Limits of the Criminological Imagination

For presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for Humanist Sociology, November 7-11, 2012, Nashville, TN, where the conference theme is “When Race and Class Still Matters,” and where Michelle Alexander, 2010 co-winner of the AHS book award, for The New Jim Crow, will keynote.

AGEISM, RACISM, CLASSISM , SEXISM AND THE ETERNAL LIMITS OF THE CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

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

July 30, 2012

                Basically, criminologists have learned nothing new since criminology began.

                When Anglos colonized what became the United States, their prototypic most dangerous person was a young native brave and a rebellious imposing young black slave.  On the heels of the British defeat in the War of 1812, President Monroe declared all of Latin America to be in the US sphere of influence, and a generation later--after early criminologists had declared the most dangerous persons to be “foreign” young men clustered in urban ghettos—Mexicans and their Spanish colonizers became the leading threat to US national security and expansion of empire.  When the slaves among us were freed, as this year’s keynoter Michelle Alexander well documents--from vagrancy statutes and convict leasing on to this day—poor young men have remained the most criminalized class among us, which the most prized, most quantitatively sophisticated criminological analyses of data, let alone ethnographies, conclude that the “best evidence” continues to show that who we most put in prison reflects the kind of people who are the most dangerous among us.

                Happily, critics have continually challenged this criminological “fact.” I myself propose a new way to study violence and how to transform it.  I see two main problems.  To begin with, it’s a tautology: No matter how it’s drawn, the political line between criminality, and lawmakers and enforcers is a power play, and in power (aka “political”) games, odds favor those who get to make and enforce the power of the penal law.  Second, I join outspoken criminologists (among them humanist sociologists in the tradition of C. Wright Mills) who have recognized that the only apolitical definition of social harm we can come up with is the institutionalization of power itself across generations.  There is no practical or moral justification for claims that some classes are entitled to vilify others.  I accept the radical feminist premise that persistent power over others is violence itself.  In the power game as in the leading criminological imagination, competing to prove who deserves to be on top of whom is up for grabs, and in those terms, I’d argue that the most dangerous class among us are those who hang out in gangs of powerful ageing white men.  The question for me becomes: How do we redress power imbalances?

On Bombing Civilians

ON BOMBING CIVILIANS AS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

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

July 29, 2012

                Al Jazeera has just run an interview with US Secretary of Defense Panetta, where Mr. Panetta proclaims that the Syrian government-ordered aerial bombardment in Aleppo that has indiscriminately killed civilians is a crime against humanity.  Meanwhile, Mr. Panetta unabashedly carries out orders for drones to fire on enemy targets that indiscriminately kill civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Mr. Panetta emphasizes that the Syrian government is killing “its own people.”  I doubt that Syrian resistance fighters and their families would agree on sectarian grounds for starters.  I assume that Mr. Panetta that we are targeting enemy forces with drones as friends of the Afghan and Pakistani people, but the civilians they kill are Afghan and Pakistani themselves.  Besides the US refuses to accept jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court over its own citizens , or, for our military, of any “sovereign” nation which US forces formally occupy (comparable to the extra-territoriality which Britain claimed over Chinese harbors that led to the Opium Wars of the mid-19^th century).  And to come full circle, the Syrian government spokespersons say they are bombing forces supplied inter alia by the US Government.

                The Koran tells us that indiscriminately killing civilians as a war expedient constitutes premeditated murder, period.  Syria, the US, what’s the difference between us government supporters and theirs?  Love and peace, hal

peacebuilding or peacemaking: take your pick

PEACEBUILDING OR PEACEMAKING: Take Your Pick

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

July 26, 2012 (a sequel to yesterday’s blog on “standing to mediate”)

