Methodology

METHODOLOGY

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

June 22, 2012

                Criminological research has been the focus of my attempts to figure out my own learning methods, but methods I have chosen are—I believe—applicable to human learning in all contexts.  I distinguish “methods” from “methodology.”  This brief methodology is an account of postulates that guide my choice of how I learn today—a study of my own research methods.  At points I take the liberty of citing other places where I have elaborated on this or that point.

                As of my 1980 book surveying Crime Control Strategies, I explicitly adopted “the systems approach” taught me by my mentor and beloved colleague, the late Leslie T. Wilkins (as explained in the opening section of the book’s concluding chapter on “the potential for crime control” (at pp. 299-302).

                Where others try to discern whether a cause of an illness like criminality is biological, psychological, cultural or socio-economic, it is instead obvious to me that all change in anyone’s behavior manifest themselves biological 100% of the time, and psychologically and socially too.  A lobotomy, for instance, is 100% dependent on someone’s decision to do it, the materials and know-how to do it, triggered probably 100% by changes in the subject’s behavior (psychological), interacting with those who can’t figure out how to handle the subject socially, who live in a culture where there is a socially tolerable place for lobotomies to be done, which these days is 100% supported by “abnormalities” that show up in brain mapping…The only practical knowledge I can at least seek is of what people get, as in consequences for those who do lobotomies and those they lobotomize.  When presented with someone’s “problem behavior,” I find myself exploring possible outcomes of alternatives ways of treating his or her organism, including whether to intervene first medically, psychotherapeutically, or by exploring change with those who find the behavior “unacceptable”?  More fundamentally, whom should I consult for information about the situation first?  (My own default answer: start with the least powerful/least heard voice in the situation at hand.)

                In this methodological paradigm, a change introduced into a system one way is assumed to manifest itself in all manner of measures of system change we take.  Look hard enough, and you can find that environment can even change the genes of identical twins in divergent ways, and as with what are known as body memories, events can change eye color or induce pain or stigmata that correspond to changes in vital signs and electrical activity in the brain, and extend to how the organism is treated by others, and how it thinks, feels and behaves in social interaction.

                I focus on effects of interaction on feelings, thinking, and action, presupposing that every action has corresponding thoughts and feelings all at once.  Hence, empathy can be described as a feeling (of safety, of trust), as a thought (what one hears), movement within the actor (as in body language, blood pressure, or brain wave patterns), and as a course or process of interaction.  I call processes that manifest themselves as empathy “peacemaking,” in contrast to courses of action that inhibit empathy, which I call “violence.”  Violent courses of action are fixated on attaining substantive goals, where actors  treat others as instruments of goal achievement.  Empathic actions continually change direction, like a river allowed to change course, to meander and clean itself without human “improvements” like dredging, straightening and damming.  Empathic actors take turns listening, reflecting, and deciding what to say or do next.  In mathematical terms, empathic action is stochastic rather than causally determined.  I describe and contrast the nature of violence and peacemaking at some length in chapters 5 and 6 of my 2006 book on Peacemaking (final page proofs freely available at http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf ).  I propose that violence generates entropy, where in physicists’ terms, social friction produces heat.  I propose that peacemaking generates synergy—a cooling of social heat.  Honest, open information sharing between actors is synergistic: When I freely give information I don’t lose it.  Any reaction I listen to not only adds to the information I gave, it adds my reaction to the reaction to my action; the sum of the interaction is different from either of its parts, just as green is neither blue nor yellow.  Potentially, empathic, that is to say honest and open interaction, defies laws of entropy, defies laws of scarcity.

                We continually rub each other the wrong way even in the strongest relationships.  Routinely, interpersonal and intergroup conflicts pass easily and are soon forgotten, violence is aborted.  Violence hardens as people get locked into holding their positions, into determination to win contests of will, into attachment to outcome, into violence.  In theory, it is never too late, as through mediation, to try responding to violence with empathy by showing parties to conflict that reasons for their position are understood and important to a listener.  It is never too early to try.  As Roger Fisher and associates put it their book on international diplomacy entitled Getting to Yes!, history shows that people can be made to move from positions to interests even when groups of people have wantonly killed each other by the millions, let alone when individuals kill in cold blood (see the 1999  Australian award-winning documentary, and an accompanying mediator commentary, on a mediation conference between those who murdered a Pizza Hut worker in an armed robbery attempt, and the victim’s family, coworkers and friends, in “Facing the Demons”; just google it).

