Surely one of the big design challenges (and remember – for the purposes of this discussion – design means how well something works) when addressing seemingly unsolvable issues like crime and imprisonment, is that the rule of cause and effect which is so familiar to us all, and which largely determines the way we live our lives, seems to be turned on its head.
After all, imprisonment is a very punishing experience for anyone – and one would think that every fibre in our being would try to avoid it. In a nutshell, if the effect is imprisonment (severe punishment) and the cause of that effect is my behaviour, why do I keep behaving in that way?
People who have some knowledge of the why of self-destructive choices will be aware of unconscious forces that drive people to do things that cause them to end up in prison – and we will be exploring them in later Chapters – in particular the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics.
However, regardless of the fact that our knowledge of the influence of the unconscious is widespread in academia and the helping professions it is my observation that, generally, when planners look at causes of crime and imprisonment in society (with a view to putting something in place to stop it happening) they appear to focus on what I will call proximate causes.
I will define a proximate cause as the nearest cause to the effect. (It might be helpful to expand on this a little to say that a proximate cause of ground getting wet may be rain falling. However the reasons why rain falls here, and falls now, are rooted in many interconnected different causes such as amount of sunshine, the strength of the wind, our altitude, the current air pressure, nearness to the sea, and even gravity – i.e. rain falls down not up)!
Getting back to the causes of crime, a proximate cause as to why a young man might join a gang involved in criminality might be, the young man drops out of school.
Following on from this, a proximate cause of the young man dropping out of school might be suspension due to bad behaviour.
What is put in place by the Pillars dominated system might then be a home-school liaison officer or a school attendance officer who uses what we often refer to as a carrot and stick approach to the problem, which will usually include a mixture of encouraging the boy, appraising him of the rewards of school attendance and warning him and his parents of the legal consequences of school absence for children.
But when we begin to try and determine the cause for the bad behaviour it gets more complicated.
In my experience the response of decision makers within the Pillars is usually not at all in tune, or empathic with the intertwined causes (sometimes called complex causation) involved. What I mean by this is that there are usually so many different factors in a young man’s life that cause him to behave in a way that his parents, family and society considers to be bad that the decision makers seem to get stuck.
Like our varying attitudes to the Sun, it is very common that everyone concerned for the boy will have a different opinion on 1): why he is getting into trouble, and 2): what needs to be done to steer him clear of trouble in the future. The reason for this is that no two perspectives are the same.
This is even true within the same family, where Dad might have a particular opinion as to what to do, and Mam will have a different one. The teacher’s opinion will differ yet again, as might a neighbour’s, and a Garda who is involved might see the situation from yet a different perspective.
Most of the reasons for the differences are down to how the different people who are involved experience the boy, what stake they have in the boy’s future, their history and knowledge of the boy, their relationship with him, their life experience, their knowledge and/or training, their own prejudices, etc. etc.
(This is like, as I said, how our differences in our description of the Sun depend on how we experience it).
I expand on how people get stuck in different posts but it is enough to say here that in my experience it is common that strategies that are put in place to protect such young people usually use what I will call reductionist methods, breaking everything down into identifiable causes, and setting up something to deal with each individual cause in isolation, instead of dealing with the whole.
I’m almost certain that this happens because we (rightfully) believe that all effects have causes.
So accustomed as we are to the reductionist model of thinking it seems to make sense that if we deal with the causes one by one the effects will also disappear one by one.
An example of this might be referring a 14 year old boy who is seriously misusing drugs to a treatment centre for an 8 week programme, but ignoring the myriad of stresses that impact on him as a result of his unstable family life, and then having the expectation that all will be well when he comes home. Here, the well-meaning planners’ goal is that by sending him for 8 weeks to a very expensive treatment centre the skills learned over the duration (cause) will result in his long-term sobriety (effect).
Sometimes, ordinary, non-professional people (including, perhaps, his parents, or members of his extended family) know intuitively that this has a very small chance of working, but they are ignored because firstly the planners are desperate for a solution, and also the family members are not educated professionals.
And, his parents may be afraid to voice their sceptism because they are desperate for a solution too – and know that this is the only option on offer!
Such a referral to a treatment centre is perfectly logical, when you think of it. But very often doesn’t work, as I will explain in far more depth in later Chapters.
We discussed how such decisions are arrived at in the Chapter on the Pillars, and we will be mentioning such processes again.