Crime and the Death Penalty
No topic draws a clearer line between liberals and conservatives than that of violent crime. Strict Father morality sees the cure for violent crime simply as strict punishment. This derives from the Strict Father model of the family that demands that disobedience must be punished, preferably in a painful fashion with an instrument like a belt or a rod. It assumes the Morality of Reward and Punishment, which says that punishment is the moral alternative. And it also assumes a behaviorist theory of human nature that says punishment will work to eliminate violence.
In addition, conservatives claim that violent crime has been the result of “permissive” childrearing practices. They claim that violent crime in later life is caused by a lack of strict discipline at home, a lack of painful corporal punishment in response to disobedience. A mother’s nurturance without a father’s discipline, they imply, produces antisocial, uninhibited, violent children with no respect for law. Conservatives, using this reasoning, attribute the rise in violent crime to the corresponding decline in the presence of fathers in American homes, due to divorce and illegitimacy. The assumption is that a father would administer strict discipline, with painful corporal punishment for disobedience, and that this would teach children to behave and to grow up as law-abiding, self-reliant citizens.
The Nurturant Parent model of the family makes exactly the opposite claim. It says that children are best socialized and taught responsibility through a nurturant upbringing where discipline is maintained through loving, respectful, and firm interactions and a constant attention to mutual responsibilities and explanations. Painful corporal punishment, the nurturant model says, does just the opposite of what it is intended to do. It teaches violence and violence begets violence. Children who are made to submit through pain to the will of a parent are taught to make others submit to them through their use of violent methods. Correspondingly, neglect has a similar effect. Neglect is a lack of the nurturance in which discipline comes out of loving, responsible interactions. Neglect is thus a form of violence, a denial of needed nurturance.
Liberals respond that violence among fatherless children living in high-crime districts is a result of one or more of the following: (1) mothers who act like abusive strict fathers, administering corporal punishment for disobedience and berating their children; (2) mothers who are neglectful; or (3) social causes, such as poverty or peer pressure. Liberals further argue that mothers who are abusive or neglectful were abused or neglected themselves. The long-term cure for violent crime, liberals argue, is (1) nurturant environments in which there are no neglectful or abusive strict-parent models and (2) the reduction or elimination of poverty by the provision of job training and jobs. From the liberal perspective, what the conservatives are suggesting would just increase violence.
Advocates of nurturant-parent child-rearing practices cite research indicating that strict-father families and corporal punishment contribute importantly to delinquency and violence in later life. Such studies will be discussed in Chapter 21.
Gun Control
Liberal support for gun control is a consequence of the nur-turant parent’s view of painful corporal punishment—that it contributes to a cycle of violence. Guns are not intended just for target practice or sport. They are intended to hurt or kill people. The very presence of a gun evokes scenarios in which guns are used. These scenarios (self-defense, retribution, or revenge) all share the property that violent punishment is seen as the natural response to wrongdoing. That very idea, the Nurturant Parent model claims, leads to further violence. And further violence with guns means more killing.
Conservatives’ support for the right to bear arms—even the right to bear machine guns—comes from Strict Father morality, which says that it is the responsibility of everyone to protect himself as well as he can and it is the responsibility of the Strict Father to protect his family. Guns are seen as the individual’s form of protection in a hostile world and they are symbolic of the male role as family protector. They are an instrument of moral strength and a symbol of the power of the Strict Father. As such, they also uphold the moral order. There is thus a very good reason why it is conservatives who support the right to bear arms at a time when conservatives are down in general on rights as liberals have defined them, e.g., the right to a decent standard of living, the right to an education, and the like.
There is also a good reason why very impassioned opposition to gun control often goes with survivalism. Survivalism is about self-reliance through self-discipline, the hallmark of Strict Father morality. And there is a good reason why those who are impassioned about the right to bear arms and about survivalism are also against the income tax. As we have seen, opposition to taxation fits Strict Father morality. And there is a reason why advocates of the right to bear arms are often violently anticommunist. The Strict Father model provides the link between the protective function of the father and the principle of the Morality of Reward and Punishment, the very basis of all morality in the Strict Father model.
This is by no means to say that all conservatives are gun nuts, survivalists, antitax activists, and strong anticommunists. But there is a good reason why those values fit together and why people with those values tend to be conservatives.
Crime
Why do conservatives believe in spending money to build more prisons, and in tougher sentencing laws even for nonviolent offenders. Why do they support the Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out law, mandating twenty-five-year-to-life sentences for repeat nonviolent as well as violent offenders? Why do they do so in the face of evidence that having more people in prison does not reduce crime?
The state of Minnesota’s Kids First program, which stresses day care, education, and community involvement, has succeeded in crime prevention at a much lower cost than running prisons. Why has this model not been supported by conservatives?
