaborate fundamental points, and in the
concluding chapter of this volume, re-synthesize my own thinking.
In each of the chapters before
the concluding synthesis I focus on a discrete criminological issue. In this
first study I argue that the primary dependent variable in criminology should
be whether interaction is becoming more participatory, more democratic. In the
next chapter I propose that incarceration trends in the United States can only
level off or decline either when war is re-targeted at foreign enemies, or as
response to violence becomes more participatory and democratic, more
responsive. In Chapter 3, I describe how people manage to build
community-mutually responsive relations with others-as a defense against
personal and structural violence.
In Chapter 4, I focus on a classic criminological concern:
How do we know whether a
violent offender
has become safe company, and what can we do to bring about that transition? Implicitly, whether cast as
"punishment" or "treatment," changing the offender has been
seen as a matter of making offenders conform to a regime laid down by the
proper authorities or professionals. I argue instead that command and obedience
make people more dangerous, and that the same responsive, empathic relations on
which community is built
are the only way to make offenders safer company.
In Chapter 5,
the peacemaking process becomes a guide to criminological research methods.
Throughout all these chapters, I confront the reality which survivors of
childhood sexual violence and their supporters have brought home to me-that the
greatest personal violence we face is hidden. To respond to and become safer
from this violence, we have to see and hear about it. Beyond being a cardinal
principle of peacemaking, listening to the voices of the most silenced,
powerless people among us becomes the most direct path to discovering the most
deeply hidden violence. Rather than relying on a literature of expert findings
about offenders and victims, I learn more from asking prisoners and survivors
of personal violence to speak for themselves, drawing them into my own
conversational circles. I draw these same voices into the classes I teach,
where students commonly report having learned more from "real people"
than they have from texts about the people.
In
"Educating For Peace," I not only concentrate on the classroom
setting in which my most concentrated learning occurs. In the context of the
calling known as "educator," the peacemaking process which builds
community applies: Students and teachers learn most when the classroom becomes
an exercise in participatory democracy, and when the voices of those who have
practically no legal recourse to safety, including students and the teacher,
share their vulnerability and celebrate safety and healing.
All these
chapters reflect that as a class, survivors of almost unimaginable childhood
torture, by their nearest and dearest, also teach the profoundest lessons of
how to survive and heal, of how to build trustworthy relations as a
"family of choice" supplants a "family of origin."
The context
changes from chapter to chapter, but the central theory of how to make peace
changes little. I see from chapter to chapter that I often return to trying to
explain a phenomenon I have already tried to explain a chapter earlier. The
literature I cite varies by the time I originally wrote the chapter, as when I
variously cite those who share my belief commonly discredited stories of
childhood sexual violence, or descriptions of the Navajo peacemaking process. I
long ago gave up on the idea that there is "the literature" on any
subject. In writing as well as face to face, I happen to have bits of
literature come my way which corroborate or inform my own theory of violence
and peacemaking.
I went through
a premium legal education wanting to find answers to other people's problems.
In my peacemaking frame, I can only conceive of accounting for my own theory,
inviting others to construct and account for their own theories. My highest
aspiration for readers of this text is that they are encouraged to emulate a
quest for one's
own understanding
of the war on crime, and of how to fight it or how to make peace with it. If my
theory is correct, I am safer and better educated when others speak for their
own understanding and feelings rather than mimicking mine. As the chapter title
goes, I fear that obedience does not work; I seek instead that people assume
personal responsibility for their actions, beliefs and feelings. Please
consider this volume an invitation to account for your own views and
perspective.
I am still
learning, constantly, fortunately. I share the writer's egotism; like any
storyteller I want validation. I rely most on validation from my primary
informants. In recent years survivors of child sexual abuse and their
supporters have time and again reassured me that my distinction between
violence and making peace makes practical sense, and captures what has worked
for them. They have also corrected or re-informed me on numerous occasions.
There is a price in
credibility and legitimacy to be paid for learning from societal losers. I imagine that among fellow
members of the American Society of Criminology and of the Academy of Criminal
Justice Sciences, insofar as my work is noticed it is deemed eccentric and
unreal or atheoretical. To persist learning as I try to do, I place my bets
more on validation from people who are socially and professionally discredited
than on professional validation and certification. For the entire three decades
I have been a criminal justice professor, the U.S. Justice Department has
dominated criminological research funding. I long ago learned that naturalistic
inquiry was unfundable, particularly if the questions presupposed the view that
obedience was dangerous. I rationalize that the best research data in life come
for free. I don't pay prisoners and survivors to tell me their stories, in the
classroom or in daily life. I don't seek human subjects clearance because all
my learning is exploratory and unforeseeable. To me, all of life is a pilot
study of what works and what does not. Fortunately, after several failures, I
have survived in academia as a tenured full professor in a richly endowed
research university. In all fairness, however, I have known many talented
peacemaking educators who have been driven from academia. So in what I do for a
paycheck as in everyday, assuming responsibility for one's own understanding of
violence and peacemaking is risky. I do not blame people for being trapped in
obedience to politically convenient notions of how to gain public safety.
* This title originally
appeared in Criminal Justice Policy Review, 11, 2 (December 2000). The introduction is taken from "Empathy Works,
Obedience Doesn't," Criminal Justice Policy Review, 9, 2, pp. 141-167 (1998).
A CRIMINOLOGIST'S QUEST FOR PEACE
Hal Pepinsky
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