Archive for the ‘punishment’ Category
20: bonobo and human families, early childhood and free will
ye olde nuclear family, and its enclosures
The bonobo reproduction rate is low, as is ours these days, though for different reasons. Bonobos don’t tend to go all the way, while humans have contraception even for naughty catholics. Muslim scholars seem a little confused about the issue, but are generally more accepting than their catholic counterparts. As to children, humans are rather more possessive about them than bonobos. Bonobo females are largely in charges of the kids, collectively, and paternity is unknown and undisputed. Think about how that would play out in human society, which for millennia has been largely patriarchal, patrilineal and even primogenitive.
This doesn’t mean male bonobos are hostile to kids, as it’s generally a caring and sharing society, and besides, humouring the kids is a good way of winning favours from their mothers and others. Think of how that would be as a kid – you wouldn’t just be able to run to dad when mum’s mad at you, you’d have any number of adults to run to. You’d also have a range of adults to learn from, to identify with, to consider as role models, as well as to play off against each other.
Modern, supposedly advanced human society is very different. We live in separate, securitised houses, in nuclear families – ideally mum, dad and 2⅓ kids – with a garden surrounded by a high fence, if we’re ‘lucky’. The grandparents live across town, or in another country, or a nursing home. Visitors are vetted by smartphone. Of course often it’s a single-parent situation, usually mum, and the odd long- or short-lived boyfriend. She works, so the kids spend a lot of time in day-care, meeting other kids and sharing with them one or two adults, who don’t get too close, wary of being accused of funny business. Rarely are these adults male. Still it’s pretty good, lots of toys and games and things to make and do, all in primary colours, but it’s not every day because it’s too expensive, you (the kid) sometimes get shipped around to aunties or friends or assorted baby-sitters, or you get switched to a new centre, with a whole bunch of strangers, or a kid you really like just disappears. But mostly you’re at home with your stupid brother, until school days arrive and you have to wear a uniform, and mum fusses over you and makes you feel nervous and watchful about whether you look different from the other kids, in a good or bad way. And you learn stuff and you like or hate the teacher and you start competing with the other kids and start thinking about how smart or dumb you are.
Modern human life is pretty regimented. At a certain tender age you go to school where you learn first of all the basics of numeracy and literacy as the first steps toward being civilised. You also learn about rules and regulations, time management and the difference between work and play. Thrown into the school pool of humanity, you’re driven to contemplate and come to terms with variety: fat and skinny, pretty and ugly, noisy and quiet, smart and dumb, friend and enemy and all in between. You learn to make judgments, who to trust, who to avoid, and what to pay attention to. The prefrontal cortex, that amazing human asset, is continuing on its great connective journey, as you negotiate yourself between the formal and the free, between regimentation and independence.
Yet all the research tells us that most of those judgments you make at school, and which you vaguely remember having made, are actually the product of that growth period before the laying down of memories, distorted or otherwise. And that includes your ability to make effective judgments.
In the first few years of life, we form more than a million new neural connections every second. In fact, so many that after this surge of connections comes a period of pruning for order and efficiency. But this early period of development requires stimulation, which comes in infinite varieties of ways, including, of course, the bonobo way (and I don’t mean tree-climbing and chomping on insects), the chimp way (watching adult males battling it out), the Tiwi Islander way or the Netherlands royal family way or whatever. And much of this guided stimulation forms our behaviour for the rest of our lives. And the lack of it can reduce our capacities for a lifetime, in spite of subsequent kindness and care, as the notorious case of the Romanian orphans kept in horrendous states of neglect under the Ceauşescu regime has shown, though interestingly, some 20% of those adopted orphans have grown up showing little or no damage. Stimulation can come from within as well as without, and neglect has many variables.
