The Role of Peacemaking in Penal Abolition.

• Author: Pepinsky, Hal

Abstracts

Political forces are grounded in what those who are punished most by the state-prisoners--tell us, and in the experiences of those who are punished and threatened more by state violence at all levels of the criminal justice system--as Black and Brown lives are in the United States. These forces can have significant short-term abolitionist effects, both on incarceration levels and on the treatment of those who are policed and incarcerated. The durability of political abolition of state punishment--of incarceration especially--depends on members of any society becoming comfortable with talking through their grievances, directly and safely, with those they blame and fear and, in Roger Fisher et al.'s (1991) terms, "get to yes!" on how to proceed. I call studying and learning to follow this practice "peacemaking." Here, I draw especially on issues surrounding the violence of policing, of prosecution, of incarceration, and in communities and schools to illustrate how principles of peacemaking are and can be applied, thereby breaking the punishment habit.

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HOW CAN CONFLICTS BE RESOLVED WITHOUT RESORTING TO PUNISHMENT? This was my interpretation of the primary question begged by the name change organizers of the second International Conference on Prison Abolition in Amsterdam in 1985 (ICOPA 2) gave to the third International Conference on Penal Abolition in Montreal in 1987 (ICOPA 3), the first ICOPA in which I participated. I had returned to Norway in 1986 to study the country as a "peaceful society"--one that has refrained from sending combat troops abroad and has attained and sustained what is among the world's lowest incarceration rates for a century--especially to spend time with a mentor, Nils Christie, prominent among ICOPA founders. I was inspired to do so in part by one of Christie's recent books, Limits to Pain (1981).

Christie had a talent for speaking plainly. For him, as for me, punishment represented the "intentional infliction of pain." Criticizing law enforcement and incarceration even in Norway, he harkened back to a time when police officers knew the people whom they encountered "in many respects," instead of simply viewing them as suspects or offenders, instead of profiling. It is noteworthy that criticism of punishment itself continues to be foundational to criminological thinking at the University of Oslo and to Scandinavian criminology generally (see Padmanabhan 2016).

When I arrived in Oslo in 1986, Christie gave me a copy of a forthcoming article, "Conflicts as Property" (Christie 1987). In a political culture where mediation has been widely institutionalized, Christie questioned turning conflicts among people over to the state in place of settling them among those involved.

Whereas Christie framed the problem of conflict resolution in these works as one of people giving over ownership of their conflicts to the state penal system, I took particular note of his interests in social control outside the criminal justice system. Another recent book of his, Hvis Skolen Ikke Fantes (If There Were No Schools, Christie 1982a), became a standard text for school teachers in training, encouraging them to foster curiosity and self-discovery over prescribing what students need to be taught, and to take the hierarchy out of education. He also took me to one of the Steiner villages in Norway he was closely involved with, Vidarasen, where paid staff live side-by-side with "exceptional people" (principally, people with Down syndrome), and residents eschew formal hierarchy and seek to live in harmony with nature according to principles Rudolf Steiner called "anthroposophy" (Christie 1989). As Christie saw it, the problem of resorting to punishment by state agents is a manifestation of the larger problem of whether society as a whole is losing its tetthet, literally "tightness" (Christie 1982b). From this larger perspective, I came to see the problem of punishing offenders for crime as a manifestation of the problem of resorting to punishment throughout a political culture. In Norway, where limits are placed on incarceration, the law also prohibits corporal punishment at home and in school. Limits to infliction of pain, the propensity of members of a society as a whole to resolve differences and conflicts without resorting to punishment, are culturally embedded in private and public relations alike. Christie had introduced me to Norwegian peace education researcher Birgit Brock-Utne, who familiarized me with the radical feminist premise that the root of the problem of violence generally is the exercise of power over others, and the alternative in the classroom, as in everyday life, is to transform power over others into power sharing, which in formal legal processes is manifested as mediation or conciliation, in contrast to adjudication or arbitration. When I returned home, I shared a manuscript of an early conception of the alternative to exercising power over others (published as Pepinsky 1988) with Richard Quinney, and he invited me to coedit a volume which gave a name to the alternative to punishment I now use, "peacemaking" (Pepinsky & Quinney 1990). So, at my first ICOPA in Montreal in 1987, I framed penal abolition as a matter of "Crime and Punishment, War, Violence, and Peacemaking."