The answer comes out of Strict Father morality, in which the Moral Strength system of metaphors is primary, with Moral Self-Interest right behind it. Strict Father morality thus includes Retribution, Moral Strength, Moral Self-Interest, and Moral Essence. Retribution sees punishment as defining justice. The priority of Moral Strength entails that a show of strength is the best protection against evil. It is a consequence of Moral Self-Interest that people act in their own self interest; hence, people will commit crimes if it is in their interest (that is, if punishment is lenient) and won’t commit crimes if it is not in their interest (if punishment is harsh). And according to Moral Essence, past behavior is a guide to essential character and essential character predicts future behavior. Therefore, a repeat offender has a bad character, which means he’s likely to commit crimes again. To protect the public, he should be imprisoned for a long time.
By Strict Father morality, harsh prison terms for criminals and life imprisonment for repeat offenders are the only moral options. Programs like Minnesota’s Kids First are social programs and are, as such, immoral to conservatives for reasons given above. The conservative arguments are moral arguments, not practical arguments. Statistics about which policies do or do not actually reduce crime rates do not count in a morality-based discourse.
Liberals, following Nurturant Parent morality, point to Minnesota’s Kids First as an argument that prevention programs can reduce crime, while pointing to statistics indicating that putting people in prison does not. Liberals see crime as having social causes—poverty, unemployment, alienation, and lack of caring and community—and argue that social programs are needed to address those social causes. Conservatives don’t believe in social causes of crime or in any other social causes. Let’s consider why.
Class and Social Causes
Conservatives tend not to use explanations based on the concepts of class and social causes, nor do they recommend policy based on those notions. Why? Liberals use these concepts all the time, in providing explanations and in formulating and justifying policy. Again, why? What is it about the difference between liberals and conservatives that makes these concepts sensible to one, but not to the other?
Think for a moment about how the notions of class and social forces are used. Class structure comes with the notion of an upper class with wealth and power that wants to maintain its privileges; a lower class—the cheap labor of the upper class—held down and kept subservient to the upper class; and a middle class caught in between—aspiring to the upper class and afraid of falling into the lower class, but also depending on the cheap labor of the lower class. Social forces are usually postulated to account for the failure of certain lower-class groups to succeed, to gain access to wealth and power. People in the lower class can get caught in the system and be unable to rise. Such a social arrangement is seen by liberals as unfair. It is a social injustice.
According to this picture, the upper and middle classes could not maintain their current lifestyles without the cheap—and often difficult and demeaning—labor of the lower class: picking vegetables, working in fast-food places, cleaning houses, collecting garbage. In this picture, the upper classes owe a lot to the lower class—much more than they are paying. Social justice demands that the lower class be paid more, live under better conditions, and be given maximal opportunities to work their way out of poverty, opportunities for education and job training, for example.
This picture is usually supplied as a justification for government to do something to help out the people at the bottom, at least to provide for their basic needs and to give them enough education and job training to allow them to do a bit better. It is also used to explain the rage and violence of lower-class people against the system that “imprisons” them socially and economically. It is the class structure and the social forces holding it in place that does the “imprisoning.”
Concepts like “class” and “social and economic forces” and “social and economic imprisonment” fit naturally into a liberal worldview. For liberals, the essence of America is nurturance, part of which is helping those who need help. People who are “trapped” by social and economic forces need help to “escape.” The metaphorical Nurturant Parent—the government—has a duty to help change the social and economic system that traps people. By this logic, the problem is in the society, not in the people innocently “trapped.” If social and economic forces are responsible, then other social and economic forces must be brought to bear to break the “trap.”
This whole picture is simply inconsistent with Strict Father morality and the conservative worldview it defines. In that worldview, the class hierarchy is simply a ladder, there to be climbed by anybody with the talent and self-discipline to climb it. Whether or not you climb the ladder of wealth and privilege is only a matter of whether you have the moral strength, character, and inherent talent to do so. Because explanations for success or failure give priority to Moral Strength and Moral Essence, explanations in terms of social forces and class make no sense. They are only seen as excuses for lack of talent, laziness, or some other form of moral weakness. In such a worldview, the concept of social justice does not make sense. If the poor are selling their labor to the rich, then it is the labor market and the labor market alone that determines what that labor is worth. Labor, in this metaphor, is a commodity like any other commodity, and its value is not inherent but determined by what people are willing to pay in exchange for it. The Morality of Reward and Punishment, which requires that all markets be free markets, demands this. Any other arrangement would be immoral and threaten the very moral foundations of society. It is for this reason that conservatives are against the minimum wage, while liberals, in the name of a bare minimum of social justice, support it.
To conservatives, the existence of a wealthy class simply makes real the Morality of Reward and Punishment, the basis of all morality. It is not wrong, not something to be corrected, for the wealthy to seek further privilege. It is natural and moral, a guarantee that the Morality of Reward and Punishment continues to work. Crucial to this is what conservatives see as the essence of America—the Ladder of Success myth. As long as free enterprise flourishes and anyone with enough self-discipline and imagination can become an entrepreneur, the Morality of Reward and Punishment will hold and all will be well.
