A Case Against Punishment

Imagine the following scenarios:

• A six-year-old child is fooling around and breaks a family heirloom.
• A grade five student repeatedly talks back to the teacher when corrected for disruptive behaviour.
• A high school student regularly skips English class.
• A 20-year-old steals a car as part of a gang initiation.
• A 38-year-old new parent leaves the baby in a locked car while running in to buy milk.
• A senior sells unused pain medication to a local teen.
• A hockey coach grooms and then sexually assaults a player.
• A politician leaves the country during lockdown.
• A political party makes a difficult and unpopular decision.

What to do about these situations? In each of these cases, society’s knee-jerk reaction is the same: punish them. Children are admonished and sent to their rooms. Students are given detention and grounded from favoured activities. Adults, young and old, are thrown in jail. Parents lose custody of their children. Politicians are demoted or fired. Political parties are removed from power.

We feel justified in our desire for retribution because we need to teach them a lesson, or because they should have known better, or because they deserve what they get. But, in reality, this is a vindictive need that is a product of society’s entrenched but misguided biases and beliefs. In fact, punishment is not a particularly effective method for changing behaviour. At times, it might be a deterrent to honest folks who can choose better behaviour to avoid unpleasant consequences. But if we believe that everyone is doing their best with what they’ve got, then we must believe that most people who make poor choices do so because there isn’t a better option readily available.

• The six-year-old had excess energy.
• The grade five student was neuro-atypical and felt unjustly punished for not fitting the box.
• The high schooler was overtired due to an inability to cope with parental fighting.
• The gang member had no positive role-models and was desperate to belong.
• The new parent couldn’t imagine deciding between waking the baby who was finally asleep and not having milk for the toddler waiting at home.
• The senior couldn’t afford to pay rising food and rent prices and still buy gifts for the grandchildren.
• The coach was abused and bullied growing up, and never got help because the shame was too strong.
• The politician believed the travel was justified without being able to see the privilege inherent in that perspective.
• The political party was trying to make a choice based on the information available at the time.

In each of these situations, someone made what we would consider to be a ‘bad choice’. Presumably, they all should have known that the choice might come with negative consequences. One of three things happened. Either they didn’t think, or they thought they wouldn’t get caught, or they thought the benefit was worth the risk. The only one of those where the punishment might make a difference is in the third possibility, when the person rationally thought that the risk was worth it, which might have been different if the consequences had been more dire. But think about that. It is impossible to find a consequence that will have the same impact on every member of society, so we would have to make the consequences so ridiculously dire that parents, teachers, and judges would be hesitant to apply them in most cases.

More importantly, in the majority of cases, consequences don’t play into the decision making of the offender. A clear example of how this thinking doesn’t work is in drinking and driving. There is no consequence more dire than living the rest of your life knowing that you killed someone else. People don’t choose to drive drunk because the consequences aren’t serious; they choose because they think it won’t happen to them – either the crash or the arrest. I cannot believe that anyone wakes up one day and decides to become a pedophile. I don’t believe anyone sits down and rationally discusses whether they should go to nursing school or become a thief. People fall into these roles in steps and stages, often forced by circumstance, or in the absence of the support needed to make healthy decisions.

Society’s response to poor decisions, especially those that affect someone else, is punishment, or revenge, when what we really need is change, learning, and restitution. When we lose something, we want the person we deem responsible to suffer, to see how it feels to be us. What we really need is understanding, to feel heard in our grief and our pain. When we see others getting what we see as an unfair share (like in cases of petty theft), we want them to lose, or to pay it back with interest. What we really need is to ensure the person’s needs are met so that cheating is not their best option. We want those who try to get ahead to feel our disappointment, our anger, and our frustration. But who wins in those cases? Do we win when we break up families? When we destroy people’s lives? When we sign up to support criminals in their life-long relationship with the justice system? No. We don’t win. They don’t win. It is a sure recipe for losing.