It stands to reason that we as individuals have little or no control over our development in this crucial period. Which brings me to the issue of free will. Philosophers have traditionally argued for free will on the ‘could have done otherwise’ basis. I could have drunk tea rather than coffee with brekky this morning (though I invariably drink coffee). I could’ve chosen x from the restaurant menu instead of y. So often these trivial examples are given, when it’s screamingly obvious that you don’t get to choose your parents, your genetic inheritance, your early childhood environment, the country or period you were born into, or even the species you were born as (I could’ve snuffed out your brief candle by treading on you in this morning’s walk). Given these restraints on your freedom, restaurant choices surely pale into insignificance.
But let’s stick with humanity. I won’t go into the neurological underpinnings of the argument against free will (as if I could), but if we treat no free will as a given, then the consequences for humanity, vis-à-vis our handling of crime and punishment, are stark, as the neurologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky points out in the penultimate chapter of his book Behave, entitled ‘Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will’. This is a vital issue for me, in terms of a more caring and sharing bonoboesque society, so I’ll reserve it for another essay, or two, or more.
References
InBrief: The Science of Early Childhood Development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst. 2017
on luck, and improving environments
I’m in the process of reading Behave, by Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neurology and biology at Stanford University, who has tried in his book to summarise, via the research literature, the seconds, then minutes, then hours, then days, then lifetimes and more, that precede any particular piece of behaviour. It’s a dense but fascinating book, which aligns with, and provides mountains of evidence for, my view that we’re far less in control of ourselves than we think.
It seems we think this because of what might be called conscious awareness of our behaviours and our decisions. This consciousness is something we sometimes mistake for control. It’s interesting that we consider it obvious that we have no control over the size of our nose or the colour of our eyes, but we have more or less complete control of our temper, appetites, desires and ambitions.
Humanistically speaking, this understanding about very limited control needs to have massive implications for our understanding of others. We don’t get to choose our parents, our native country or the immediate environment that most profoundly affects our early life and much of our subsequent behaviour. The flow of hormones and neurotransmitters and their regulation via genetic and epigenetic factors proceed daily, hourly, moment by moment, and all we’re aware of, essentially, is outcomes.
A lot of people, I note, are very uncomfortable about this kind of talk. For example, many of us want to treat each other as ‘equal before the law’. But is one person ever ‘equal’ with another? We know – it’s obvious – that we’re all different. That’s how we distinguish people, by their smiles, their voices, their fingerprints, their DNA. So how can we be different and equal at the same time? Or, to turn things around, how can a legal system operate if everyone is treated as different, unique, a special case?
Well, in a sense, we already do this, with respect to the law. No two bank robberies, or rapes, or murders are the same, and the judiciary must be highly attuned to the differences when applying punishments. Nowadays, and increasingly, the mental state of the offender – particularly at the time of the offence, if that can be ascertained – is considered when sentencing. And this is surely a good thing.
The question here is, considering the exponential growth of our neurophysiological knowledge in the 21st century, and its bearing on our understanding of every kind of negative or positive behaviour we engage in, how can we harness that knowledge to improve outcomes and move from a punitive approach to bad behaviours to something more constructive?
Of course, it’s one thing to identify the release or suppression of glucocorticoids, for example, and its effect on person x’s cognitive faculties, it’s entirely another thing to effect a remedy. And to what effect? To make everyone docile, ‘happy’ and law-abiding? To have another go at eugenics, this time involving far more than just genes?
One of the points constantly hammered home in Sapolsky’s book is the effect of environment on everything that goes on inside us, so that, for example, genes aren’t quite as determinative as we once thought. Here are some key points from his chapter on genes (with apologies about unexplained terms such as epigenetic, transcription and transposons):
a. Genes are not autonomous agents commanding biological events.
b. Instead genes are regulated by the environment, with environment consisting of everything from events inside the cell to the universe.
c. Much of your DNA turns environmental influences into gene transcription, rather than coding for genes themselves; moreover, evolution is heavily about changing regulation of gene transcription, rather than genes themselves.
d. Epigenetics can allow environmental effects to be lifelong, or even multigenerational.
e. And thanks to transposons, neurons contain a mosaic of different genomes.
