How A World View Changes
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A Palestinian boy straps explosives to himself and becomes a suicide bomber. A mad young man in America shoots people for no reason what so ever. A child abuser is discovered to have been abused as a child. A drug addict mugs an old lady for her pension money and, months later she subsequently dies but it is discovered the drug addict turned to drugs after losing his job and home.
It is not unusual to switch on our TV’s today after such happenings and find much ‘hand wringing’ occurring as the interviewee insists we ‘have to find the root causes of these problems’. Often, if something awful has occurred in a particular neighbourhood somewhere on Earth the interviewee will be described as ‘a community leader’.
I’m always immediately suspicious of anyone described as a ‘community leader’ as I’ve never seen an advertisement for such an occupation. I’m inclined to think ‘community leader’ is a gentle euphemism for ‘interfering idiot with personal agenda’.
Back in the 70’s, 80’s and much of the 90’s when the IRA were hell bent on blowing up everyday shoppers in Manchester and ordinary citizens enjoying a pint in their local pub I don’t recall any ‘hand wringing’ or ‘desire to understand the root causes’ and so forth. ‘String the bastards up!’ tended to be the common reaction – and quite right too.
The IRA purported to be fighting for the cause of a united Ireland – and I’m quite prepared to believe that most of them actually believed that – but blowing up innocent men, women and children on the British mainland out shopping was hardly likely to create any sympathy for this ’cause’.
It apparently did create sympathy in certain ‘Irish quarters’ of America but I’ll let that pass for now if only because ‘name calling’ never achieves anything.
And ‘there’s the rub’.
We seem to have created a ‘blame culture’ that does it’s damnedest to avoid blaming anybody unless there happens to be a handy scapegoat around.
The Palestinian boy wasn’t a deranged murdering S.O.B. at all, he was so distraught at the behaviour of Israel he could find no other way of expressing his anger and hatred than to blow himself up – which in and of itself would be fair enough – but the fact that he blew up several men, women and children out shopping in the process now becomes almost secondary as we look for ‘the root causes’ of his actions and blame Israel.
That is certainly not to say that the leaders of Israel are blameless. Quite the reverse. The treatment of Palestinians by Israel has frequently been appalling. However, the men, women and children no longer in existence had no part to play in the torment of the Palestinians or, indeed, the hypothetical Palestinian suicide bomber.
The child abuser who went on to abuse has his ‘root causes’ analyzed by some ‘community leader’ / liberal ‘do-gooder’ / ‘self appointed expert’ (delete as applicable) who asks that we understand that the trauma of being an abused child is the ‘villain of the peace’ and the abuser himself is blameless as his mental capacity to understand the wrong he was doing was compromised by his own abusive childhood.
(Having been an abused child I believe I am quite entitled to advise that such analyzing is, to put it mildly, complete and utter garbage)
The drug addict is now depicted as an unfortunate person who lost his way due to the trauma of losing his job / home / wife / family etc etc etc. The fact that his mugging of an elderly lady resulted in her health deteriorating and eventually her death is of secondary importance.
“We must discover the root causes that made this previously good man so desperate that he had to mug an old lady for her pension”
In other words we must help and rehabilitate these murdering / abusing scumbags. Well, obviously, we can’t rehabilitate the hypothetical suicide bomber as there’s very little left of him to do much more than use him for fertilizer but you get my drift?
I utterly disagree.
Apart from the hypothetical suicide bomber who is now assisting in the growing of someones vegetables, what we should do is lock the bastards up to ensure they can never again harm an innocent. We should then throw away the key and leave them in their cell with three square meals a day and the rest of their lives to analyze the root causes of what made them become murdering / abusing scumbags.
We could even let them out (in chains) to explain, once their self analyzing is complete, why they did whatever it was they had done. Then, having discovered the root causes behind their behaviour we can send them back to their cells to regret letting their own problems cause the pain, suffering and even death of innocents.
I somehow do not expect any TV channel soon to wheel me out as a ‘community leader’. Do you?
