Punishment

[Illuminattile]

The thread in Our Block about the mother who forced her son to wear a sandwich board saying "I steal things" as punishment for theft got me thinking.

The situation described above is one form of operant conditioning. The song commits an act (in this case, he steals) and he gets punished (in this case, he's embarassed by his momma). The idea is, he realises that if he steals he'll be punished so he doesn't steal. It's the same with prison; you commit a crime, you go to jail. The next time you're in the position to commit a crime, you're deterred by the threat of punishment.

But punishment doesn't stop someone wanting to commit a crime, it merely stops them from going through with it. What punishment essentially says to the criminal is "you'll be punished for committing a crime", rather than saying "it's wrong to commit a crime". The child in the example above might not steal again, but that won't be a result of him learning his lesson, realising that theft is an immoral thing to do. It will be out of fear of reprisal. He'll weight the good against the bad and make his decision based on that.

Operant conditioning works in two ways; Punishment and Extinction. Punishment focuses on increasing the bad, Extinction on decreasing the good. B.F. Skinner did operant conditioning experiments with rats. At first, the rats would press the lever and receive a food pellet. This established a behaviour; the rats would push the lever to receive food. The two type of operant conditioning were used to deter behaviour. In one, the rat would push on a lever and receive a food pellet followed by an electric shock (punishment). In another, the rat would push the lever and simply receive nothing (extinction).

These approaches are sufficient for reducing the unwanted behaviour of animals, but we are humans. We are an intelligent species. Surely we can deter behaviour by appealling to our higher intelligence? Should we not be teaching our children that theft and violence are wrong rather than merely risky? Would establishing a stronger, clearer moral foundation reduce crime in later life?

Am I being too idealistic, is this not possible in the real world?

 

[Sebastian]

Would establishing a stronger, clearer moral foundation reduce crime in later life?

just theoretical:
yes, i think it would reduce the crime.

when you ask "is it possible?" then my answer would be:
to a certain degree its even realistic to reduce the crime. but there will always be people who dont care about moral and all that (because of certain circumstances).

 

[The.Menace]

Am I being too idealistic, is this not possible in the real world?

I think you are. But you're right, maybe we should 'teach' our prisoners about why they went wrong, like in a class of psychology at school,

 

[Khaled]

practically, i think it's safer to focus on punishment because it's not societies job to teach you that "stealing is wrong" for instance.
look at it this way. I know i m oversimplifying but:
stealing is wrong because of religion/ethics...
stealing is risky because you have to protect the rights of others.

there are several crimes that might not be considered unethical. For example, bigamy is a crime in the States (i think) but not in some other countries. So you cannot expect everybody to believe it's intrinsically wrong. However, you expect an American to abide by the law, and you use punishment to enforce it, but extinction in this case doesn't work

 

[The.Menace]

Of course you do have a point, it might be hard sometimes to actually explain the crimes (Try to explain me why I'm not allowed to smoke weed ) - another reason to call it 'too idealistic'

 

[Amara]

I think we do appeal to morality when dealing with criminals. Deterrence is not the only goal of punnishment, in fact it is merely one of several. Punnishment also takes on elements of retribution for example (an eye for an eye, is not that teaching a kind of morality?) as well as rehabilitation (the criminal does not possess the required moral standard to be allowed to re-enter society, therefore they must undergo a form of re-socialisation)...and so on.

So having regard to those arguments which are in favour of punnishment, it is almost like the moral lessons have failed to be transmitted into the mind of the criminal. It is a failing perhaps. Punnishment in that sense, is designed to rectify the lack of social development and requisite standard of morality. (I have not seen the Clockwork Orange, but I believe it raises these kinds of issues).

And then, if we consider the defence of insanity. We do not punnish those incapable of making a decision in regards to whether their actions are right or wrong.. therefore reinforcing the idea that crime is wrong, (yet one has to be of sufficient mental capacity to identify it as so).

As for the question of whether a stronger moral foundation would reduce crime in the future, I think it is true of crimes such as homicide, yet theft and other social and economic driven crimes are, I believe, by and large the result of marginalisation, in which case it is not so much a lack of morality as the negative effects of capitalism which drive these crimes (the undeterrable - if you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to fear. Needs > Rules).