And genes are only one component of the array of forces that influence or control our behaviour. We know, or course, about how Phineas Gage-type accidents and brain tumours can alter behaviour, but many other effects on the brain can alter our behaviour without us and others knowing too much about it. These include stress, malnutrition, and long-term cultural and religious influences which permanently affect our attitudes to, for example, women, other species and the food we eat. Domestic violence, drug use, political affiliations, educational outcomes and sexual affinities are all more inter-generational than we’re generally prepared to admit.
The first thing we need to do is be aware of all this in our judgment of others, and even of ourselves. There’s just so much luck involved in being who we are. We could’ve been more or less ‘good-looking’ than we are -according to the standards of the culture around us – and this would’ve affected the way we’ve been treated throughout our whole lives. We could’ve been born richer or poorer, with more or less dysfunctional parents, taller or shorter, more or less mentally agile, more or less immune to the pathogens that surround us. On and on and on we could go, even to an extreme degree. We could’ve been born in Algeria, Argentina or Azerbaijan. We could’ve been born in 1912, 1412 or 512, or 150,000 years ago. We could’ve been born a mongoose, a mouse or a mosquito. It’s all luck, whether good or bad is up to us to decide, but probably not worth speculating about as we have no choice but to make the best of what we are.
What we do have is consciousness or awareness of what we are. And with that consciousness we can speculate, as we as a species always have, on how to make the best of ourselves, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, and for that reason the most successful, measured by population, spread across the globe, and what we’ve done for ourselves in terms of social evolution – our science, our technology, our laws and our politics.
That’s where humanism comes in, for me. Since we know that ‘there but for the randomness of luck go I’, it surely follows that we should sympathise with those whose luck hasn’t been as lucky as our own, and strive to improve the lot of those less fortunate. Safe havens, educational opportunities, decent wages, human rights, clean environments, social networks – we know what’s required for people to thrive. Yet we focus, I think, too much on punishment. We punish people for trying to improve their family’s situation – or to avoid obliteration – by seeking refuge in safer, richer, healthier places. We punish them for seeking solace in drugs because their circumstances are too overwhelming to deal with. We punish them for momentary and one-off lapses of concentration that have had dire consequences. Of course it has always been thus, and I think we’re improving, though very unevenly across the globe. And the best way to improve is by more knowing. And more understanding of the consequences of that knowledge.
Currently, it seems to me, we’re punishing people too much for doing what impoverished, damaged, desperate people do to survive. It’s understandable, perhaps, in our increasingly individualist world. How dare someone bother me for handouts. It’s not my fault that x has fucked up his life. Bring back capital punishment for paedophiles. People smugglers are the lowest form of human life. Etc etc – mostly from people who don’t have a clue what it’s like to be those people. Because their life is so different, through no fault, or cause, of their own.
So to me the message is clear. Out lives would be better if others’ lives were better – if we could give others the opportunities, the health, the security and the smarts that we have, and if we could have all of those advantages that they have. I suppose that’s kind of impossible, but it’s better than blaming and punishing, and feeling superior. We’re not, we’re just lucky. Ot not.
local councils, Australia Day and federal bullying
It’s all ours boys, from sea to flamin sea. Forget those damn Yanks, our Empire’s just beginning!
Recently a local council, the Yarra City Council, which covers a large portion of the eastern and north-eastern inner suburbs of Melbourne, opted to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, January 26, because of local sensibilities. It has posted the details of its decision, and the reasons for it, online. I find those reasons unexceptionable, but then I’m not a nationalist, I prefer to take an internationalist, humanist view on such issues. So I’ve never celebrated Australia Day, any more than I would celebrate the national day of any other country I happened to land up in, though I relish local customs, cuisines etc.
I have of course noticed, having lived in this country for over fifty years, that Australia Day has become controversial in recent years, for good reason. I happen to be reasonably knowedgable about the date, having read a bit of Australian history and having, over many years, taught the history of that date – Cook’s mapping of Australia’s east coast, the reasons for sending out the first fleet, the arrival in Port Jackson, the planting of the flag, and Britain’s obviously questionable claim to sovereignty – to NESB students in a number of community centres – the very places, sometimes, where citizenship ceremonies were carried out.