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Norman, as a Criminologist I am afraid I must disagree with your sentiments. By and large we are learning more and more about what causes crime in general and some crimes more specifically. We know, for example, that while poverty contributes to crime it is not the sole perpetrator. There are other factors such as environment, broken homes, bad parenting, gangs, etc. Notice that I did not put drugs in as a causation because drug use, like criminal behavior, is usually a choice one makes. Drugs are inanimate chemicals that harm nothing if left alone. In another sense we, in this country, have an overwhelming sense of morality to the point of being oppressive. Religion and godliness is an obsession that tends to dominate many parts of American life to the point that it drives some into rebellion. There is clear evidence, for example, that most serial killers and rapists were persistently hounded by their mothers about their sexuality. Boys were told that they were dirty and nasty and their penises were evil. Girls were taught that men were evil and were only interested in them for sex. This has been more prominent in some of the evangelical and Pentecostal faiths but also exists in some of the more mainstream faiths like the Southern Baptist.
If you have been keeping up with American politics at all you probably know that we in this country have been literally crippled in this country for the last five years by the so called Tea Party. These are social ultra conservative who tend to thrive in the South and some of the Western states. They have long believed in both the death penalty and locking people up and throwing away the key. They have also managed to distort the juvenile justice system from one that was supposed to intervene in the lives of young people before they became hardened criminals and “salvage” them, to use the words of Jane Aadms. The juvenile system now has become more of a mini criminal justice system that is quicker to resort to punishment than to treatment for kids. It has led to disasters such as mistreatment of young people in boot camps, and detention facilities. One judge in Pennsylvania was recently convicted in a payoff scheme where he was getting paid for sending kids to a privately owned detention facility. In several other instances kids have died at the hands of correctional officers in boot camps. Combine all of this with America’s “War on Drugs” which began in 1972 by Richard Nixon and was enhanced in 1986 by Ronald Reagan. From 1986 until 2001 the prison population increased 500% with the majority of those being locked up for drug violations. Of those drug violator going to prison most were what are called “drug pusher”, the retail sales people of the drug industry. When one looks closely at these people they were mostly very much small time people and were usually sell marijuana or crack cocaine. Under Reagan’s enhancement law possession of any amount of crack cocaine became a felony. This law was aimed at the poor who could not afford the powdered version.
So, where does this leave us. We have a society where people have been focused on the struggle of morals for the past 40 years, and passing judgement on others. If you look back at our history, and the history of the world, there was far less violence before the 1960’s. In this country the major violence was involving racial issues and Vietnam War protests. Mass murder and serial killers were around but were rare here and in other countries except for the tyrants and dictators. After the sixties and our stumbling and bumbling in Vietnam, and the preposterous War on Drugs our problems began. As Jim mentioned, our constant meddling in the affairs of the Mideast was bound to bite us in the ass at some point. There is no way in hell we would have ever stood for any other country to interfere with our government the way we had manipulated countries in the Mideast.
We in this country think we have done things perfectly but we are not much different from anyone else, nor is England. We all have to pay the piper at some point. England decided it wanted to colonize the world but people did not care much for that as Jim pointed out. When the Europeans decided to settled this land we screwed over the Native Americans really bad. When we declared war on Japan we rounded up hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans and placed them in internment camps where they stayed for the duration of the war losing property and business. After the war we and our allies decided to give the Jewish people their homeland, Israel, much to the dismay of the Palestinians. We gave Iran to the Shah who was a brutal dictator with his death squads. Was all of that out of the goodness of our souls, not hardly.
Just as we had sought to exploit the Africans for their slave labor to help build this country and England had wanted to exploit the colonists for the riches of America, we all wanted to get at the oil in the Mideast. We have used our wealth to bribe other countries to allow us to strategically place military bases around the world to fend off the Soviet Union, now Russia. Where the world was once round and countries, and therefore threats, were “all the way around the world” from us, the world is now flat. Everyone is in striking distance of just about everyone else.
Even with all of this, none of our countries can come together and focus on our own self interest and solve our “in country” problems. Despite the fact they we in America see how bad it is for religion to run the Muslim countries, Christians would love for the Christian religion to run this country. They would love to replace the Constitution with the Bible. I am not sure how it is in Britain but I am sure the Church of England would not mind that either.
