Reintegrative Shaming Theory - John Braithwaite, Lecture notes of Criminology

Download Reintegrative Shaming Theory - John Braithwaite and more Lecture notes Criminology in PDF only on Docsity! REINTEGRATIVE SHAMIN John Braithwaite Australian National University Shame and Crime The pivotal concept of the theory in Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Braithwaite, 1989) is reintegrative shaming. According to the theory, societies have lower crime rates if they communicate shame about crime effectively. They will have a lot of violence if violent behaviour is not shameful, high rates of rape if rape is something men can brag about, endemic white-collar crime if business people think law-breaking is clever rather than shameful. That said, there are ways of communicating the shamefulness of crime that increase crime. These are called stigmatization. Reintegrative shaming communicates shame to a wrongdoer in a way that encourages him or her to desist; stigmatization shames in a way that makes things worse. So what ts the difference? Reintegrative shaming communicates disapproval within a continuum of respect for the offender; the offender is treated as a good person who has done a bad deed. Stigmatization is disrespectful shaming; the offender is treated as a bad person. Stigmatization is unforgiving - the offender is left with the stigma permanently, whereas reintegrative sharning is forgiving - ceremonies to certify deviance are terminated by ceremonies to decertify deviance. Put another way, societies that are forgiving and respectful while taking crime seriously have low crime rates; societies that degrade and humiliate criminals have higher crime rates. Low Crime Societies African societies are among those which use reinlegrative shaming quite extensively. The Nanante is an example of what 1 would call an institution of reintegrative shaming that deals with crime in a ritually serious but reintegrative way. THE NANANTE An Afghan criminologist at the University of Edinburgh, A. Ali Serisht, pointed out after the publication of Crime, Shame and Reintegration that the Pushtoon, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, had an institution called Nanante similar to the conferencing notion I discussed in that book. The Nanante is a ceremony where the criminal offender brings flour and other food and kills a sheep for a community feast. Often this will be held at the victim’s house, where the victim will participate in cooking the food the offender brings. At the ceremonial part of the event, the offender will nat be told that he is bad and in need of reform, but rather that “You have done an injustice ta this person”. At the same time the offender will be assured that “you are one of us and we accept you back among us”. The police and courts have virtually no presence in communities that rely on the Nananate. Japan is the developed society which has perhaps the heaviest reliance on reintegrative shaming as an alternative to humiliating or outcasting criminals. It has a very low crime rate and is lhe only nation where the evidence indicates a sustained decline in the crime rate over the past half century. This has been accomplished with a low imprisonment rate - 37 per 100,000 population, compared to over 500 in the US. Guy Masters’ (1995, 1997) research shows that Japanese schools use reintegrative methods for controlling delinquency The next day, and on each successive day until the problem was solved, special teachers’ meetings were held with all present to seek a solution. On three occasions the principal or the girl’s homeroom teacher went to the girl's home and lalked! with her. The final resolution involved a visit by the entire class to the girl’s home, where apologies were offered along with a request that the insulted girl forgave her friends. Two days later she returned to school, and two weeks later the teacher read a final report to the regular teachers’ meeting and then apologised for having caused the school so much trouble (Cummings, 1980, p. 118-119, cited in Masters, 1997). Reintegrative Shaming in Western Societies Contemporary Western societies are rather stigmatic compared to much of Africa and Asia. However, they are not as stigmatic as they used to be. We no longer put criminal offenders in the stocks, where they could suffer all manner of degradation up to and including rape. We no longer require poor students to wear a dunce’s cap. Indeed our schools and our childrearing practices in families have become much more reintegrative over the past two centuries. Moreover, the evidence is strong that American families that confront wrongdoing while sustaining relationships of love and respect for their children are the families most likely to raise law-abiding citizens (see Braithwaite, 1989: 71-83). Laissez-faire families that fail to confront or that just “natter” at misbehaviour (Patterson, 1982) and stigmatizing families that reject and degrade both experience a lot of misbehavior (Baumrind, 1971, 1978). Robert Sampson and John Laub’s (1995; 122) celebrated analysis of the Gluecks’ data on the life course of American offenders and non-offenders supports this conclusion: “what scems particularly criminogenic is harsh, unreasoning, and