`               Peacemaking recognizes that each case of violence and its parties are unique.  Putting people in legal categories is beside the point, which is fortunate because violence thrives on disputes over who the real villains are, as in whether those who claim al Qaeda membership or those who claim to defend US national security are the real terrorists.  As many people who practice “restorative justice” put it, in the face of violence, they and I focus is on repairing harms done rather than on righting wrongs, what they call “retributive justice.”  It’s not that empathy always repairs violence, but empathy is the only thing that ever does so.  Empathy, not making right with might, is the only remedy for violence I have found.  I would rather nurture empathy in my grandchildren by showing them empathy, than teaching them that I know right from wrong better than they do.  When it comes to personal and social security, empathy is how I learn it, empathy is how I teach it.  That’s my method of choice.  Love and peace--hal

Letter to a Prisoner

LETTER TO A PRISONER

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

June 18, 2012

I just returned from the 14 International Conference on Penal Abolition, June 12-15, at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad.  The lead organizer, Catherine Ali, was founding director of the national mediation service.  She invited me to design and lead a workshop on mediation for three hours the first afternoon of the conference at the prison in Santa Rosa.  The last day of the conference, we met at the national prison officer training academy.

 The following is an excerpt from a letter to a friend who is in the “security housing unit” of the Indiana prison system.  We have corresponded for around a quarter century.  I wrote him about the upcoming workshop, including a copy of the story of prisoner/guard conflict that prison officers had made up.  It was important to me that the role play of the beginning of a mediation be grounded in the role players’ reality.  It turned out that the story itself became irrelevant after prisoners and staff all got into the act of asking each other questions and responding.  Here is the end of the letter I wrote to my Indiana friend Billy today:

….The mediation workshop and follow-up session went great.  In a room at the prison for the workshop, 25 prisoners, about 15 staff, the warden, 2 local mediators and I did the role play.  Once those playing guard and prisoner (chosen by their peers—a real prisoner facing a real guard.  After they had both started looking at each other in the eye, I went back and forth from the prisoners (sitting on one side across the aisle from staff) to raise hands and volunteer to ask those on the other side any questions they had, and respond to what someone on the other side had just said.  They quickly got to the here and now about issues they had with each other.  I was like “wow!” One of the mediators told me that everyone in the room including the warden spoke except one guard by the time our time ran out.  We had refreshments and I asked prisoners first and then staff how they liked the mediation idea.  Most of the guards and all the prisoners were enthusiastic, as was the warden.  Folks on both sides said this was the first time they had been able to raise real issues face to face with anyone on the other side.

  On Friday at the training academy for guards, the mediators who had been at the mediation and I talked about the possibilities for mediation.  One of the mediators, a woman known for doing more state-sponsored mediation than anyone else on the island, came back at the judge lined up to introduce us, with a detailed list of guarantees that would need to be built into the national mediation act.  The conference organizer had invited the judge who is in charge of court ordered mediation services.  He led by delivering a short clear and cogent paper he had written promoting expansion of mediation, and when we were done, he gave me his private email, was about to read my book, and said I might be invited to do more mediation instruction, online or perhaps by returning to Trinidad.  (Yes, I do have enough ego to feel very flattered.)  The prison was a new one just set up in a warehouse for guys about to be released only (which happened to be across the highway from the veteran member’s neighborhood, on whose association board she sat), but as the judge put it in his introduction, it is better to start with the easy cases (or settings) than not to start at all.

  I never thought I’d see the day when guards, their superiors, community activists, with judicial blessing, all were enthused by the idea of creating mediation in their own ways as diverse as victim-prisoner, prisoner-prisoner, staff among themselves, prisoner-staff singly or collectively…I don’t take for granted all the coincidences that made this moment so magical.  With a little further good fortune, the energy that built in and around the workshop will indeed let prison-centered mediation soon become practice, perhaps in ways unprecedented in prisons worldwide, and I am oh so thankful to the warm, welcoming and creative Trinidadians who made this experience so memorable for me.

  What are you up to these days?  Let me know if you’d like more books.

                                                                        Love and peace,

                                                                        Hal Pepinsky

  

Ten Reasons for Penal Abolition

written for the International Conference on Penal Abolition's 14 biannual conference, in Trinidad, June 12-15:

TEN REASONS FOR PENAL ABOLITION

1.       To provide space for making peace,

2.       Where honesty prevails,

3.       Where trust results,

4.       Wherein lies safety,

5.       Wherein our relations become secure.

6.       This is where compassion trumps fear,

7.       And anger,

8.       Where love is requited.

9.       This is the realm where we can let down our guard,

10.   Where in safety we dare to face those we fear and loathe most.

Hal Pepinsky, June 9, 2012

Serendipity, my attitude

SYNERGY

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

May 9, 2012

                I conceive all mass to be systemic resistance to waves of energy that flow in waves around and through us.  Energy as humans know it is the force of human will to live that gets somewhere, commonly thought of as achieving goals or objectives, or ultimately as sustaining homeostasis in our own bodies.  Common words for force are organizing, growing, enforcing or cooperating—accelerating or concentrating life’s labors.  All matter contains energy at a price, all friction among organisms creates heat.  Heat is entropy as we experience it, from fever to hunger to body counts.  The energy expended to sustain oneself and one’s kind has its own rate of decay, its own half life.  In our human case, the more energy we expend to extend our own lives, the more rapidly we create human waste, from battlefield deaths to prisons to famine and pestilence—the more concentrated destitution and wealth become.