It seems clear to me that this date for celebrating Australian nationhood, which really only started to become controversial in the eighties, will eventually be changed. Until it is, controversy will grow. The Yarra Council decision is another move in that controversy, and it won’t be the last. It would be great if this change happened sooner rather than later, to nip the acrimony in the bud, but I doubt that will happen. The Federal Government has used what powers it has to prevent Yarra Council from holding citizenship ceremonies, arguing that the council has politicised the day. However, the controversy that has grown up over the date has always been a political one. Yarra Council’s decision was political, just as was the response of the Feds. On January 26 1788 a Union Jack was raised at Sydney Harbour, and all the land extending to the north, the south, and the west – some 7,692,000 square kilometres, though its extent was completely unknown at the time – was claimed as the possession of Britain, in spite of its clearly being already inhabited. If that wasn’t a political decision, what was it?
The Assistant Minister for Immigration, Alex Hawke, has spoken for the Feds on this matter. Their argument is that citizenship itself has been politicised by Yarra Council’s decision:
“The code is there to make sure that councils don’t do these sorts of things. We don’t want citizenship ceremonies being used as a political argument for anybody’s political advancement one way or the other.
“It’s our role to uphold the code. We warned them not to do this or we would have to cancel their ability to do it, and I regret that they’ve done it.”
The code being referred to here is the Citizenship Ceremonies Code. The Yarra City Mayor, Amanda Stone, believes the council’s decision isn’t in breach of it. This may or may not be so, but this isn’t really the point. The chosen date for celebrating Australia day commemorates a highly political event, which can never be wished away. Marking this day as the most appropriate day for immigrants to become Australians valorises the date, and the event – essentially a land-grab – even more. So it seems odd, to me, that a decision not to promote this land-grab as representative of the much-touted Australian ‘fair go’, should be worthy of criticism, let alone condemnation and punishment.
Generally the Federal polllies’ response to all this has been confused and disappointing. Our PM has said this, according to the ABC:
“An attack on Australia Day is a repudiation of the values the day celebrates: freedom, a fair go, mateship and diversity”
Turnbull knows well enough, though, that the council’s decision isn’t an attack on the concept of Australia Day. It’s a recognition that the date is unacceptable to many people – precisely because that date itself repudiates the values of freedom and fair play, in a very obvious way. Turnbull isn’t stupid, he’s just doing what he’s done so many times of late, making politically expedient noises to maintain the support of his mostly more conservative colleagues.
The Labor leader Bill Shorten’s half-and-half response is also typically political. Here’s how the ABC reports it:
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was also critical of the move.
“Reconciliation is more about changing hearts and minds than it is about moving public holidays,” Mr Shorten said.
“But, of course, if we look at national days important in the history of this country, there is March 1 1901, when the Australian parliament, the Australian nation came into being.”
In other words, ‘reconciliation is about nothing so trivial as the dates of public holidays but, hey, maybe March 1 should be our Australia Day’. Caspar Milquetoast would have been proud of that one.
We’re just at the beginning of this tussle, and the end, I think, is inevitable. Yarra Council isn’t the first to make this decision. The Fremantle Council did the same in December last year, but was bullied into backing down by the Feds. The Yarra Council seems more firm in its resolve, and obviously other councils will follow in due course. The Turnbull government will fall at the next election, and this will encourage more council action and more public debate on the issue. It’ll be interesting to observe how long it all takes…
reveries of a solitary wa*ker: wa*k 3
my new Dino-lite Basic, and some coriander roots, under low magnification
Having finished reading the big Darwin book I’m letting the influence of his character and world percolate through me, for example on my way home from work the other day, walking by the city river, I got the idea of taking pics of the bird species hanging by the riverside with my mobile phone – murray magpie, mallard, eurasian coot, black swan, masked lapwing, Australian pelican, Australian magpie, dusky moorhen, Australian white ibis and little pied cormorant. It really brightened my day, though the photos were pretty crappy, but I looked up the species when I got home (this is where the internet really comes into its own) and learned so much about habitats, male-female differences (the male murray magpie, or magpie-lark, has a white ‘eyebrow’ and a black throat) and such. Fun, and now I’m thinking about a good camera for bird-watching. I’ve also, on something of an impulse, bought a digital microscope, on its way from the USA. No idea as yet what to use it for.
