Psychology

State Funded Abuse – Punishments and Rewards in Prison

Jeff/neighsayer7 Comments

Abuse – well, corporal punishment – well, punishment – actually causes misbehaviour in children and crime and violence in adults, rather than curing these things. With children, it’s not news, I think that the exercise of punishment actually models and ingrains the very problem behaviour that we employ it to solve. Ironic, which means it would be funny if it weren’t horrible and tragic.

But in adulthood, in the justice system, this causality can be far more direct. The ways in which punishment promotes crime and violence in prison situations requires no knowledge of or belief in psychology at all.

When a person is convicted of a crime and incarcerated, there has long been a tradition and an assumption that the convict has lost his human rights, that if prisons are scary and dangerous places, well, that is the deterrent. That is a reason not to break the law, and we may say that the criminal has done it to himself. These days, a convict’s human rights are gaining some power, at least the officials, the prison administration and employees, are not supposed to abuse convicts any more than is required to enforce the removal of one human right, namely the obvious one, the convicted person’s freedom. The guards are not supposed to abuse the prisoners directly: no beatings, no sexual abuse – lately the force-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners is a controversy, whether or not the force and restraint required to stop a person’s slow suicide is or isn’t a violation of his human rights. This debate (not the situation alluded to) marks a huge improvement in the consideration of the rights of prisoners. There is room for improvement to be sure, but it’s a relatively large step, considering the condition of prisoners in history.

Having said that . . .

I think we need to turn our attention to the ability of prisoners to violate each other’s rights.

If a prisoner has rights, if we (society, the criminal justice system and its agents, the taxpayers who fund it), if we are not allowed to abuse these convicted persons, how is it that we are willing and able to lock them up with a lot of the very sorts of people who are likely to (and proven to) abuse them?

Prisons are scary places, full of dangerous, scary people, and in our attempt to control crime and abuse, we throw them all in there together. I think we have all given some thought to the minor criminal thrown in among the wolves, and the first thing I’ve already mentioned: don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. I don’t really approve, but that’s not where I’m going with this. For now, regarding that, I’ll say, fair enough. A second point that may be viewed in favour of the forced intermingling of violent criminals with the less violent ones would be that there are tiers, different levels of prisons, minimum, medium and maximum security institutions. I’ll deal with the second point first.

Capone was imprisoned for tax evasion, right? Many criminals that would be perfectly suited for MaxSec locations spend time in all the other levels of the prison network. Many a murderous, gangland soldier spends time in lighter prisons than they might, they get convicted of crimes that are not necessarily their worst acts, possession of stolen goods, drug dealing, any number of things. Because of this, really bad guys can be encountered anywhere in the prison system. All prisons are scary and dangerous.

For the first point, again, we’ve sort of made our peace with the idea that we send not-so-bad guys to prison with very bad ones, that’s the deterrent, it’s prison, not Disneyland. It’s not supposed to be fun. But now we’re getting to it. In prison, and in life, there are winners and losers. The smartest, the toughest, the biggest, baddest, most dangerous men in prison can and often do, dominate and victimize the weaker ones. The well connected ones, the organized gangsters recruit and make slaves and/or soldiers of the more vulnerable . . . may I guess what you’re thinking? But that may not be it. Here’s my problem:

Are we not rewarding the most dangerous criminals?

Are we not creating a situation where the worst and most dangerous offenders are being given a convenient supply of victims to exploit, to rape, rob and enslave? In other words, are we not encouraging the very same patterns of abuse and victimization in the most powerful criminals in our attempt to discourage that very behaviour in the less dangerous ones? Wait a second, this sounds like sociology, ‘what are we incentivising,’ that’s not it either. It’s worse than that. The worst of it is not what we’re doing, it’s that we’re doing it.

What are we doing, exactly?

Collecting the worst, scariest people we can find, and . . . providing victims for them. We, the people, we, society, we the voter and the government, for God’s sake – are pimping for the most dangerous and uncaring people our nations have produced, and paying for it with public funds.

That is what we are doing.

Victimization is antithetical to rehabilitation. We need to keep our prisoners safe if we ever want to help any of them. I’m saying individual rooms, and contact among them only by mutual consent. I’m saying money, to be sure. But abuse causes crime, and what we are doing now isn’t working; the billions we are spending now are not only wasted, but actually exacerbating the problems.

It’ll be cheaper in the long haul.

Imagine a World Without the Damages of Abuse . . .