                From richer rich to poorer poor, one response to social decay is to get somewhere faster, commonly known where I live as efficiency or productivity.  Getting somewhere faster is power, more energy efficiency.  While I have toyed with the idea of distinguishing power “over” others from power “with” others, I think that however well intended, all power is implicitly over others, as for example in winning or losing political representation.  As power is amassed, resistance grows among losers, as now in Wisconsin with the looming prospect of having the loser of the last gubernatorial election defeat the incumbent, or with US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Bursts of resistance to power unite conviction on all sides that some romantic notion of imposing social order depends on blaming foreigners to one’s own kind such as bankers, infidels and immigrants.  In contests of power, even cults of personality and empires eventually fall, dying or transforming with a fiery and often prolonged series of wars against foreign and domestic enemies.

                I certainly been a powermonger myself.  I have often systematically resisted convention, as in the classroom, and with appeals even to get my own tenure and promotion, let alone in advocacy for students and staff in virtually all the grievance channels on campus and in testimony on behalf of children in custody cases or in criminal cases.  I try to limit the damage I might do by setting boundaries on my involvement in organizations or movements or organized faith. I try to reserve time for synergy.  As systolic is to my blood pressure, so enjoyment of power is to my will to live.

                Moments of synergy rests on adherence to power structures.  In these moments, other boundaries in our relations are relaxed, and new foundations for relations are created in their place.  This requires letting go of attachment to time—taking power out of the energy that flows out of us.  So for instance, when I was mediating victim-offender disputes, I joined other mediators in celebrating most cases in which freedom to confront one another face to face by simple safety rules let grievances be aired freely, which often resulted in parties’ agreeing to terms they themselves invented.  I emphasized as mediation opened that I for one was willing to continue mediation, in further sessions if necessary, until everyone in the room felt that everything that needed to be said had been said by someone.  I sought in other words to take the time out of responding to discord.  Or in teaching, I abandoned attempts to “cover” predetermined material rather than allowing room for discourse to move in unanticipated directions in the course of mutual accommodation.  Or in deciding where I would live when I retired, in favor of letting a partner carrying me wherever she turned out to be.  Or when two people build sustenance together with less than half the effort it would take either of them to sustain her- or himself alone.  Synergy thrives on serendipity.  Synergy in our relations builds trust.  We know it as enjoyment of love and support, as security that others will be there for us in times of need, and who will stand by us when we are attacked.  My late friend, mentor and colleague, Les Wilkins, used to send his graduate research design students to go out and find serendipity.  To me, serendipity increases as I let go of trying to get somewhere in particular, as by settling right by might, or by planning the rest of my life and obeying or commanding others.  Selfishly, I rely on taking time to enjoy synergy as my best insurance that I will not die alone.  This is how I have come to want to live.

                Power and synergy are symbiotic: Neither exists without a parallel existence of the other.  This is captured by the concept of yin/yang, where each force of nature contains seeds of the other.  There is no way that power can conceivably be destroyed except by power itself.  As Egyptians and Libyans have recently discovered, power itself cannot be overthrown.  We know raw power as personal and structural violence.  In the midst of violence, moments of synergy moderate social friction or entropy that exercises of power generate, where people survive hell on earth by caring for another out of love and mutual need.  Where there’s synergy, there’s hope for continued human existence.  Synergy entails an attitude that creates, gives and sustains life.  Above and beyond all, I live and long for moments of synergy  Love and peace--hal

Latin American pleas for US drug legalization

CALLS FOR U.S. DRUG LEGALIZATION FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

April 13, 2012

Check al Jazeera’s report on pleas for US drug legalization at the Summit of the Americas--which President Obama will attend tomorrow after discussion of the legalization is over--at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/2012413142349136990.html . The report points to the irony that among political leaders in Latin America, it is those self-identified as leftist in Nicaragua and Cuba, and U.S. ex-colony Panama, who continue to support the U.S. led war on drugs, launched by President Nixon in 1971. Asking for drug legalization are presidents self-identified as conservative: a former defense minister in Columbia, a former general in Guatemala who was elected president on a platform of fighting a broad war on crime, and in Mexico, a president who at U.S. behest launched an ill-fated war on drug traffickers. “Conservative” presidents of Costa Rica and El Salvador have joined them.

In a visit to Central America last week, the US vice president said that the topic of legalization was worth discussion, even though this administration was opposed. Perhaps if re-elected, President Obama will moderate this stance. Progress toward legalization will probably continue with the illicit drug most known to be a drug of choice among white people, marijuana, while drug enforcement will continue to account for most of the increase in imprisonment of people of color, particularly so for women.

When the U.S. modern war on drugs began, proponents of legalization in this country were leading self-identified conservatives too, notably William Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman.

At a time of high unemployment, it may seem cruel to want to put those in the drug enforcement industry out of work, but in this case, call me a fiscal conservative. Love and peace--hal