At a recent meetup group I had a stimulating discussion, or rather listened in on one, about the end of humanity, the various possibilities for our impending doom, the principal one being artificial intelligence. The idea is that so many things that humans are engaged in are barely in control, and that the best option for the survival of a species isn’t constant change and development, but stasis, as with trilobites perhaps, or some types of bacteria. Since this appears not to be an option for us, some think that we’re hurtling, with all our good intentions, not towards the singularity, but towards extinction. Anthropogenic global warming, mass species extinction, human-induced epidemics, out-of-control artificial intelligence, or a combination of these might cause this event, but it was the view of one conversationalist that AI would be our undoing, and possibly quite soon. It might lead to a gradual transhumanism, which we won’t recognise until it’s too late. One of the key figures mentioned in analysis of humanity’s possibly grim future was Nick Bostrum, whose name has come to my attention from time to time. Wikipedia tells me he’s a philosopher based at Oxford, and the director of its Future of Humanity Institute. So, a person and an institute I should be conversant with for my solutions ok blog. I should probably link to it there, and it’ll mean a lot more reading and study, groan. Meanwhile, one of the arguments I heard the other night was that this could explain why we don’t find complex life out there looking for us, with their super-clever antimatter rockets and super light-speed travel techniques, because complexity of that sort beats an inevitable path to destruction. Highly-developed life-forms like us and our superiors burn with brief intensity then snuff themselves out. For us, this might be sooner than later. Hmmmm. In any case, existential risk is something I’ll have to pay more attention to in the future, if we have one.
The other day I was listening to the amusing Answer Me This podcast when the name Marky Mark came up – apparently an actor, for he was chosen to star in Peter Jackson’s film The Lovely Bones. Not being too keyed in on popular culture, I’d never heard of Marky Mark (or The Lovely Bones for that matter) so I looked him up. It turned out that this was an early moniker for the actor Mark Wahlberg – whose name I’d heard of, but that was about it. Having now seen some photos of him, I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything, and I had no idea that in his early life as Marky Mark he was a notorious rapper and petty crim. But interestingly, I read that Wahlberg was now seeking a government pardon for the crimes he was convicted of as a teenager – including a few bashings of Asian-looking people. One of these incidents resulted in the victim having permanent eye damage. I don’t automatically trust too many internet sites, but the story appears to be that Marky, as a probably drug-fuelled and undoubtedly peer-influenced teen, indulged in some pretty nasty behaviour, spiced with language about ‘gooks and ‘slopes’, but he did have potential – don’t we all – and with the help of mentors he turned his life around to become, eventually, a Hollywood ‘star’. He did receive punishment for some of his crimes – and I read that he was tried as an adult for at least one of them – probably the one in which a victim lost an eye, or part of one….
I mention all this because it’s a case that raises a number of fascinating and important ethical issues. Firstly, there’s the tendency, most prevalent in the US but increasingly here too, to try juveniles as adults when they commit serious crimes, as if their ability to be fully responsible for their actions is in direct proportion to the damage they do. This smacks of a slide down the slippery slope of retributive justice – people have been really really hurt so the perp has to be really really punished, no matter that she’s eleven years old. While I have some sympathy for that attitude, and I’ll elaborate on that later, we have to accept that teenagers and children are different and that there are good, scientifically verified reasons for granting them diminished responsibility in a graded way from earliest childhood to the latest teens. The law is always a bit of a bludgeon of course, rarely taking full account of individual developmental and psychological peculiarities, which is one of the problems of ‘equality before the law’, but there’s no doubt that we generally do stupid things as teenagers and school kids, often under peer pressure, things we’d never do as mature adults. I myself got into trouble with the law for stealing, together with four or five of my friends, at the age of fourteen. We’d been egging each other on, and we perpetrated a lot more than we were charged with, but it all came crashing to a halt when we got caught. None of us were nasty brutish types, and it’s unlikely that any of us have reoffended.