                I thank and congratulate Dr. Simeon Sungi for his dissertation defense today  (on “the role of indigenous systems as alternatives to international criminal trials” across the Africa) for nailing down for myself the difference between building honest, open discourse among parties to collective violence, and its antithesis, criminal prosecution.  In prosecution (as in all wars), a state or an interstate focuses on taking out enemies of the state(s).  Transforming violence as between opposing groups entails recognizing the authority of minority and majority leaders in current, daily (i.e. “indigenous”)  practice, and guaranteeing safe passage  to a table with opposing leaders.  I owe the origin of this insight to Arnold Sherman’s 1982 chapter on “the social construction of ‘terrorism’”  (in H Pepinsky, Rethinking Criminology, 85-101).  He concludes that bloodshed between the British and the Mau Mau movement in Kenya might “have gone differently had both sides recognized that it was in the interest of the British to define Mau Mau activity in the 1950s as other than ‘terrorist,’” (p. 86).  He supposes that the British might instead the recognition they gave to leaders of recognized nation states.  And I think, how much safer might folks from the US and those the government labeled “terrorists” have become, for instance, if when the USG identified Bin Laden as public enemy as early as 1997, they had invited him and cohorts  he chose to a place where all parties felt safe to trial to deal away attack and counterattack?  Suppose instead of prosecuting people as street offenders, prosecutors sought to offer victims control of their own “evidence” and over their own destiny, in hopes of coming to terms on which offenders could also assume greater responsibility for making redress on their own terms, rather than being punished or incapacitated for blameworthiness.  In his award-winning 2001 book on Making Good: how ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives, Shadd Maruna finds that those who stay out of further trouble with the law create new selves that are socially legally accepted and socially respected.  In internationally used terms, I put trying to impose terms of control on others peacebuilding, while in its place I juxtapose granting opposing forces room to build control on their own terms, as genuinely making peace.

                It is a contradiction in terms to oppose power over others by taking control over them.  Counterforce or violent resistance may temporarily quell violence at best, deepening distrust and counter-resistance in its wake.  But that doesn’t preclude efforts to promote respectful, dignified honest dialogue in the face of pressure to lop off the heads of those who offend us.  Peacemaking  is the only socially stabilizing alternative I see to compounding violence with counter-violence.  The flames of violence are securely damped  only insofar as  opposing parties grant each other legitimacy to speak on their own native or grassroots—on terms indigenous to themselves.  Love and peace--hal

standing to mediate

STANDING TO MEDIATE

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

July 25, 2012

                Reading over a dissertation draft yesterday comparing “effectiveness” of International Criminal Courts’ to indigenous responses to international “crimes” sparked my awareness of what made the prisoner-guard mediation role play I facilitated in Trinidad morph into a serious, respectful exchange of issues in which all 25 or so prisoners, all but one of the fifteen or so guards, and the superintendent—plus two local mediators—spoke up before the workshop broke for refreshments and informal conversation (as described in “Letter to a Prisoner,” pepinsky.blogspot.com, June 18, 2012).  As I look back on that event, I think it was two elements of preparation for the workshop that virtually guaranteed that workshop dialogue would become so lively and apparently refreshing to so many participants.

                First was how the story of prisoner-guard conflict used in the role play was created.  Led by one of their number who was a trained mediator himself, the guards constructed the incident and its background, which one of the local mediators slightly elaborated.  On its face, the story seemed to me to remarkably slanted to make the guard who wanted the prisoner put in a punishment cell look bad and the prisoner look good.  Perhaps the tone of the story reflected the fact that the prison was for prisoners about to be released with guards made to feel they were specially selected for their professionalism, but I also imagine that when I offered the guards the privilege of writing the story, I laid an implicit responsibility on them to show how fair to the prisoner’s side of the story they could be.  Regardless, the fact that the story came from the group that normally makes the rules for the prisoners made the story real to all participants, each of whom came into the workshop with a copy of the story in hand.  (In mediation training normally, trainers choose or make up role play stories.)

                Second, and I think most crucial in any intergroup dialogue or mediation, the “opposing” groups got to pick their own leaders.  I see in hindsight that everyone prisoners and guards paid close attention—then burst into follow-up, because they respected their own role players, and had a personal stake from the outset in how much their side got heard and respected.  The experience drives home to me the importance of respecting indigenous leaders, rather than choosing who represents a group in conflict for the group.  If in the workshop I had done the routine thing of asking for volunteers and my picking the role players, I’m confident from teaching experience that during the role play, many minds would have wandered, and discussion would have been strained.

                In attempts to dampen intergroup conflict, there is a crucial distinction dictating who qualifies to represent a group (known in legalese as standing to be heard) and dealing with those whom group members themselves recognize as leaders.  If groups have contending leaders, then mediation among intra-group leaders needs to precede negotiation or mediation as an entire group.  For this criminologist, efforts to reduce gang violence come to mind.  Gang summits are reported to ease violence, and I have heard the same to happen in a maximum security prison where the safe let indigenous black and white “gang” leaders come to their own terms of co-existence.  Instead, gang leaders are locked away in isolation for life.  If agents of the US state want groups it labels terrorist to hold their violence, it would do better to give safe passage to “enemy” leaders they are instead assassinating.  The main obstacle to sensible transformation of violence is the belief the only way to get enemies to surrender is by chopping off their heads.  That just inflames the violence.

