“The best way to make a nonviolent offender violent, is to put him in prison”

In the health field, it is critical to identify the cause of a problem so that it can be removed or corrected. When the diagnosis is incorrect, the applied treatment is insufficient or might even intensify the condition. If we apply this logic to the question of whether our current criminal justice system influences criminality, we are pressed to accurately diagnosis the cause. Our current criminal justice system assumes that punishing those who commit violent acts will deter them and others from committing such acts in the future — that punishment prevents crime and violence. If that premise, that diagnosis, were true, then we’d expect a low recidivism rate for people punished for their crimes. We’d expect punishment to positively influence behavior. The opposite is actually true.

The most powerful stimulus for violence is punishment. According to Dr. James Gilligan, director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School, punishment – that is to deliberately cause pain – above and beyond the degree that is unavoidable in the act of restraint, only constitutes further violence and causes further violence. In “Reflections on a National Epidemic of Violence,” he writes, “The best way to make a nonviolent offender violent, is to put him in prison.” Gilligan contends that punishment increases feelings of shame and humiliation, and decreases feelings of guilt. Shame, humiliation and guilt are exactly the psychological conditions that give rise to violent behavior. He cites three preconditions for violence:

1) feeling ashamed;

2) having no nonviolent means of diminishing feelings of shame; and

3) lacking emotional capacities that normally inhibit violent impulses stimulated by shame.

So, in other words, the purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame. Thus, an accurate diagnosis of the cause of violence is an attempt to achieve justice.

It is difficult for healthy people to understand how shame causes violence because the magnitude of the resulting violent act seems so far out of proportion to the triviality of the precipitation cause. It is exactly the triviality of the provoking incident that makes it so shameful.  Battered women understand this. What may seem trivial, like not having dinner on the table on time, or harmless, like wearing a new blouse, can precipitate murderous outrage. Their batterers are so deeply ashamed of their wishes to be loved and taken care that they go to the opposite extreme. Their use of violence is a face-saving means of forcing other to take care of you. Knowing this, battered people go to extremes (often to their own detriment) to provide some measure of peace.

The only way to understand and stop violence is to see it as tragedy. Gilligan says that if we don’t provide people with essential means to develop and mature, such as education, employment, health care and treatment, we leave them no other means than violence to protect themselves from potentially overwhelming circumstances and intolerable shame. “We must approach violence through public health and preventive medicine,” he states, “and see it as a symptom of life-threatening pathology in order to explain and thus prevent it.”

Having worked for the past 30 years with women and children who have experienced the extreme end of violent abuse, it is clear that violence is the ultimate means of communicating an absence of love by the person inflicting the abuse. The absence of love leads to shame and shame is the pathogen of further violence, acted out inwardly for many women and often through neglect of their children. When she couldn’t fend off unloving acts, one woman told me, her “soul was murdered.”

At Christ Kitchen, we go to extremes to show women the extravagant love of the Savior. It can take a long time for a soul empty of love, filled with hate and self-loathing, to believe in Love, to trust Goodness. “It takes a long time to reinstate dignity,” my Ethiopian mentor, Jember Teffera, says. So, we show up every day ready to proclaim and live out the Lord’s ways, knowing we won’t always feel successful, knowing that deep abiding love, prayer, commitment, accountability is the only way shattered souls find peace.

We have to trust that the Lord is at work within our very imperfect current criminal justice system because we hear stories about it all the time. One woman stared for days at the 23^rd Psalm scratched as graffiti on her cell wall and was inextricably changed. Another, after 30 years of addiction and finally imprisonment for dealing heroin, prayed to God to change her or kill her. She was miraculously set free. Many others say without incarceration they never would have surrendered their addictions.

It’s the deep abiding love of the Lord that enables change – even in prision. Oh, church, where are you?

 ”Crime & Punishment?” is the topic of our next Coffee Talk, which will take place at 10 a.m., Dec. 7 at Indaba Coffee. Martinez is a panelist.