The best I can offer Norman is to make me King of the world for a year or so and let me get everyone straightened out. I will make you the King Assistant for Europe. 🙂 🙂 🙂
To be honest Bill, The Church of England is pretty much buggered. Falling attendances and so forth.
I bow to you as a criminologist old bean but surely the first thing to do is keep the innocent safe? I’m not entirely daft old bean – well – not yet anyroad 😉 I realise there ARE root causes and so forth, I would just like the ‘criminals’ regardless of the cause of their criminality, locked up first to protect everyone else.
To be honest, even if ‘There is clear evidence, for example, that most serial killers and rapists were persistently hounded by their mothers about their sexuality’ you still have to ‘lock them up’ in some way to protect the innocent.
I kind of agree with you and, if I had more knowledge of Criminology I suspect I would agree even more.
Most importantly, on a personal note, both Jim and yourself are educating me in a very big way here – and, hopefully, others as well.
Thank you.
Can we just make it King Assistant for England? You know…what with all those French and Germans and Scots and so forth…more bloody trouble than they’re worth..;-)
Sure Norman. And I agree that the really bad people have to be locked up regardless of the root causes. They are still dangerous as hell. I still deal with them every day and, even though they are human beings and must be treated as such, I have no delusions about most of them ever being able to walk freely on the streets again. However, we need to clear our prisons of those who really don’t need to be there. Those who are the low level drug pushers of marijuana and crack users that have been caught up in this war on drugs. We need to take a lot of that prison money and put it into treatment for those people and get them into the job market by expunging their records of the drug offenses. Most every state and the federal government are going broke trying to house to many people in prison who do not need to be there. People who are dangerous to others need to be kept there until they can prove they are no longer dangerous. For example, robbers, rapists, murderers, and a some burglars would be considered dangerous, but most of your petty thieves can be dealt with in a different setting that is less expensive.
Years ago, when a friend of mine named Gus Moeller, who has since passed away, was Deputy Superintendent of the Federal Bureau of Prisons they had developed a system to separate the inmates on the probability of their chances to be rehabilitated. In that system they recognized that roughly 10 -15 percent of their population was completely hopeless and not worth any effort to change so they were just left to serve their time. Another 30 -40 percent only had a possibility to be changed and they were put into a program where they had to earn a rehabilitative status. That left less than half of the population coming into the system that could be graded as a probability for rehab and were put in the rehab program. Of those only about half of them actually completed the program and stayed out of trouble for at least 5 years after their release. Currently there are not very many, if any, jurisdictions doing longitudinal studies to determine the success or failure of their correctional programs. Most have simply given up due to over crowding and have become ware houses where they end up turning out people earlier than they should. People who probably should not be out.
Norman, I’m very much with you on protection. I fully support imprisonment of individuals who cannot be trusted in society, regardless of underlying causes, to protect society from sociopaths. That’s not retribution or punishment. Prisons should not be punitive. Instead, they should harbor those who cannot be trusted to be in society without hurting others. Efforts to educate and correct their behaviors should be sincere, but if the person can’t be “fixed”, there should be no reluctance to sustain their incarceration.
The punishment motive…and meting out “punishment” that is less than “cruel and unusual” is a fundamental flaw in our criminal justice system. Capital “punishment” is murder in the name of justice. Measuring “punishment” in terms associated with the severity of the crime is wholly ineffective and barbaric.
Instead, we would be far better served by doing our level best to address the problems of “criminals”, attempting to return them to society if they are “rehabilitated”, and keeping society safe from individuals who present risks to society. Meanwhile, there’s zero merit to punishing. The goal should always be what the system dares to call itself, “corrective.” The “corrections system” is not corrective, and the cruelty of losing one’s freedom is more than enough punishment without compounding the punishment with solitary confinement and other punishing behaviors for inmates who are not a threat to other inmates.
Long live the King!
Norman
I’ll grant you that your “lock the bastards up” view will resonate with many, and it has strong historical precedent. I’m not religious, but if we draw on the Bible as an historical document, we see evidence of “an eye for an eye” in the Old Testament evolving to “turn the other cheek” with the advent of Christianity. Of course, few so-called Christians embraced “turn the other cheek” in any meaningful way, and “an eye for an eye” still prevails.
