Punishment Isn’t About Crime

June 10, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston


Robin Hanson has a list of statements (here) that summarize his contrarian view. These include, among many others

Charity isn’t about Helping Church isn’t about God Medicine isn’t about Health Consulting isn’t about Advice School isn’t about Learning

The furor over the sentence given to the Stanford swimmer-rapist Brock Turner shows that we should add one more to the list.

Punishment isn’t about crime.

Criminologists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the effect of punishment on crime. Does the death penalty reduce murder rates, and if so by how much? Or more generally, do harsher punishments reduce the crimes they apply to? Does rehabilitation work – or more specifically, which kinds of programs work best? Does taking criminals off the streets reduce overall amounts of crime?

These functions of punishment go under the names of general deterrence, specific deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. They raise researchable cause-effect questions.
Not so what is probably the most important function of punishment – justice. In crim textbooks (including mine) it goes under the heading of “retribution” or “just deserts.” But basically it’s vengeance. And unlike the other rationales, it is concerned with punishment’s effects not on the behavior criminals but on the feelings of good and righteous citizens. The idea of retribution is that we want punishment for bad guys because it makes us feel better to see them suffer. If the bad person does not suffer enough, the good people feel dissatisfied, even angry, and they call for harsher punishment.

Usually, they cloak this impulse under the more rational principles like deterrence, but let’s be real. Do any of the people insisting that Brock Turner be given a longer sentence think that if he is released after only a few months he will commit more rapes? Or that the short sentence will encourage other fratboys to commit rape, as though horny, drunken 20-year old will pause to think, “Hey, it’ll only be 6 months in the slammer. Now if it were a few years . . . .” ? 

Often, this deterrence idea marches under the banner of “sending a message.” A harsh sentence “sends the message” that this behavior will not be tolerated. The cliche slap-on-the-wrist sentence sends the opposite message. But if the intended targets of these messages, potential criminals, rarely receive the messages. That’s especially true for those whose crimes are unplanned and opportunistic. Instead, the people who respond to the message are the same people who wanted it sent. And they respond according to whether the message satisfies their desire for vengeance, or as they would call it, justice.

Some social scientists argue that this desire is part of human nature and that evolution has embedded it in our genes. Even babies, some experiments show, get upset when evildoing (usually by puppets) goes unpunished. But even if the desire is universal, the punishments that arise from it vary widely. In some countries, the six-month sentence would be within the normal range. That is, it would satisfy the desire for justice. In other places, anything less than death would be too lenient.

When vengeance as the basis for policy outweighs the more rational factors like deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, you get juggernauts like the war on drugs, which was mostly vengeance under a veneer of deterrence. In the initial response to the perceived drug problem, politicians enacted harsher sentences to send a message to drug users and dealers. When these new laws failed to bring the promised reduction in crime, lawmakers might have paused to rethink their assumptions. Instead, they fell all over themselves proposing even harsher sentences, locking up more people for longer periods of time.

Doing more of the same thing and expecting a different result might be a definition of insanity. But in the war on drugs, it functioned like an addiction – addiction to punishment. When a mild amount didn’t have the desired effect, lawmakers (with public approval) raised the dose. We then became habituated to that new level, we thought that only an even higher dose would bring relief. We were punishment junkies, spending more and more of our money on something that brought little relief, all the while raising our level of tolerance. We wound up with “normal” sentences that people in many other Western countries considered medieval.

In the swimmer-rapist case, the people outraged by the six-month sentence are not campaigning for generally harsher sentences for rape. They are, however, demanding the equivalent of a policy change – replacing the judge. But the motive is the same – justice (or vengeance). If we can’t punish the rapist, then let’s try to punish the judge and replace him with someone who gives out sentences that make us feel better. Of course, only the self-delusional will think that punishing the rapist or the judge will have any effect on fratboy date-rape.

One final note: I am not saying that those who want a longer sentence for Turner are wrong. I’m not saying they’re right. What I am saying is that whoever enters that argument on either side should be clear as to the bases of their position. They should also recognize that the issue is one of morals or values, so unlike questions of deterrence, it cannot be resolved with facts.