punitive discipline combined  with rejection of the child. Stigmatizing punishment, by the family as well as the State . appears to backfire”. Research Toni Makkai and I have conducted on the enforcement philosophy of nursing home inspectors in Australia, the US and UK suggests that inspectors are ineffective when they ave tolerant and non-judgmental in the face of failures by nursing home management to meet standards of care for old people required by the law (Makkai and Braithwaite, 1994). Nursing home compliance with the law actually declines following inspections by tolerant and understanding inspectors. It declines even more sharply after inspectors with a stigmatizing approach to wrongdoing have been in. The inspection teams that did best at improving compliance were those who believed in clearly communicating that failure to meet legal standards would not be tolerated, yet who believed in doing so in a way that showed respect, avoided humilation, used praise when things improved, who believed in being both tough and forgiving. Lawrence Sherman (1993) has interpreted his research on US policing as suggesting that when police stigmatize offenders, this engenders defiance. Respectful policing, which involves procedural fairness, politeness and giving the offender the benefit of a presumption that they are a good person who may have done a bad act, builds commitment to the law. Sherman has embarked on an ambilious program of experimental criminology to test these hypotheses more directly. Why Should Shaming Reduce Crime? Most Westerners believe we lcarn to refrain from crime by fear of punishment. Does this fit your own behaviour very well? Some of the time it probably does. But think about the person who has done most to make yout life difficult in the past year. Did you consider  murdering them to deal with this? For most readers of this book, the answer will be no. You refrained from murdering that difficult person not because you considered that option and then concluded that the risks outweighed the benefits from getting the person out of the way. More likely you refrained from murder because it was simply unthinkable to you; it was right off your deliberative agenda. My theory is that it is exposure early in our lives to the idea of the shamefulness of murder that puts it off the deliberative agenda of responsible citizens. This is why it makes no difference to most people whether the punishment for murder is the electric chair or prison. What matters, according to the theory, is moral clarity in a culture about the evil of killing other people. This is why homicides go up after wars (Archer and Gartner, 1976). It is why television that communicates the message that the best way to deal with violence is through violence, that those who wrong us can sometimes deserve to die for it, is a problem, Sadly, the ethnographic evidence is that murderers in America often believe they are agents of justice, purifying the world of the evil person they are wasting (Katz, 1988). When we do something wrong, the people who are in the best position to communicate the shamefulness of what we have done is those we love. A judge waving his finger at us from on high is in a rather poor position to be able to do this. We do not care so much about his opinion of us because we have been given no reason to respect him as a human being and we will probably never meet him again. It is family we love, friends we respect who have most influence over us. Precisely because their relationships with us are based on love and respect, when they shame us they will do so reintegratively (respectfully). Why Should Stigmatization Make Things Worse? Stigmatization pushes the stigmatized away from those definitions and into the clutches of criminal subcultures that communicate definitions favourable to crime - e.g. “rich peaple can afford to be robbed and they themselves rob people like me all the time by their rip- offs”. The connection of opportunity theory to the theory of reintegrative shaming is more indirect, but nevertheless powerfully important. Unemployment and schoo! failure close off legitimate opportunities. However, they also cut off their victims from interdependency with other citizens. School failure tends to sever ties of interdependency with the school as the school failures reject their rejectors from the school community. Unemployment takes the employed out of interdependence with other citizens in the world of work. Because the unemployed often deai with the shame of losing their job by rejecting the world of workmates and employers, they become less vulnerable to their reintegrative social control. But there is a much more profound way that unemployment breaks up communities of care. Families racked by unemployment are more likely to disintegrate. When children lose the cating love of a mother, father and other extended family members whose attachment is primarily to the alienated partner, the webs of reintegrative influence become less powerful. Those whose presence or lave is lost to us are no longer in a position to shame us reintegratively when we err, to praise our fortitude when we turn our back on opportunities for wrongdoing. If dad is a hated male identity in a family culture dominated abstr mom, then a boy is more at risk from the supportive male identity a criminal subculture may supply. A boy will always be in the market for some sort of male identity. If it is the case that unemployment (and poverty and failure more generally) opens up conflicts in struggling families, splits them physically or emotionally by disrespect, then the love and respect needed to render socialization effective will not be there.  