                At an individual level, ideally, anyone who has a complaint against anyone else ought to have standing to complain in his own terms.  Granting standing to be heard abates violence in all its forms.  Love and peace--hal

Aurora shootings

   Reaction to James Holmes's shooting spree reminds me of something the first ritual abuse child victims' advocate I met, Rick Doninger of Evansville, IN, told my classes how Children of the Underground founder Faye Yager (also a repeat guest in my classes, at whose home I stayed, whose child victimization dossiers she shared with me), had taught him to ask a question he had never in his training and experience even thought to ask a forthright victim: HAS ANYONE ELSE HURT YOU?
   I am time and again amazed at how we reduce violent outbursts like Holmes's as a problem of psychopathology.  I gave that assumption up when I forsook my (grand)parents' field of psychology for sociology: WHY PRESUME THAT DID WHAT HE DID ALL BY HIMSELF?
   Time and again in my socio-criminology career, I have time and again been amazed at how glibly we accept that the triggerman lived an "isolated" life in which he planned and executed, and surrendered, and had crazy hair, and refused to talk to authorities, and who in video coverage in court appears totally oblivious--either drugged or dissociating or both in combination, who knows?  Who even asks, except time and again to interview the owner of the shooting farm who wouldn't admit weird Arthur to membership on the family farm?
  Of course I don't know who else might be involved, but if I were investigating for the law or the press I would go out of my way to find out who Mr. Holmes DID have contact with, and do snowball interviewing if possible...and as a police interviewer I would figure it was perfectly okay with me if what he told me was legally inadmissible.  You simply present evidence that Holmes was the shooter and that people died and that the shooting was planned in advance, and settle for life without parole.  Otherwise, I might explore ways of talking with him and testing whether other personalities could be drawn out, asking him about associations with others, and so forth, Miranda be damned.
   I say it is more parsimonious to presume organized covert assistance, guidance and encouragement more than Holmes alone put the elaborate plan together over an extended period of time during which Holmes suddenly disappeared from public view.  It's like asking whether anyone else hurt you to ask who else DID meet with Holmes over that period.  It can begin simply by interviewing sellers of Holmes's paraphernalia.
  I don't mean that some particular conspiracy ought to be presumed, but as Rick Doninger discovered, the only that covert conspiracies come to light are by at least exploring the possibility that the Aurora shooting was planned and executed by more than one person.  We are reduced to psychologizing when we don't bother to look socially.  l and p hal

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com, 519 Evergreen Circle, Worthington, OH 43085-3667, 1-614-885-6341

Entering the kingdom of heaven

WHEN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN WAS AT HAND

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

June 27, 2012 (my mother’s 93^rd birthday)

                My fiftieth year high school class reunion is two days away.  Around thirty, of the roughly forty of us still alive who joined and left Ohio State’s k-12 university class of ’62 at various times, are a number of us who have been born again, and among those associate being born again with stopping drinking or getting drunk.  I actively correspond with a cousin who entered the priesthood as he stopped drinking. I have recently quit drinking myself.  Friends are understandably curious: Isn’t it hard for you?  Do you ever really want a drink?...

                Of course I think about drinking constantly.  Heavy drinking is still quite fresh in my mind.  So was sleeping around when I met Jill.  I find myself associating quitting drinking now with quitting sleeping with other women when I met Jill.  As I perceive it, the awakenings that have led me to stop womanizing and to stop drinking in a hospital in Iowa are as profoundly religious as to my classmates and cousin’s commitments to sobriety.  I don’t know what to call the force that has saved my butt over and over and has now brought me home with Jill near my mom.  I did come around years ago to looking skyward and saying quiet thank-yous.  I stopped worrying about my afterlife, except that I want to be remembered well by those closest to me when I die.  As of when I was asked 36 years ago to design a required course for criminal justice majors called “alternative social control systems,”  I have been preoccupied with understanding what results we get for trying to control one another’s actions.  Having nothing more profound to do with my privileged life, I have tried to figure out how we steer ships of social life away from hell on earth toward heaven.  Time and again, as when I committed myself to a partnership with Jill, I have faced with a blatant choice of entering the kingdom and steering against the tide of violence, of hell on earth, of the social sea in which we all swim.

                It has taken awhile for me to put my experience of living without drinking alcohol in religious context, but as I see it now—no blasphemy intended—as I slowly came to my wits in that Iowa hospital, I saw what I experienced in the moment as “no way out”:  If I stopped drinking, the kingdom of heaven lay before me back at 519 Evergreen Circle with Jill, as long as I let go of the hell that led to favorite uncles of mine to die drunk and alone.  I chose heaven.  So far so good.  Once again, I just say thanks.  Love and peace--hal

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