Marky’s offending was rather brutish though, with serious consequences for a least one victim. His desire for a pardon is apparently driven by the fact that he’s disqualified at the moment from getting an Oscar or other accolades because of his past. Unlike me he has a permanent criminal record presumably due to being tried as an adult. He’s written a letter to government authorities wanting recognition for being an entirely different person than the one who committed those acts. Marky now does charitable work on the side like many other Hollywood stars – which is fine and dandy especially as they’re significantly overpaid for what they do and would have good reason to consider themselves bloody lucky to be in their position – but as online critics have pointed out, he’s never apologised or made reparations to his permanently-scarred victim. It goes without saying that this soul has also had a change of life since being bashed with a two-by-four all those years ago. Not much work for a one eyed Asian in Hollywood, methinks.
So this is the dilemma. Why doesn’t Marky Mark face up to the damage he did by trying to help the one person whose life he changed irreparably as an oafish teenager? That would seem to be an obvious move. And that brings me back to the treatment of serious crimes committed by persons of diminished responsibility. The reason we seek to impose harsher penalties, and for that reason to attribute greater responsibility to the young perpetrator, is because of the consequences of the crime. We believe someone has to pay for all that damage, and if not the perp, then who? It’s a really vexed question, but imposing an extremely harsh penalty on an adolescent for an extreme crime doesn’t really help, especially when the penalty, such as a prison term, will tend to harden the adolescent and make him more resentful, angry, and subject to bad influence, than he was before.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a very forgiving society, a society which immediately seeks to help adolescents who’ve gone off the rails to the extent that Marky Mark presumably did – and I should make it clear here that I’m just using him as an example, and I’ve no idea if the facts of his case are exactly as, or even close to, what I’ve reported (I got it off the internet after all). As part of that help, he should’ve been made to face the living consequences of the damage he had done, the suffering and change he had wrought in the lives of others. But that of course would require a massive change in our system of crime and punishment. For adolescent crime though, I think it would work well, and to be fair, it does operate to some extent in some juvenile court systems, conferencing between perpetrators and victims and their families, though there isn’t enough of it, I suspect.
discipline and punish
There’s a tendency in certain countries to treat a juvenile as an adult when she or he commits a crime considered ‘heinous’, as if the nature of the act somehow constitutes evidence of maturity, though we know that this is not necessarily so. A child can easily kill another child, or an adult, or adults, if the requisite weaponry is to hand. We know that a sixteen-year-old isn’t sufficiently mentally developed to be treated as an adult – otherwise she’d be permitted to vote, to drive a car (without P plates), to drink alcohol, to watch R rated films, to travel overseas without parental permission and so on. Yet when such a person commits a crime that seems to us particularly unpalatable, with significant victim impact, we appear to let that impact affect our judgment as to the responsibility of the perpetrator. This, I think, is a serious problem.
It’s particularly a problem in overly punitive states, such as the USA, with its frightening prison statistics, and its vast swathes of the population living in a kind of anarchic, dysfunctional, hopeless poverty. Some of these people experience almost their first taste of discipline in a courtroom, where they find themselves the playthings of a system impossible to comprehend, speaking an opaque language, operating with such an indifferent forcefulness as to render its subjects inert and fatalistic.
I don’t have a solution to the problem, I simply observe and feel the unfairness deep under the skin, but as I’ve said before in other contexts, don’t get angry, get educated, and that means informing yourself, where possible, of the causes of this perversion of what most reasonable people would see as the proper treatment of juveniles as individuals with diminished responsibility.