Ceci n’est pas the Active Voice

June 8, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

My brother volunteers as a reader of audiobooks. His latest assignment was a methods text –  Research Methods in Social Relations, 8th edition (Geoffrey Maruyama and Carey S. Ryan, Wiley, 2014).  In the last chapter, on p. 511, he read this:

The use of the first person and the active voice is now preferred over the third person and the passive voice. The past tense is used when reporting the past research of others and in describing your own procedures. The present tense is used to discuss results currently in front of the reader ...

Political Ideas, Political Tactics

June 7, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

A comment on the previous post claimed that political correctness is “bullying people.” The comment ignored most of the content of the post, which was about the tactic of using the term political correctness as a strategy used by bullies divert attention away from their bullying. The comment also confuses two dimensions – ideas and tactics. It’s a common enough mistake. Even the Wikipedia entry doesn’t keep ideas distinct from tactics.

Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct), commonly abbreviated to PC, is a term which, in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures which are intended not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. In the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.

The first sentence refers to ideas, as did my previous post (“comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”). The second sentence describes a rhetorical strategy: when you want to vilify something (in this case political correctness) go to extremes. Find examples of the most extreme version of the ideas and the most extreme tactics of its supporters. Once the phrase has become a pejorative, anything that can be labeled as politically correct must automatically be wrong.

But most people use the term to refer not to tactics but to ideas or values (e.g., “New York values”). To say that replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 is politically correct, or supporting gay marriage, or hoping that the Washington Redskins pick a different name, or thinking that women, Blacks, and LGBT people ought not be excluded from syllabuses or TV shows and that Donald Trump shouldn’t call women bimbos – these and a host of other issues, all of them labeled as politically correct, have nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with ideas and principles.

Bullying is a tactic, not an idea, and it is used by supporters of all sorts of political ideas. Anti-abortion activists scream into the faces women going to abortion clinics. Some even firebomb the clinics and make death threats against practitioners. In fact nowadays, thanks to the Internet, people from all over the political spectrum make death threats and use other vile tactics that all fall under the category of bullying.

The “political correctness = bullying” conflation illustrates another aspect of muddied thinking – “motivated cognition”: our feelings about the ideas affect our perception of the tactics. It’s like the football fan’s perception of pass interference or holding or some other infraction – whether we see a player’s tactic as legal or illegal depends on which side we’re rooting for. The classic 1954 study “They Saw a Game” documents this kind of motivated cognition among students following a controversial Dartmouth-Princeton football game.

More recently, in 2012 Dan Kahan and his colleagues did a similar study – “They Saw a Protest” (pdf here). All subjects were shown the the same video of protesters and police. Some were told that the protest took place outside an abortion clinic and that the protesters were anti-abortion. Others subjects were told that the scene was a military recruiting center and that the demonstrators were protesting the Army’s anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (still in effect in when the study was done).

Subjects were told to imagine that they were on a jury and that the video was key evidence in a case where the protesters were suing the police. One of the basic questions was whether the police had violated the free-speech rights of the protesters. On the whole, there was little difference between those who were told that the protest was at an abortion clinic (49% said yes, the police had violated the protesters’ rights) and those who were told it was at a recruiting office (45%). That’s on the whole. Separating the subjects according to political views revealed sharp differences in perceptions.

The measure of the subjects’ political orientation was not the usual liberal-conservative dimension but instead a space marked off by two axes: One axis is the Hierarchical-Egalitarian. Egalitarians think we should strive for greater equality in society; Hierarchicals are OK with current inequalities of race, class, and gender. The other axis is Individual-Communitarian – basically about the role of government. Is the government interfering too much in our lives (Individual), or is it not doing enough to improve things (Communitarian)? Translated into more conventional political categories, the Hierarchical and Individual would be conservative, the Egalitarian and Communitarian would be liberal.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Hierarchicals (solid lines in each graph) were much more likely to say the police were at fault when the protest was against an abortion clinic than against a recruitment center.  As they saw it, the protest at the military recruitment center – that was dangerous so the police had to move in. But when the protesters were anti-abortion, how dare the police bust up a legitimate protest. For the Egalitarians (dash lines), those positions were reversed. Basically, if we agree with the protesters, we perceive the police as violating their rights. If we disagree with the protesters, the police are just lawfully doing their job.