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The damages from abuse are many, but they’re becoming well known. I’ve often listed the categories of them, physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive, but the damages themselves are:

Impaired cognitive development (trouble in school, poorer grades);

Behaviour problems;

All manner of disorders: eating, depression, anxiety, self-harm, addictions;

Physical injuries, sometimes permanent and/or resulting in impaired physical development;

Etc., etc.

 

The thing is, the list of damages that have been so well documented as resulting from what is called corporal punishment – that is the same list. This is why corporal punishment is fast being outlawed all over the world.

 

All punishment is corporal punishment – that’s the big secret. Therefore the list of damages that result from all punishment is the same list.

Much abuse is punishment gone too far, and even those who promote punishment will agree that punishing means the administration of abuse (in the generic sense) for a good reason. Now . . .

Imagine a world without it.

A world without these damages, or with less of this damage? Now that is a world that would be something to see, wouldn’t it? Just ponder:

People with less cognitive impairment, fewer disordered people, less addiction . . . less damage of so many sorts. Healthier people, healthier psyches, who knows? Maybe people would even be smarter.

Just imagine it.

Love Flowing Backwards

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

It’s a sad thing, but a vicious cycle, and a real one, in many families: reverse flow.

In some families, and to some degree or other in many families, sad to say, it is the children who sacrifice, the children that spend their days protecting the adults from their bad feelings, making sure the adults feel loved.

Adults know how important it is for children that they feel loved. Unfortunately, for so many, that is not always the priority for parents and caregivers, too often the priority seems to be discipline first, and love second. For children, however, for that very reason, that choice is not available, they are not able to exercise that sort of prioritization.

When an adult requires a child’s love, that child had better just give it up. An adult in the throes of feeling unloved, and adult who is experiencing their infantile lack of love is a dangerous thing to a child. A child in this situation has no choice. This child must set aside his own needs and serve the adult’s needs; this is a matter of self-preservation, and the child, almost invariably will look after his life first, and search for love later.

Unfortunately, what often happens is this search for love later in life becomes a desire to have children and continue this backward cycle.

(As a half-humourous aside, I must observe that in the world I am hoping to help create, saying “I want a child” will begin to be seen as a form of “I want a human being,” alongside of horrible phrases like “I want a Negro,” or “I want a pair of Vietnamese nymphets.” These are human beings, not possessions of some sort. It should be seen as a horrible thing to say, and it should be obvious that saying it signals an unhealthy psychological need as much – and more importantly – as it does a natural manifestation of the procreative urge.)

I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll be saying it again:

This generation needs to lose at both ends. We may not have gotten the unconditional love we needed as children, but we need to break the cycle. We need to not get that love again, we need to not suck it out of our children. That doesn’t save us anyway, it only continues the cycle, it only hurts our children, and theirs, and theirs, ad infinitum.

The buck should stop here. Let’s be the last unloved generation.

Don’t Turn Your Back on your Childhood Self

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When I was a kid, and still pretty young, I realized my parents were crazy.

There was a moment that I remember, although I’m sure it’s not an isolated incident. We were in the car, going somewhere or coming back, all of us, me and my brother, my two sisters, and my parents, in the big family car, Mom and Dad in the front, kids in the back, either the Meteor or the Parisienne. This would have been in the mid to late 1960s.

My brother was hyper as Hell, he could get on your nerves, and had gotten on Dad’s. He’d gone too far; he knew he was in for it, and so he got scared and started crying. This was at least partly from real fear, maybe partly a ploy, something kids do to try to tell a parent that they’ve made their point, but he was really crying. Dad apparently found this noise to be not any less irritating than my brother’s preceding noise, and growled (perhaps you’ve heard this one before?)

“Stop crying, or by God, I’ll give you something to cry about!”

To my mind at the time, the child, my older brother by a year and a half, was already crying from fear, and my father’s solution was simply more fear. This seemed unreasonable to me; I was crying also, and I too was only more afraid and only cried harder after that. That may not have been the only time, but it’s the one I remember the most, and I decided in that moment that grownups were crazy.

The difference between me and most people, between me and you, is that I’ve never changed my mind about it. To reverse myself about that is, definitively, to become crazy. To join the ranks of the mad, and I’m not doing it. My eyes were clear in that moment.

Now, I know you’ve all been there too as kids. I hope I can in some humble, respectful way, suggest that if you have changed your mind in that way, that you reconsider, retrace your steps, and start again. Support the sane, frightened child you once were and reject the madness that we call ‘parenting, discipline, punishment, consequences.’

Support the child you once were, and support the children in your world now.

And support me too! Follow me on Twitter. I will continue to try at least to put something out in this topic weekly.

My Doctrine: Abuse with an Excuse

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Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #1

 

A. Damages

1. Abuse in its several forms damages people. The forms are these: physical, mental (cognitive), emotional and psychological. The damages have the same forms. This is well documented.