I’ve always been a pragmatic “do-gooder” in that, at the the most fundamental level, my belief in the “oneness of all” is based on a very pragmatic belief that our failure to recognize that we are all one leads us to self-destructive behaviors that eventually rise to the level of global warfare. “Us and them” is an illusion that perpetuates violence against “others” who aren’t really others.
But still…we have oppressors and oppressed. We have perpetrators of violence and victims of violence. We have thieves and those who have possessions stolen from them. In every case, however, the perpetrators are in a symbiotic relationship with the victims.
Our current efforts to come to grips with what motivates the perpetrators might be seen as liberal hogwash…and in some cases, it is just that. On the other hand, a sincere effort to understand and empathize with the perpetrator is in our own self interest. If we don’t examine what led to the perpetrator’s actions, we are doomed to continue “creating” perpetrators and enabling them to victimize others.
Let’s step back from current events and examine a classic case of creating a monster. At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles and other post-war settlements were needlessly and self-destructively punishing and oppressive of Germany. Post-war Europe was crushing not only German leaders but Germany and Germans as a whole. This cruel and unusual punishment gave rise to the Third Reich and enabled Hitler and his minions to seize power and plunge Europe, and eventually the world, into WW-II.
We could have, should have, seen that coming, but of course we didn’t.
Similarly, US and other Western Nations’ meddling in the Middle East, South and Central America and elsewhere have given rise to a new round of Crusades…with radical Islamic terrorists attempting to inflict punishment on the Western world for centuries of colonial abuses, manipulations of their governments, placement of and support for puppet dictators and much more. Our failure to see the inevitable, and our short memories, and our skewed, propaganda-driven views of the world lead us to see this terrorism through the eyes of a victim, but we fail to recognize and take into account our own roles in fostering terrorist behaviors.
You mention the IRA, but you fail to mention the role of the British Government in propagating revolt. I don’t sympathize with the IRA, but I do empathize with what led them to act as they did. One might say the same of US rebels at the time of our Revolutionary War. While the US fought battles, Mahatma Gandhi mounted a peaceful revolt to achieve the same ends.
Returning to current examples, it is to our benefit to attempt to understand the perpetrators and to mitigate, to the best of our ability, the circumstances that lead someone to commit mass murder of any type…whether on a California college campus or on the battlefields and in the gas chambers of Europe.
An eye for an eye has been with us since the dawn of “civilization” and it has failed us for that long. There is no deterrent…no practical improvement in human behaviors…from incarceration or from capital punishment. Extracting vengeance may salve the wounds of those who are injured, but it does nothing to change behaviors…as witnessed by current events.
So, I, for one, am thrilled to see the seedlings of efforts to understand the motivations of perpetrators. I desperately want to come to grips with the “why” so we can take steps to cope effectively with the things that motivate perpetrators to act as they do. It’s an evolutionary step in the right direction to accept our roles and responsibility in creating Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Michael McKevitt…and Castro, George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Vladimir Lenin and myriad others for that matter. What we think of each of them often depends on how we personally relate to them and what they did for us as individuals.
Many mass murderers are victims themselves. That does not justify their actions…and I don’t, in ANY way suggest it does. But if we don’t do our best to understand them and fix the things that injure them, we simply breed more of them.
So it’s not a misguided sense of liberalism that motivates us to invest the effort to understand why a Palestinian boy would strap on a bomb vest. It’s enlightened self-interest that guides that effort. That effort needs to be accompanied by a willingness to come to grips with our role in motivating that boy to be a suicide bomber and do something about OUR actions that lead to his efforts to inflict pain on us.
If I sit next to you in a bar and insult you, spill your drink, and relentlessly poke you in the side, should I be surprised when you punch me? And yet, we are surprised and appalled by the Palestinian boy, the IRA bomber, al Qaeda, the Sandinistas, the theater shooters, and so many more. We help “break” these people, and yet we are surprised when they lash out as if they are broken. We are distressed and angry when the Vietnamese revolt against our puppet dictators and want their country back…and align themselves with countries that have the resources and motivation to act as their surrogates in war against us.