There is a fascinating documentary about Norwegian Prisons, by Michael Moore. In it, he visits several prisons, including maximum security prisons, where we learn that rehabilitation is the goal. They have a 20% recidivism rate, whereas in the US, the recidivism rate is about 80%. The inmates are treated with respect and humanity. They live communally, with a reasonable quality of life, and learn skills to support their return to society. For those of us familiar with the North American justice system, this seems absurd. It does not fit our belief that criminals have relinquished their rights to a life of dignity and comfort.

So, how does society perpetuate these beliefs? We start early. We start by punishing small children for not meeting expectations that are beyond their ability. We start by treating children as extensions of ourselves and by expecting more from them than we do from adults (like expecting them to value what we value over what they value). We start by expecting school children to fit inside a very narrow definition of normal. We model punishment as a way to control their behaviour. We talk about criminals, politicians, and those who vote differently from us as deserving horrible fates. We sensationalize news and polarize opinions. We criticize the choices of our neighbours, our friends, and our leaders, rather than modeling empathy and an understanding that different does not necessarily mean wrong and that making poor choices does not diminish one’s worth as a human being. We rant about the choices of politicians and threaten not to re-elect them. We forget that we are all human and all trying to do our best.

But what if there is a better way? What if, instead of seeking retribution, we sought understanding? What if, instead of asking, “What is wrong with these people?”, we asked, “What led these people to make those decisions or to hold these beliefs?” What if, instead of punishing criminals to the maximum extent of the law, we used compassion to rehabilitate them? What if we required political parties to work together, and allowed them to make brave decisions without fearing for their jobs?

Many spiritual leaders and emotional healers say that forgiveness is for the victim, not the perpetrator. The idea is that victims are hurt more by holding onto the anger and resentment stemming from their grievances than their perpetrators, who might not even know about the effect of their behaviour. That, in forgiving their perpetrators, victims release themselves from holding on to events and the resulting pain, and allow themselves to move forward in peace. Likewise, I think believing that we can only find relief by inflicting retribution on others keeps us in a perpetual state of painful and disappointing revenge-seeking, when we discover that punishing others doesn’t undo our own pain.

 Ask any parent, and they will tell you that punishing a child feels unpleasant and sometimes counter productive. Ask any teacher, and they will tell you that punishing a student does not feel like a win. Judges talk about the heaviness of sending young offenders to jail, where they are statistically likely to get worse instead of better, and the devastation in breaking up families. With all of the current awareness around systemic racism, we also know that both the education system and the justice system favour whites, which is just another level of complication for teachers, principals, and judges trying to make sound decisions.

I wonder what would happen if, as individuals and as a society, we chose to focus on compassion and rehabilitation instead of revenge and punishment. Could we raise a generation of citizens with the internal motivation and emotional regulation necessary to make the changes we want to see in the world? If we took a deep breath and said to our children, “I know you didn’t mean to break that, but it was important to me, so I need some time to be sad. Where can we find a safe place for you to spend your energy?” What if we adjusted our school system to embrace diversity and to value, honour, and celebrate each child’s interests and abilities? What if we provided support to those who need belonging at any age? What if we congratulated instead of shaming people who sought help for problems like addiction, sexual aggression, and narcissism? What if we allowed people to unlearn privilege without shame? What if we supported political policies instead of parties, and allowed for mistakes and corrections without flip-flopping and reversing decisions every few years? What if we supported our families, friends, and neighbours even when their decisions did not line up with our own?

Would children develop more empathy and tolerance? Would students learn through their innate curiosity and develop innovative solutions to problems we haven’t been able to fix? Would our communities become stronger and more resilient? Would people seek help instead of being pushed to the edges of their limits? Would we have more open discussions about racism, poverty, and justice? Would our political system stabilize and waste less money, and instead focus on the issues that really matter? Would people begin to make choices to protect others and the environment? Would we find there really is enough to go around? If there wasn’t such a need to protect ourselves from injustice and threat, would we naturally begin to lift each other up instead of scrambling over each other to get to the top? There are no certain answers to these questions, but it seems worth a try. In light of the news this week, with so many polarized and vitriolic opinions, it seems like we are desperate for something, anything, that could cool the fires and begin to encourage compassion, understanding, and co-operation. Where can you begin to be that change?