2. Corporal punishment also damages people, and the damages take the same forms: physical, mental, cognitive, emotional and psychological. This is well documented. The corporal punishment of children is being outlawed in much of the world, driven by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.

 

3. Non-corporal punishment cannot actually exist, it’s a logical fallacy – an oxymoron, in fact. The argument goes like this:

 

– punishments are unpleasantnesses, they are by definition, something the punished person would not want, and so they are necessarily imposed, forced upon the punished person, against his will. Anything forced, anything imposed, involves either direct physical means, or at least the threat of physical means.

– punishments are employed when reason and talk – non-physical methods – fail, or are presumed to fail. This is often true, that these non-physical means fail, babies and young toddlers can’t be reasoned with, and even for older children who can be, punishments are usually only considered when any child is being unreasonable in the first place. When non-physical methods have been attempted and then ruled out, then logically what remains is physical, either directly or in potential.

 

Therefore punishment is impossible except that it’s physical. The only possible exception to this logical proof is in the case of punishments that are purely mental, emotional, or psychological, and these sorts of punishments are also universally considered to be unacceptable and abusive.

 

When children submit to their non-corporal punishments, this is not a disproof. It is only that the child is making a choice, the child is either remembering his baby or toddlerhood punishments, the physical ones, or more likely the child knows that if he resists, that the punishments will escalate and become corporal punishments, or most likely both, some combination of the two.

 

4. Conclusion: there are no non-corporal punishments. All punishments require force and physicality. Therefore all punishment is corporal punishment, therefore all punishment cause the damages associated with corporal punishment.

 

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #2

 

B. The Cognitive Damage

 

1. Punishments/penalties are all artificial consequences, contrived ones. It is not really a simple ‘cause and effect’ phenomenon when some active agent chooses the effect for a cause. In this way, our contrived consequences are substituted for the real world, natural consequences a child may experience when he explores or misbehaves, and therefore any real world learning experience is circumvented. This is the function that is in play when we note, through many good studies that corporal punishment hampers cognitive development.

 

When standardized punishments are substituted for the nearly infinite number of random real world consequences of childhood exploration as well as misdeeds, the vast and varied learning that may have happened is severely lessened, and the only learning that does happen is artificial and contrived. This is definitive of serious arrested cognitive development. It follows that the resulting impairment of thought will vary, of course with many factors, but certainly with the degree to which a child is controlled. A child who has more real world learning experience will be better able to process information regarding the real world than one whose learning years held few real world mistakes and learning opportunities.

 

2. Of course, parents need to protect their children from extreme danger. Life and limb certainly take priority over individual missed opportunities for real world learning. These safety hazards are not the most common situations parents and children face, however, and this is not a valid argument for the use of punishment generally.

 

Some may say that children need to be punished to learn to obey in every situation, so that their obedience will be guaranteed when there does arise a hazard, a real threat to life and limb, that a child needs to be conditioned to obey so that he may be ordered away from a street or a river and will comply immediately. This, I would say is a valid argument only if this sort of conditioning didn’t have a serious down-side. I believe that the damages that result from punishing, and certainly from the all-encompassing environment of punishment that this argument implies, brings a terrible cost also, up to and including a considerable cost of life and limb, in the form of violence, crime and suicide, along with the many social costs that are not as visible, that result from the cognitive hobbling that is produced by these methods.

 

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #3

 

C. Childhood Misbehaviours are Irrelevant

 

1. When we are punishing our children to teach them not to cause any harm in our lives, not to break anything, not to hurt anyone, we are causing permanent harm in our attempts to avoid short term and material harm. The damages of abuse and corporal punishment are long lasting, while the damages of childhood misbehaviours are, for the most part, either material or temporary, sometimes both.

 

Temporary damages are bruises that result from infantile violence or carelessness, or simply missed or disrupted adult social occasions; material ones are broken dishes, damaged or stained clothing or furniture – of course material damages can be either permanent or temporary; a loved glass heirloom is forever, a coloured wall until the next painting. Things like painting the wall cost labour and money, which, if it happens to a modern person living in debt, may be a permanent harm to their finances. Young children can cause real harms, but again, as in the previous section, this would only justify the damages of punishment if those damages were small and temporary, and they are not. The damages of corporal punishment (and it is my position that there is no other kind) are long lasting and impact every aspect of life. This, again, is well documented.