So often, WE are the ones striking the other on the first cheek, and yet we are shocked when the original victim is unwilling to turn the other cheek…often over and over again.
We need not condone or support or even tolerate the behaviors of those who lash out. But failing to make the effort to understand…REALLY understand that Palestinian boy…is a mistake we make at our own peril.
Bloody hell Jim! Why oh why oh why haven’t you ever been President or something???
You’ve just changed – or at least tweaked – my perspective in a few paragraphs!
I hear you old bean. I really do. Thank you.
Norman, you are very kind! I’m too ornery for politics. I actually did serve my community for many years. I was the volunteer head of our master-plan committee (we wrote zoning code for a semi-rural community just 12 miles from the capital city in the state of New York). One of my last acts in politics was to mount a lawsuit against the community, because they were taking bribes and buckling to pressure from developers to violate the code my committee just wrote and the government just adopted. The situation was ugly, with the New York State Senate Majority Leader exerting his influence to overturn our zoning code so that his developer buddy could build “big box” retail in space zoned for small office space (doctors, attorneys, and other non-retail businesses).
I wrote the first check to begin the litigation against the municipality, the developer and his buddy, Mr. Bruno. He was eventually convicted of fraud on “unrelated” charges. http://www.fbi.gov/albany/press-releases/2009/alfo120709a.htm
In the end however, politics being what it is, Mr. Bruno’s conviction was overturned.
So I’m not in politics anymore, and there is the infrastructure for a big box store on the corner of routes 4 and 43 in North Greenbush, NY. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.653702,-73.691428,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sS9ROCbt-YbbbbbewghLSQg!2e0
Ironically, however, the developer must have “lost his shirt” on this project, because 13 years after the fact, there is nothing but a driveway structure, street lamps and paved parking (along with a very expensive “improvement” to the highway to accommodate projected traffic) at that site. The big box store never materialized. Sometimes, if you build it, they DON’T come.
I now live in the mountains outside of Denver, Colorado, where the stench of politics poisons the air less than it does where I once lived.
Jim, I am jealous of where you live. Living in Alabama has actually become a burden because of the people. There are some good people here in this state but, for the most part, they are overwhelmed by the stupidity of the religious zealots and down right stupid people that get voted into office at the state level. I have been thinking about retiring completely and moving but I hate moving away from my kids and grand kids.
Bill,
Colorado has more than its share of religious zealots, Tea Party members, gun nuts and so on. My wife and are among the small minority of progressives in the mountains. Denver is overwhelmingly progressive, but Aurora, where we used to live is deeply “conservative.” Colorado Springs would seem very familiar to you….it’s home to Focus on the Family and other ultra-conservative and radical Christian groups. Colorado has, of late, voted ever so slightly “blue” due to the high concentration of the population in Denver and a few other progressive cities, but where I live is “scary red”.
An anecdote that symbolizes Colorado…and this happened in the heart of Denver…LODO (lower downtown). I was in a leather-goods store. Coats, boots, gloves and so on. In walked a cowboy…a real cowboy. He was coming from one of the many cowboy events in Denver…probably “The Stock Show.” This cowboy was a bit dressed up…in his best cowboy attire…but he was the real deal. And he was packin’. On his hip, in a low-slung holster straight out of a John Wayne movie, was a .44 magnum revolve. …well-used .44, not some shiny showpiece or bit of costume jewelry like the stainless steel Gloks and other such baubles many suburban gun owners sport.
No-one, other than me that is, batted an eye.
As they say, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore…
Bill, if you are looking for reliable blue, do your research, because where I grew up…the Northern Adirondacks in upstate NY, it is deeply red, too.
What we are seeing is that we never get the full story from the media. Each one tells only the part that supports their editorial views. That’s why Fox News is a shill for the Republicans ans the Religious Reich. It’s also where they get the most viewers and make the most money.
At the considerable risk of appearing cynical, I suspect that, if Fox News thought they would get more viewers and therefore, more ad revenue, by supporting the other side of the political spectrum we would see them make a 180º turn in their “reporting”. As would any other for profit media.
I’m very envious of people that are more intelligent than me but, no matter, I like you 😉