Politics shaped perception on an even more factual question: had the protesters blocked people from entering the building? Again, when the protest was at the recruitment center, Egalitarians saw the  protesters as relatively benign, Hierarchicals saw them as a threat to pedestrians and others. When the protest was at the abortion clinic, those perceptions flipped.

But wait, there’s more, and it gets worse. Not only does our ideology influence what we see, but we fail to recognize that connection, assuming instead that we are merely calling them not just as we see them but as they objectively are. At the same time, says Kahan, we are quick to spot the motivated perception of people we disagree with. The result is that we think those we disagree with are not just wrong but that they are acting in bad faith, deliberately misperceiving a peaceful protest as a violent mob or vice-versa.

For Political Correctness

June 4, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Political correctness.  Donald Trump scoffs at the idea, but he loves the phrase.  It’s what he uses to avoid questions and dismiss his critics. This strategy is what Sykes and Matza, in their now-classic 1957 article on “techniques of neutralization,” called “Condemning the Condemners.” Sykes and Matza were describing the thinking that juvenile delinquents use to justify their lawbreaking. Condemning the condemners neutralizes the rules against crimes, for after all, if the authorities are imperfect – corrupt, venal, unfair, etc. – then the laws they are enforcing can be ignored.

The delinquent, in effect, has changed the subject of the conversation in the dialogue between his own deviant impulses and the reactions of others; and by attacking others, the wrongfulness of his own behavior is more easily repressed or lost to view.

 
Similarly, Trump. Are his ideas and policies racist or sexist; are they intolerant on religion? Ignore that question, because the real problem is the idea behind the question itself:

MEGYN KELLY:  You once told a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice” it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees.. . . How will you answer the charge . . . that you are part of the war on women? TRUMP: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness.

                                   
The strategy plays well among Trump’s supporters. When Trump said that the problem was political correctness, they interrupted with cheers and applause.

But there’s something to be said for political correctness. Part of that creed might be summed up as “Don’t be an asshole, don’t be a bully.” It’s the same impulse towards decency as the dictum that the role of the press should be to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” If you’re doing it the other way round – comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted – you’re probably being an asshole and a bully.

Political correctness sides with those who are most easily victimized and stigmatized, especially when the basis of that stigma is something that the afflicted have little power to change – race, gender, sexuality, disability, age, physical appearance (height, weight, beauty).

A Washington Post story (here) about a case of bullying highlights these aspects of political correctness. It was on the “Post Most” list that week – the most popular stories among Post readers– probably for the same reason that the NRA loves stories about people using guns to defend themselves against bad guys. In this case, political correctness could have saved a life.

Emilie Olsen was adopted from China at nine months. She grew up in southwest Ohio. In fifth grade she became the object of jeering for her clothes (“Chinese people don’t wear camo”). In sixth grade this expanded to include accusations about her sexuality (a fake Instagram account “Emilie Olsen is Gay”). In seventh grade she was showing signs that the harassment was having its intended effects – her grades dropped, she became depressed, she cut herself. In addition to the online bullying, her tormentors posted graffiti in school bathroom stalls:  “Go kill yourself Emilie.”

She had some friends and supporters. Their demand to the bullies to “stop messing” with Emilie turned into a brief fight. Her psychological condition grew worse, and less than two months later, she got her father’s gun and killed herself.*

Her parents have sued the school, which of course denies that bullying, if there even was bullying, had anything to do with her death. The parents may not be able to prove their case legally. Still, if the school had enforced some of those principles the Trump-minded** dismiss as political correctness, Emilie Olsen would probably still be alive.

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*The case illustrates another tenet of liberal thought – that guns are dangerous. A gun in the house is much more likely to be involved in an accident, a domestic fight, or a suicide than in defense against outside predators.

** Butler County is heavily Republican.  In the Republican primary in March, Kasich won the county. But Trump did much better there, losing by only 2 percentage points, than he did in the state as a whole, where he lost by 11 percentage points.