 

2. Childhood explorations and mistakes, when they go bad, can cause some damage, things get broken, caregivers and other children get bruised and inconvenienced, but for the most part, these are individual, one-off incidents, that is, single incidents, with a single instance of damage per case. If we consider that each instance is a learning opportunity, each instance can teach a child a single lesson such as the fragility of pretty glass objects, or the fragility of human relationships (when one toddler hurts another, and the other expresses his feelings somehow), we can see that trading any one such lesson off against a lifetime of suffering the damage of having been punished is a bad bargain. The long term damages of punishment would only be justifiable by considering that the damages of the child’s misbehaviour are also long lasting. In reality, the occurrence of a misdeed or a mistake by a child will rarely be habit forming. These things, dish-breaking, punching other children, do not become chronic if they go un-punished. In reality, punishing increases defiance and misbehaviour in the long term.

Consequences, shmonsequences . . .

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Change your ways, people, not your words, or not only your words.

Consequences, discipline, ’cause and effect,’ these are all words for punishing. If you’re imposing any of these things, you’re punishing . . . and yes, that’s . . . bad.

I am the most politically correct person you’d care to meet, but here’s what’s wrong with so much about PC terms: they’re terms. Words. We have seen words banned, new words for old things, old words disappearing, but the things never seem to.  Outlawing the N-word has not ended some peoples’ dislike for black people, racism still exists, albeit in code.

Punishment still abounds, albeit in code. Changing things, though, that is more difficult than changing words. Changing this thing, the world-destroying scourge of punishing, this is going to be harder than memorizing new words for it. It’s going to involve some very heavy lifting, namely:

1. Admitting our parents hurt us to no good end; and

2. Never regaining our sense of personal power by hurting our kids to no good end.

That is some very heavy lifting. No shame in not doing it – just no glory either.

Fail at Controlling Your Kids

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This is it, this is what I’m saying.

Not “control your kids without punishment,” or “control your kids without physical punishment.”

I’m not trying to tell anyone that is is possible to control your kids without punishment.

It’s not. I admit that.

What I’m saying is, punishment harms them – us. We were kids too – so controlling them harms them, so: give up the control. Control them a whole lot less.

Protect them from serious safety issues, but don’t punish them in order to train them to protect themselves from these serious safety issues, because this punishment harms them. When they’re small, too young to understand, that’s YOUR job, protecting them, not theirs.

Protect yourself and your expensive or otherwise treasured things from them when they’re small and experimenting with the world and with their power, creative and destructive power, but don’t punish them in order to train them to protect you and your stuff from their creative and destructive power, because this punishment harms them. When they’re small, too young to understand, that’s YOUR job, protecting you and your stuff, not theirs.

Other than that, don’t be controlling your kids, the cost is too high, the cost in trauma, the cost of their trust in you and your love, and the cost in their cognitive development.

You can TRY to control them, with speech, even distraction, don’t get me wrong, you’re supposed to teach them, you want them to know you’re paying attention, that you care. You can TRY to talk them out of stuff, talk is OK, but if it’s not working, it’s not working, don’t escalate to punishing. Let them learn the real-world consequences of their actions, let them learn about the real world.

Believe me, it won’t “work” most of the time. With no tool more powerful than talk, you are going to lose the battles with your two-year old.

And that is how it should be.

If you always win, if you do what it takes to win every time, if you succeed at controlling your kids, that’s only a short term win for you. Punished kids feel betrayed and abused. Punished kids, by the time they can converse, don’t like you any more, and they don’t want to listen.

If you want them to talk to you when they can, if you want teenagers that are willing to converse with you, keep it to talk when they’re small, never escalate.

Lose the battles.

Fail at controlling them.

Beware of parenting advice that tells you you can win, because winning with your two-year old means losing your older kids.

You want to win the war?

Lose the battles.

 

Negative Effects on Cognitive Development

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

I see rewards and punishments as very detrimental to learning about the real world. I think the kids’ minds are not properly developed by the adults always substituting artificial effects for real world effects that would have had an actual relationship to the cause.

Not every punishable situation is a safety, or a life and death matter.

They do say that over-punishing has the effect of some hampering of cognitive development, and I think this is why, because punishments and rewards interfere with actual, real life learning.

And if I’m right about that, then the increase of negative cognitive effects is linear, not only present in “over-punishing.”

Wouldn’t you think?

Also, punishment wouldn’t have to physical for that negative effect, would it? Any punishment that substitutes an artificial effect for a real cause would do that . . .

 

Regarding the Online talk about Bullying

Jeff/neighsayer19 Comments

There was a post on here recently, about a bullying incident, I think it was one that went viral, about a boy who was being bullied for bringing his My Little Pony backpack to school and the school basically told his mother he was asking for it, and he should just conform – of course I’m paraphrasing, but you’ve probably heard the story anyway.

