“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” ~Abraham Lincoln.

 

    The beliefs we hold most dear as truest are joined together in our perspective towards life in general. This includes a fundamental viewpoint we judge things against in regards to the truth of the beliefs. This viewpoint then is what ends up determining the lion’s share of what is true for us and how we act on it. But, at the same time it limits what we see to be true because there are so many different vantage points in time and place, that yield way different conclusions about what you are or aren’t seeing as true. The good news is, if you don’t like what you see, all you have to do is move locations for a different view.

 

    This formed perspective, viewpoint, paradigm or whatever else you want to call it is a convenient screening mechanism for our brain to not overload our consciousness with endless bytes of data per second, which we can’t possibly think about in any meaningful way. The fortunate part of this process is that it isn’t permanent and we can change it just by moving. And, the amazing thing about gaining the openness to question and change a perspective that has outgrown its usefulness or one which we have discovered compelling evidence to disprove—well that is one very big open door to the kind of creativity that can help solve some of our most complex problems that challenge us in today’s face-paced, overwhelming Information Age. 

 

     Stephen Covey used to caution leaders to not to get to the top rung on their ladders only to discover they had placed the ladder against the wrong building. This may have come from Warren Bennis’s earlier distinction between efficiency, or doing a thing in the right way, and effectiveness, or doing the right thing.  Apparently, we are just waking up to that “wrong building” reality in our whole legal and criminal justice systems. We have built our these inter-related systems on a very wrong basic assumption of moral responsibility and accountability and punishing people as if they truly owned it all for what they did, when there is no hard evidence to justify that wrong perspective.

 

    Philosophers, Psychologists, Criminologists, Sociologists, Penologists and all the other ologists have debated free will vs. determinism since the dawn of thinking, without ever concluding victory for one side over the other. Perhaps this dualism, as Alan Watts would say, is an irreconcilable one becausethey are just different sides to the same coin. Present brain research however, is lessening the degree of certainty which a person can freely chose to do something or not, apart from all the conditioning the person has gone through in life with influences and prior bad choices. The scientific community has exposed free will as the illusion it is.

 

   We have always know that human behavior, especially motivation, thinking, choosing is mostly an unconscious mystery compounded by another mystery—the development of language with which we think and communicate. And recent brain research demonstrates that the brain automatically thinks through a choice, decision, thought or act, before it comes into conscious awareness from the unconscious part of the brain where it originates from. If you are inclined to look into this phenomenon further, you can start with Sam Harris’s little book, “Free Will.”  

 

    So, for our legal system to assign full moral responsibility and accountability for law violators’ mostly unconscious choices and behavior, this seems a little absurd at this point in our thinking evolution. Now that we are beginning to realize we have had our ladder leaning up against the wrong building all along, we can begin to see the “why” of the many failures of the system and begin to be more successful with our ladder placed against the right building.

 

    The best way to shift paradigms and begin to get more successes in criminal justice work is to delete the belief that prison and other legal sanctions for law violators are a just retribution for their crimes, because that is a false belief whose time has come and gone. Now this doesn’t mean to excuse all wrongdoers for their wrongdoing by relieving them of all personal responsibility and accountability. We still have to safeguard the law-abiding public from all those who can’t seem to not want to do harm to others, being irresponsible in this regard.

 

    By discarding this belief, we can just move our ladder and place it against a different building—a system designed to protect the public with the balanced purpose of punishment and rehabilitation. Punishment with the loss of freedom and amenities and restorative justice obligations for victims, is enough punishment. Rehabilitation programs, including the very operation of the correctional sanction itself, need to reinforce an offender’s right choices for responsibility in not harming others. This sounds like an overly simplistic way to get better results, but the challenge is to focus on this basic purpose consistently and with all three components of the criminal justice system working together for the same purpose.

 

“…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.” ~Darrell Calkins.