Paradigm shift, from punishment to healing
Lately I’ve been thinking about Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that science advances not in some smooth progression, but by undergoing paradigm shifts. A great example of this is the switch from the Earth-centered solar system to the Sun-centered solar system. For renaissance-era astronomers, the Earth-centered system presented a lot of difficulties, as there were a lot of weird looking patterns in the sky (such as Mercury appearing to go in little circles) that required complicated theories to make work. The pile of observations that couldn't easily be fit into a model of planets going around the Earth kept growing, making a mess of things. The Sun-centered theory, while radical from an existential perspective, made a lot more sense when compared to observations, which set up the conditions for a fairly rapid paradigm shift after Copernicus published his findings in 1543, as the observations fit so much better with the Sun-centered model. Yes the history is more complicated, but it’s an analogy, so I hope you’ll forgive me.
The analogy I want to draw here is that we are living in a punishment centered society, where we are told that punishment is an effective orienting framework for achieving social goals. However, more and more observations are piling up that really don’t fit this model. First, it doesn’t seem to produce good results. People come home from prison traumatized and often unable to find housing and work, which leads to very high recidivism rates (with over 50% of people incarcerated again within 3 years). If the goal is building a thriving community and society, punishment is working contrary to that. Meanwhile, alternatives to incarceration seem to work much better. Second, in some areas of society, mainstream opinion is turning hard away from punishment and towards restorative, healing-oriented approaches, such as ‘gentle parenting.’ This started with the shift away from physically beating children, and now is including harsh words and other shaming, degrading, and deprivation methods. So we know that at least for some people, punishment is a bad option. Third, we now know that shame, one of the emotions most often evoked by punishment, is a key driver of violence (see e.g. this by James Gilligan, former director of mental health for the MA prison system, and Danielle Sered’s book Until We Reckon). There are more examples I could list but that’s a start.
So, the idea that punishment should be the orienting framework by which we structure and train behavior is starting to crumble. What will replace it? I think we are on our way to a paradigm shift to a consensus that healing is the effective orienting framework for achieving social goals. This transformation has been going on for some years and is more active in some parts of our society than others, but it’s spreading, as we all become more aware of the impacts of trauma on our lives and communities, and how to address it. With a healing-centered social paradigm, the observations we made above now make sense - we don’t need to contort ourselves to make them fit. Our goal then should be to hasten this transition.
I’m saying things that are quite similar to what a lot of other people have said, whether in reference to the Just Transition framework, or scores of restorative justice practitioners and others. The comparison to Copernicus may be helpful to some, so I offer it here.