Blocked opportunities therefore undermine interdependence and community and this weakens reintegrative capability (and promotes stigmatization). Stigma further reduces legilimate opportunities. Once we are labelled a criminal, it is hard to get a job (Hagan, 1993). Conditions of widespread stigmatization and unemployment are breeding grounds for criminal subcultures that offer solutions to those who have status problems as a result of these afflictions. They also offer practical illegitimate opportunities - ways of making a living by selling drugs, for example. This latter set of processes apply equally, | argue, to crimes of the powerful. The nursing home owner is stigmatized by the state as a crook, a rapacious person who preys on vulnerable old people. A nursing home industry subculture of resistance to the regulatory requirements of the state can supply a solution to his status problem. It is nit-picking bureaucrats with their red-tape and wingeing old people who have never had it so good (together with their anti-business advocacy groups) who are bringing the country down. It is aggressive business people like them who make the country strong. The business subculture of resistance also helps share knowledge about legal tactics ta resist the demands of the regulators and the resident advocates. So the theory works at the top of the class structure as well as at the bottom. Regulatory stigmatization closes off a legitimate opportunity to accumulate wealth (say trough enjoying a positive reputation as an ethical provider). This fosters criminal subculture formation. The criminal subculture of the business community then constitutes illegitimate opportunities of a much more damaging sort than can be created in the slum. If you have the capital of Nelson Bunker Hunt and W Herbert Hunt, you can even try to manipulate an entire global market for a commodity like silver (Abolatia, 1985). Great wealth means both  enormously superior capability to constitute both legitimate and illegitimate opportunities Braithwaiteyh 1991). The blocked legitimate opportunity of uiemployment or school failure is not relevant to them; but when their opportunities are blocked by say a new tax law, they have inexorable capabilities to constitute new illegitimate opportunities through off-shore tax havens and other schemes. Societies that structure their opportunities very unequally will have more of both crimes of the powerless and crimes of the powerful. There will be more systematic blockage of legitimate opportunities to the poor. And there will be more capacity for ruthless exploitation of illegitimate opprotunities by the rich when more unsyslematic causes block their legitimate opportunties. For both the crimes of the powerful and the crimes of the powerless, stigmatization is relevant to formation of and attraction to criminal subcultures. And reintegrative shaming is vital to the control of both types of crime. Communities Reintegrative shaming, according to the theory, will be more widespread in societies where communities are strong, where citizens are densely enmeshed in loving, trusting or respectful relationships with others. Obviously, it follows from the theory that shaming is more likely to be powerful and reintegrative where communities are strong and caring. Strong communities are also the key resources for the prevention of criminal subculture formation. Frank Cullen (1994) has reviewed the considerable evidence that “social support” is of central importance to crime prevention. Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls (1997: 918) have shown that “collective efficacy, defined as social cohestion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good, is linked to reduced violence”. Chicago neighbourhoods with more collective efficacy, more social trust, had less crime. Consistent with the theory I have outlined above, the negative effect of povery on crime was mediated through collective efficacy. Across US cities,  Circle processes are being discovered as richly applicable to people brought up in a European civilization. There is appeal in the sheer simplicity of victims and their loved ones, offenders and their loved ones and caring members of the community sitting in a circle to discuss the consequences of a crime and what can be done to put it right. At the end of a circle or a restorative justice conference an agrcement is reached, which will often by'signes by the offender, the victim and a police officer. The idea is that if this agreement is implemented, there will be no need for the matter to go to court. Agreements can include compensation payments to victims, apology, communily work, undertakings to enter drug rehabililation programs, surrender of weapons or ownership of a motor vehicle, moving