Talking to Myself, #6: Time-Out
Punishment.
The logic goes, if you isolate a person from others, strip them of their toys, and do this for an indefinite period of time, they will magically reflect on the nature of their transgression, understand why it was a transgression in the first place, and choose to avoid repeating this transgression in the future.
For children, we call it time-out. For adults, we call it prison.
For children, this method of punishment is a form of training. We call it training because, for the most part, bad behavior from children is no more than freewheeling cognitive exploration of a form that adults have determined is socially unacceptable. In doing so, we steer children in ways we deem best fit for society, much as you would guide a blindfolded person through a room they’ve never been in before.
And maybe that’s effective. Childrens’ brains after all are wholly underdeveloped and cognitively incapable of complex consequence evaluation. Shutting a child in a room with no toys does communicate to the child, “You are here because you did a bad thing. If you do that bad thing again, you’ll be here again.” We de-incentivize bad behavior as a clear way of showing the child they did something wrong.
But, do they know why it’s wrong?
Adults are different. We don’t need to ask this question about adults. Adults know both when they do something wrong and why it’s wrong. And in the face of knowing that wrong, adults still opt to engage in criminal behavior. A risk assessment calculation is performed and an adult deems the criminal approach the most desirable way to address a given scenario. This begs the question… why are we using the same method of consequence for adults as we are for children?
If putting a child in time-out is meant as an easy-to-understand consequence for a young brain in need of easy-to-understand concepts, well that on its face cannot apply to adults. No mentally able adult is in need of understanding why criminal behavior is bad.
What then is the point of prison? It surely is not educational or substantively reformative. Few people have ever said, “Send his ass to jail! Reform him!”
Prison must then be about revenge and not much more. It’s that animalistic perverse warmth we feel when someone gets smacked down for misbehaving. We all love to see it. I do too. Because misbehavior represents someone acting OUT of line when the rest of us are forced to act IN line. We resent the audacity. And in the most violent of situations, we resent the crushing sadness and depressing hopelessness it makes us feel.
So we say, “Lock him up and throw away the key!” We’re enraged. We’re out for blood. It’s hard not to be, especially in the face of the most horrifying of behaviors.
But, at what point in the conversation do we stop and wonder if any of this makes a difference? Crime, and especially violent crime, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. People are still afraid to walk alone at night. People still choose a neighborhood to live in based on its crime stats. People still lock their doors. People still remove valuables from their cars. People still buy knives, mace, and guns for protection. And the illegal drug trade is as bustling an underground economy as it has ever been.
Prison, or the threat of it, doesn’t appear to be making much of a dent in thwarting adult illegality. Thousands of adults every year in Baltimore and cities like it resort to crime. Every couple of years we bemoan surging crime, pay consultants to answer questions we already know the answers to, and in due time we end up back where we started.
Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that most obvious of conclusions…
Time-out only works for children.