Of course I find the school’s reaction appalling, it’s victim-blaming and all that, wrong from every possible angle.

But there was a comment stream about this story that went on forever, and I’m sorry to say, very few comments that had anything useful to say. Mostly, all the commenters wanted to punish the bullies. The school should, or the parents should . . . and that shows a disturbing lack of understanding.

Punishing CAUSES bullying.

because

Punishing IS bullying.

The only differences are who’s doing it and why. The differences are: children are not authorized to punish and the reasons they punish are not sanctioned. The process, and the rationale are the same, and are as follows:

someone (a kid) does something that some more powerful person (bigger kid/bully, or parent/authority figure) judges to be wrong, and the bully/authority figure imposes some sort of hurt on them, it’s that simple.

Every time an adult punishes a child, they not only demonstrate and teach the process, but they make the punished kid feel helpless and powerless, thereby creating in him a need to find someone else to do it to, a need to find a situation where he feels he has some power again.

An example follows, and there will be a quiz afterwards.

Billy gets defiant at dinner and refuses to eat his vegetables, something his parents think is wrong, so they punish him, by banning him from the internet for the evening. This tells Billy that he lacks the power of choosing to play online when he likes, or eat what he likes, shows him that the exercise of power is a socially acceptable thing, and that it is the method his parents use to modify his behaviour, to stop him doing something they think is wrong.

Now Billy goes to school the next day, he’s with his friends, and he sees someone doing something he thinks is wrong – wearing something “wrong,” doing something that Billy has judged that he wouldn’t do, something that seems wrong to him.

The quiz:

1. What have the adults taught Billy to do in this situation?

(Bearing in mind, perhaps the parents have told Billy not to bully – but, action speaks louder than words. What have they SHOWN him?)

2. What pre-existing need does Billy have that this situation may appear to him to fill?

. . . now here’s the tricky part . . .

3. What will punishing Billy again do?

It may be debatable whether there are behaviours that can be improved by punishing – but the behaviours that are actually CAUSED by punishing, they can’t be.

 

Hundredth Monkey Time

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Word is getting around about corporal punishment. The science is coming in.

That’s a good thing, I’m not complaining. Check out these Time articles, brought to my attention by Morgan – on WordPress, she’s here:

http://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/61364609/

and here are the articles:

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/28/would-you-record-yourself-spanking-your-kids/

and

http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/02/physical-punishment-increases-your-kids-risk-of-mental-illness/

There is starting to be a lot of this stuff, and it’s good stuff. The first article states that something like 80% of families in a study that recorded their family households were recorded using corporal punishment methods – perhaps a surprise for those who haven’t raised kids yet, that so many resort to it – and these were families that knew they were being recorded. This seems new to me, mainstream press that states that corporal punishment is not going away.

The second article pretty much lists all the extra risks that corporally punished kids are in for throughout their life, as compared to less “spanked” people.

Again, all good info, I’m not complaining.

OK, I’m complaining.

This looks good, I think we may be on the brink of the Hundredth Monkey effect here, in terms of corporal punishment, it may be that professionals at least, and maybe even parents are getting the idea that it’s not good for us after all.

But all this talk about “corporal punishment” is misguided. It assumes there is some other kind, which there isn’t. How can any punishment be enforced, if not physically? We may wish to impose a non-corporal form of discipline, but it is in the enforcement that it becomes physical; it is in the imposition of it wherein the physical part lies. Be honest:

Why would our kids accept our punishments if we weren’t willing to back it up? Why would a person be “grounded” if they had no idea that there is anything to enforce it? Again, be honest: what is a punishment if we don’t make it happen? It all rests upon physical means ultimately.

So, if we’re heading into Hundredth Monkey territory, if this idea is going to take hold, let’s be honest about it, lets grab this opportunity and make sure a true idea, a real-life idea is the one that takes hold, and that idea is this:

It is punishment that is the cause of these poor outcomes. There is no harmless variety, all punishment is ultimately corporal; we are corporal beings, after all. What sorts of punishments would not be? Mental, psychological, emotional? Do those who decry only corporal types of punishment advocate for the mental variety? Are we to promote psychological punishment, emotional punishment?

This is an all-or-nothing sort of thing.

The question is not “HOW should I hurt my kid,” it is “SHOULD I hurt my kid,” and the answer is, of course, “no.”

The question is punishment or not. Make no mistake, do not be fooled my imitations, the science is coming in, but it needs to take one more step. People are being hurt by punishment, and the problem is THAT they are being hurt, not HOW they are being hurt.