First, there are claims of a rise in juvenile offences in the USA from the nineties, but this is not substantiated, and even if it was true, incarceration would seem more an evasion of the problem than a solution. Second, there is a general rise, again in the USA, in punitive approaches to criminal behaviour, moving away from long-term, more humane trends which first emerged back in the seventeenth century and which were bolstered by the eighteenth century Enlightenment. We can see this in the restoration of capital punishment but also in increased length of sentences. The USA is the only country on the planet that permits life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders.
But this, of course, is exactly the question I’m asking. Why has the US criminal justice system turned its back on humane approaches to crime and punishment? Is it merely reacting to public pressure, and if so, why is there this public pressure? Is it a response to real increases in crime, or to a mere perception of such an increase? My limited research tells me that there is no great surge in the US crime stats, but those in favour of tough sentencing and treating juveniles as adults might well argue that it’s because of the tough sentencing that crime stats are being kept low. So rather than wading into the statistical morass engendered by such arguments, I’d prefer to look at a more obvious and clear-cut connection – that dysfunction and deprivation are profoundly associated with criminal activity as well as drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and the like.
I’m now going to make a seemingly bizarre leap from crime and drug-taking in dysfunctional and deprived areas of the USA to the choices made by laboratory rats. In The lab rat chronicles, Kelly Lambert describes experiments done with lab rats some decades ago, experiments that should have garnered far more attention than they did. Individually caged rats will increase their consumption of a drug when they can self-administer it by pressing a lever, and they’ll show clear signs of withdrawal when the drug is taken off the menu. In other experiments, rats were given the choice of water, sugar water and water laced with morphine or cocaine. They drank more of the drug-laced water than of the other choices. When injected with a drug in a particular environment, and with a saline solution in another environment, they consistently chose to be in the ‘drug’ environment, when subsequently asked to choose.
These are fascinating experiments suggesting that rats, like us, are drawn very much to drug-induced states. Right? Well, actually it’s more complicated than that, and these are not the experiments Lambert wants to draw our attention to.
The experiments I’m referring to were carried out by Bruce Alexander and colleagues in the early eighties. Alexander was interested in exploring the difference between the responses of lab rats, who generally lived in deprived, unstimulating and most likely stressful conditions, much like the inmates of a prison, and their wild and free relatives. So he created a rich, colourful and varied rat environment with lots of opportunities for the rats to entertain themselves, and each other, because they inhabited the much expanded space (some 200 times that of a standard rat cage) in groups of sixteen or more. When the drug experiments were repeated with these more socially active and choice-enriched rats, the results were very different. These rats were considerably less interested in the drugs on offer. As Lambert points out, it’s noticeable that rates of addiction to drugs in prison are far higher than outside, in spite of all the obvious difficulties in obtaining them.
The fact that these important experimental results have been largely ignored in favour of exploring, in rats and in humans, the neural processes implicated in drug addiction, perhaps provides a clue to the imprisonment problem in the USA. Finding the neural pathways for drug addiction, and finding ways to block those pathways, assuming that it would ever turn out to be a simple process, would make the problem ‘go away’. No drug addiction, or no drug effect which would encourage the user to keep returning to the drug, means no problem, right? You just ‘innoculate’ the drug user with the ‘drug blocker’ and she’s no longer an addict, and you go and collect your Nobel. It’s a bit like incarcerating everyone who commits a major crime – you make them ‘go away’. Far easier than trying to transform them by creating a whole new environment for them, full of stimulating activities, community supports, and roles and functions to tap into.
So when you look at the incarceration rates in different parts of the USA, and among different sub-groups, note how they correspond to regions and populations of deprivation and dislocation and systemic poverty. It’s not rocket science, but the real solutions are costly, and they require the kind of collective action that the USA, of all nations, is least capable of. Meanwhile, the USA is the only nation on the planet where, having committed a major crime as a juvenile, you can be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. That’ll learn em.