Connecting Political Change and Cultural Transformation

In his early essay "On the Jewish Question," Karl Marx (1844) proposed that democratic revolutions in the United States and France were to become the first of two stages of societal advancement, representing "political emancipation," to be succeeded by "human emancipation." The problem with political emancipation is that it freed citizens to pursue selfish interests and liberated egoism. Human emancipation would follow as people recognized themselves not as self-interested individuals, but as "species-beings" who looked out for and reached out to meet one another's needs, in effect sharing what they had.

Marx's subsequent writing indicates that, for him, the problem of egoism in democratic societies was that owners of means of production, capitalists, were legally free to exploit labor. As I see it, his distinction between political and human emancipation applies to how we exercise power in all our relations: political emancipation defines who among us is entitled to exercise power over others and how, including use of force and punishment; human emancipation occurs as people transform hurtful exercise of power over others into power sharing--the premise of radical feminism (Brock-Utne 1985, as elaborated in Pepinsky 2006b, 63-64).

Consider the US problem of police killings of people of color. As a political matter, those who protest killings and insist that Black (and Brown) lives matter seek justice, meaning bringing officers to justice, that is, convicting them of crimes and punishing them accordingly. In moments of conflict, in Marx's terms, the issue becomes one of who is entitled to exercise hurtful power over others, of who is entitled to punish whom. In legal and political terms, it is a civil rights issue: emancipation becomes a matter of applying the law correctly and justly.

As holders of state power over others throughout the criminal justice system, policing, adjudication, and corrections, as well as criminalization and punishment more generally, are inherently politically biased by race, class, and gender. Marx argued that those held back and discriminated against need to seize political power and punish their oppressors, before a society of proletarians emancipated themselves from punishing one another to cooperation, to peaceful settlement and acceptance of personal differences. However, in the United States today, it is a white male middle class that continues to dominate government, including criminal justice agencies, even though within a generation whites are expected to become a racial minority.

As an exercise of power over others, punishment in any society is skewed toward adults punishing children and adolescents, at home as in criminal justice. Transforming the ageism implicit in punishment is a cultural matter of adults sharing status and power with children. On my return to Norway in 1986 (having lived in Trondheim with my parents from 1961-1962) with my wife and our nine-year-old daughter, who enrolled in a local school, I noticed a number of ways in which adults gave social parity to children. For instance, Norwegian Constitution Day, May 17, is celebrated not by military displays, but by parades of schoolchildren, who then play noncompetitive games, like races where everyone who finishes gets a prize or certificate, and other organized games at parties later in the day. Day care is universally provided to preschool children. There and in school, where medical and dental care is provided, children call teachers by their first names. As students grow, they learn the system of being led by an ordforer (word-helmsperson) in discussions and in meetings, who takes note of members of a group who wish to speak and calls them in order, occasionally summarizing as the discussion proceeds--the way seminars and student/faculty meetings were held at the University of Oslo's Institute of Criminology. At dinner parties, children are seated with adults, who make a point of including children in their conversations.

I found myself associating these features of daily life in Norway with an array of institutionalized protections of economic and political equalization of power not found in the United States, including:

* highly progressive taxation of income and wealth, reducing income inequality;

* nearly equal representation of workers and shareholders on corporate boards and institutionalized worker comanagement;

* mediation boards, both public and private;

* enough power among prison guards to prevent prisons from double-celling and exceeding capacity (which results in a line, reduced in recent years, of sentenced...