Creating Freedom. Raoul Martinez

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and meetings and talks with survivors of violence. Prisoners took part for as long as their sentences permitted, ranging from a few days to more than a year. The results of this experiment were stunning.³⁹ In-house violence dropped from twenty-four serious incidents a year to zero for the twelve months following the first month of the programme, and reoffending rates for those who spent at least sixteen weeks in the programme were 83 per cent lower than for a comparable group of prisoners outside the programme. And it saved taxpayers about $4 for every $1 spent.

      The first form of institutional punishment we encounter is at school. We can be shouted at, detained, suspended and expelled. According to the United States Department of Education, the 2011 to 2012 school year saw 130,000 students expelled from school and 7 million suspensions (one for every seven students).⁴⁰ The traditional paradigm of punishment tells us that students who exhibit disruptive, challenging or violent behaviour must be controlled through reward and punishment. Contemporary research tells a different story: traditional approaches to disruptive behaviour often make things worse. Too often, punishments escalate from verbal warnings to expulsion without any behavioural improvement. The logic of deterrence fails and, once expelled, the likelihood of a child ending up in juvenile detention greatly increases.

      American clinical child psychologist Dr Ross Greene has pioneered an approach now known as Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS). It starts with the assumption that kids want to do well. If they’re not doing well, it’s because they lack the necessary skills. Disruptive children are not simply attention-seeking, manipulative or poorly motivated, they are struggling to meet the demands being made of them. CPS takes seriously the fact that the rules and expectations of the classroom and schoolyard do not bear equally on all. For instance, children with learning disabilities and diagnosed behaviour problems are twice as likely to be suspended and three times more likely to be imprisoned than their peers.⁴¹

      Instead of blaming young people for their disruptive behaviour, Greene urges teachers to try to understand the source of it and work with them to get beyond it. When a student acts in a disruptive or destructive way, he advises taking the following simple steps: find the time to gather information from the child to understand as clearly as possible his or her perspective, share with them your own concerns, then brainstorm with the child in order to arrive at a workable solution to avoid similar behaviour in future. It’s a strategy that aims to equip students with the tools to solve their own problems. Key to its success are staff willing to develop new skills themselves and to cultivate strong relationships with students, particularly those with challenging behaviour.

      Central School in Maine has implemented a number of Greene’s ideas. Before CPS, says Principal Nina D’Aran, ‘we spent a lot of time trying to diagnose children by talking to each other . . . Now we’re talking to the child and really believing the child when they say what the problems are.’⁴² To some, this will sound unrealistic given the demands of modern schooling, but at Central School D’Aran has observed a dramatic change. Disciplinary referrals to her office have dropped by over two-thirds and suspensions have dropped from two a year to zero. She puts it down to ‘meeting the child’s needs and solving problems instead of controlling behavior’.⁴³ It’s hard work, demanding for both kids and adults, but so far the results suggest it is well worth the effort. Since CPS has been applied in a number of other schools, disciplinary referrals and suspensions have dropped by up to 80 per cent.

      Greene’s philosophy was developed and tested in psychiatric clinics and state juvenile facilities. In Long Creek Youth Development Center, a correctional facility also in Maine, guards were resistant at first to CPS. ‘Our staff initially thought CPS was just a way to give in to the kids, and a lot of people outside the juvenile system feel they should be punished,’ says Rod Bouffard, former Superintendent at the facility. But once it was implemented, the benefits were clear: levels of violence started to drop, there were fewer staff and resident injuries and, when they were let out, kids were far more likely to stay out. Reoffending rates were reduced from 75 per cent in 1999 to 33 per cent in 2012.⁴⁴ Indeed, for a number of years they have had some of the lowest reoffending rates in the US.

      Prisons like Bastøy, projects like Resolve to Stop the Violence, and approaches like Restorative Justice and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions have transcended the simplistic paradigms of retribution and deterrence in favour of rehabilitation – for both perpetrators and victims. Of course, none of them is perfect: all are part of an ongoing process of experimentation from which better ways of doing things will continue to emerge. However, we already know that these alternatives are more ethical than the current predominant strategies and much more effective.

       Root causes

      Small details can have a significant impact on moral behaviour. The subconscious effect of a pleasant aroma, a modest rise in the volume of background noise, or rushing to an appointment have all been shown to impact our inclination to be kind to strangers in need.⁴⁵ One experiment showed that people who had just found a dime in the coin-return slot of a phone booth were more likely to help when a nearby stranger dropped some papers they were carrying.⁴⁶ Finding the coin increased the proportion of those who helped to pick up the papers from 4 per cent to 86 per cent. When people were asked why they had stopped to help, the discovery of the dime was seldom mentioned.

      Another study, more salient to the topic of punishment, observed the behaviour of judges.⁴⁷ Without their knowledge, eight judges were monitored as they reviewed applications for parole. They spent an average of six minutes on each application, and could spend whole days working through them. Only 35 per cent of applications were approved. The observers took note of the exact time of each decision, as well as the exact time of the judges’ three food breaks over the course of the day. What they found was striking: the proportion of approved requests spiked after each food break, with 65 per cent of requests being granted at this time. Over the subsequent two hours, as the judges grew tired and hungry, their rate of approval steadily dropped to roughly zero just before the next meal.

      A little science helps to make sense of these results. The nervous system requires more glucose than most other parts of the body. Demanding mental activity uses up a great deal of it, and prolonged mental exertion results in a drop in glucose levels in the blood. This depletion results in a deterioration of performance when carrying out demanding and effortful tasks, as well as a tendency to fall back on automatic behaviour. If an innocuous dime in a phone booth or a mild drop in glucose levels can have such significant, yet unconscious, effects on our behaviour, what influence might the totality of our environment exert over the course of a lifetime?

      The most established environmental determinant of violence in a society is income inequality.⁴⁸ Less equal societies are more violent.⁴⁹ The link between inequality and homicide rates, within and between countries, has been revealed in dozens of independent studies – and the differences are not small. According to the Equality Trust in the UK, there are five-fold differences in murder rates related to inequality between different nations. In fact, higher rates of inequality are associated with a host of social problems: mental illness, child bullying, drug use, teenage pregnancy, divorce, illiteracy and distrust.

      James Gilligan sheds light on how some of these factors could conspire to produce particularly violent forms of crime. After years of work with aggressive inmates, he has ‘yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated’.⁵⁰ For obvious reasons, shame and humiliation tend to be more prevalent in societies with greater inequality, where the race for status is more intense. In these highly competitive environments, argues Gilligan, those at the bottom of the hierarchy struggle to find ways to secure markers of status. Deprived of the education, wealth, care and opportunities enjoyed by others, it becomes incredibly important to them to defend what little status they do enjoy. With other means out of reach, violence often becomes the only way they feel they can do this. The smallest sign of disrespect can provoke the most violent of acts. (This explains why higher education in prisons СКАЧАТЬ