5. Does Punishment Work?

Despite our nearly complete faith in it to correct a world of wrongs, punishment is inherently inconsistent and unfair, and simply doesn’t work.

Everyone knows it: misbehaviours are not always punished, while correct behaviours are sometimes punished. Sometimes a one-time offender is caught and punished. Sometimes regular offenders go unpunished for long periods. Degree of punishments vary for many reasons, degree of offence not always the operative one.

Of course we've all heard this one: "Don't ever let me catch you doing (insert unwanted behaviour here)!"
This is the key to the failure of punishment to qualify as a "system." This is all anyone needs to learn to avoid punishment, of course: don't get caught. So just like punishment itself is taught with every correction, the intended lesson of every correction is lost to an overriding, works-every-time solution: don't get caught.

That's right. When "corrected" with punishment, two things are learned every time. Punish to correct, and don't get caught! Oh, yes, and something about the DVD player . . .

These are the true lessons in a "system" of punishment.

Alice Miller:

“In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development. “

I'm sure we've all felt the unfairness also. I recently got a speeding ticket. It was $113.00 or so. My attitude was, "OK, 75 in a 50 zone, I gapped out, you got me. Sigh." The cop made a speech, you know you're not supposed to go so fast, you deserve the bigger fine, you were over 20 over, but I'll give you the regular one. Well, it's good I don't think too fast, because by the time I finished getting angry and composed my response, it was over.

Here's what I'm glad I never said:

First, give me the larger fine and save me the lecture. I’m 50 years old, I don’t need to be told I shouldn’t speed (This is the explanation that turns abuse into correction). Second, this is a crime the police enforce about 1% of the time!

 I’ve put on a few kilometres driving, and people driving at or under the speed limit is pretty rare. The police just randomly give out invoices. Does anyone believe they are actually trying to systematically enforce the speed limit, or rather, that they think what they do will actually accomplish it? More to the point of my idea here – have they accomplished it?

Of course the answer to that last one is “no.”

Further to that, it’s not just speeding. Has the justice system generally stopped crime, period? No, of course not. It’s a cycle of ‘crime and punishment,’ repeated endlessly, and of course it’s not different from the other cycle, the cycle of violence.

I respect police officers generally, don’t get me wrong, they’re putting their lives on the line. They’re trying, they’re really trying, but I’m sorry to say it, they’ll never work themselves out of a job. That’s because they’re part of the cycle of violence.

Violence breeds violence, authorized or not, and the very idea we have to solve it is actually half of the cycle.

Punishment only appears to work, and only in the short term.

When punishments ‘one-answer-fits-all’ lesson, don’t get caught, is employed, wrongs are simply hidden, we misbehave out of sight. When we punish a young child’s errors and the child learns not to get caught, he or she may simply continue down their wrong path out of sight, and we will have lost any future opportunity for actual correction; a young child’s honest mistake can go ‘underground,’ possibly for years, until a toddler’s error becomes an adult’s crime! This, and we the adults have let that child down, failed him when he was very young and utterly dependant on the adults in his life, created the situation through our unassailable belief in a “system” that simply doesn’t live up to its purpose.

Punishment has been in use for the whole period of human civilization, it is referenced throughout the bible, the oldest of books, and the foundation of much of human history. The earliest book of the bible appears to concern the agricultural revolution, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, which seems to have occurred some 10,000 years ago. So that is the period during which we know that we’ve used a system of punishment to control behaviour, to correct deviations and make us safe from crime. 10,000 years.

I think we’ve given it a pretty fair trial run. When will we be ready to say it hasn’t stopped misbehaviour or crime?