from living on the street to living with an aunt, and so on. Most programs seek to reduce the imprisonment rate by pre-trial diversion. But others cut in at more advanced stages of the criminal justice process. For example, the John Howard Society of Manitoba has a program mostly limited to running restorative justice conferences in cases where a prosecutor has already recommended prison time of more (han six months (Bonta, Rooney and Wallace-Capretta, 1998). The idea is to see if the mecting can come up with an agreement that will persuade a judge to keep the offender out of prison. ‘The program seems to be having some success in accomplishing this. & great deal of rescarch is underway in many nations on the effectiveness of restorative justice processes. So far the results are most encouraging (Braithwaite, 1999), but it is far too early for criminologists to be able to form an opinion as to whether they really work as a better way of doing justice. The theory of reintegrative shaming predicts that restorative justice processes will be move effective than criminal trials in reducing crime hecause by putting the problem rather than the person in the centre, direct denunciation by someone who you do not respect (e.g. a judge, the police) is avoided. At the same time, shame is difficult to avoid when a victim and her supporters, as well as the family of the offender, all talk through the consequences that have been suffered, emotionally as well as materially, as a result of the crime. This discussion of consequences structures shame into a restorative justice process; the presence and support of those who care most for us structures reintegration into the ritual. The objective is to get the offender o acknowledge shame through apology and making amends; this, according to Retzinger and Scheff (1996) is better than by-passing shame, leaving shame to fester below the surface in a variety of unhealthy ways. Equally, it is an objective to help victims to heal the shame they so commonly feel. Integrating Normative and Explanatory Theory Let us now think about the difference between explantory and normative theory. So far we have been discussing an explantory theory of crime - an ordered set of propositions about the way the world is. A normative theory is an ordered set of propositions about the way the world ought to be. My research agenda has been lo integrate explanatory and normative theory, something that is nol common in contemporary criminology. Jeremy Bentham’s theory of crime is the most influential example of an attempt to unify an explanatory theory (deterrence) and a normative theory (utilitarianism). It seems to me that the theory of reintegrative shaming could be a dangerous theory (albeit less dangerous than deterrence) unless it is integrated with a normative theory of what should be shamed. My argument is that conduct should only be subject to shame when doing so will increase freedom as non-domination. Freedom as non-domination or “dominion” has been conceived by Philip Pettit and I (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990; Pettit, 1997) as a republican conception of freedom. This normative theory implies that a more decent way to run a criminal justice system is with the minimum level of punishment that is possible while enabling the state to maintain its promises to the security of citizens. It  means that punishing people only because they deserve it makes no moral sense. Equally, shaming people for no better reason than that they deserve it, in a way that increases the amount of oppression in the world, is morally wrong. Republican political theory also means active citizenship and community building. This commends the kind of social movement politics and restorative justice which we argued was also an implication of the explanatory theory in Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Conclusion ‘There has not been space in this essay to recount why I think the theory of reintegrative shaming explains the most powerful relationships that have been demonstrated by criminological research - why women comunit less crime than men, why young people comunit more crime than older folk, why big cities have more crime, why residential mobility (moving house) is associated with crime, why school failure is a cause of crime, why entering a happy, secure relationship with a partner and getting a satisfying job turns people away from crime, why crime in the suites does more damage than crime in the Streets (see Braithwaite, 1989). This is the first ambition of the theory: to give a better fit to the established facts than is provided by other theories. I found the best way to accomplish that was to integrate the explanatory power that does reside in other criminological theories. The theory of reintegrative shaming is an explicit attempt to integrate the insighis of control, subcultural, opportuntiy, learning (e.g. differential association) and labelling theories of crime. Integration with opportunity theory has been especially important as a key ambition was a theory that accounted for both crimes of the powerless and crimes of the powerful. My first contribution to criminological theory in the book Inequality, Crime and Public Policy