The logic of conservatism locates so-called “social” problems within people, not within society. For this reason, it would make no sense to conservatives to use class and social forces as forms of explanation and justification for social policy.
Nature and Nurture
The term “nurture” has two related senses, one having to do with nurturance (nurture-1) and the other with environmentally determined rather than genetically determined factors in human development (nurture-2), as in the opposition between “nature” and “nurture.” Nurturance is certainly an environmentally determined factor, and it leads liberals to look almost exclusively at environmentally determined factors in social and political explanations.
Though Strict Father morality is opposed to the goal of a nurturant society, it is extremely concerned with environmental factors, such as childrearing and the more general use of reward and punishment. But there are other parts of Strict Father morality that are concerned with nature as opposed to nurture-2.
Strict Father morality gives high priority to Moral Essence and the idea that the Moral Order is the natural order of dominance. Thus, there is a strain in conservatism that uses nature, as well as environmentally determined factors, as a means of explanation for social problems. Conservatives can have it both ways. Unsuccessful people can fail for one of two reasons: because they lack either (1) character (which is environmentally determined) or (2) talent (which is natural). That is why conservatives tend to like books like The Bell Curve, while liberals tend not to. The Bell Curve provides the second explanation for the economic failure of blacks—lack of talent; but if that can’t be proved, there is always lack of character as an explanation.
Preventing Crime
The difference in conservative and liberal moral systems leads to different views of the role of nature and nurture and of the explanatory validity of concepts like class and social forces. To conservatives, any appeal to social forces is always just an excuse for lack of talent (nature) or lack of character (nurture-2). Conservatives therefore don’t address crime by looking for social causes. They address crime just the way they would address the refusal of a child to abide by his parents’ rules—according to the Morality of Reward and Punishment. Conservatives punish crime, and they assume that if crime is punished harshly enough, it will end, because criminals will have a strong enough disincentive to keep them from committing crimes. If disincentives don’t work, then the criminals must be inherently bad—rotten to the core—and should be locked away for life or for a very long time.
Given the central position that the Morality of Reward and Punishment has in the conservative moral system, it is no surprise that conservatives in most cases prefer retribution over restitution as a form of justice, as a way of balancing the moral books. It is therefore no surprise that conservatives are in favor of the death penalty. It is a form of retribution, a life for a life.
Liberals, of course, look at these issues very differently. The primacy of empathy leads to an overriding concern with fairness toward anyone committing a crime (Moral Action Category 1). Given the overwhelming power of the state, any citizen is helpless by comparison unless the rule of law is carried out scrupulously. Great care must be exercised that people accused of crimes be given a fair trial and that their rights as citizens not be overridden by the state. Liberals are acutely aware that the police can abuse their power and act unfairly to get a conviction. This is especially true where the accused is someone who is poor or a member of a minority group. Poor people cannot get as good representation in court as rich people, and members of minority groups are subject to prejudice. Most of the people who have been given the death penalty and are on death row are poor members of minority groups. Overwhelming concerns for empathy and fairness, which grow out of the Nurturant Parent model, lead liberals to have a paramount concern for the abuse of state power.
Conservatives see such a concern as coddling criminals, as caring more about the criminal than the victim. They are puzzled by liberal behavior. If liberals are so concerned about protecting the helpless, why aren’t they more concerned about protecting the victims of crime? Why aren’t they promoting stricter penalties in the name of protection?
It is not that liberals are not concerned about the victims of crimes. Rather, they disagree about how crime is to be minimized overall. First, the rule of law must be upheld. If the state can act like a criminal, framing innocent people and trampling on the rights of the accused, then all hope for the rule of law is lost. To keep the state and its representatives—the police and the courts—honest, the rights of everyone accused of a crime must be upheld strictly.
Fairness is the issue here. If the legal system is not fair, it will have no legitimacy. Fairness is a consideration that arises, in Nurturant Parent morality, out of concerns for empathy and nurturance for all.
Second, liberals do believe in social causes; they believe that if children are not raised in nurturant environments, they will not learn to behave responsibly toward others. If a gang is the closest thing to a nurturant community a child knows, then he will engage in gang behavior. Thus, the way to best inculcate responsible behavior over the whole society is to provide nurturant environments for as many people as possible. The best long-range approach to fighting crime is to fund programs like Project Head Start, to provide high-quality day care for poor working parents, to provide high-quality education for the poor, and so on. That is why a liberal like Anthony Lewis (New York Times, August 8, 1995) is so outraged when he sees conservatives cutting $137 million from Project Head Start and simultaneously giving the military $7 billion more than it said it needed. It costs more than $20,000 a year to house one prisoner for a year—the cost of tuition at an Ivy League college. Liberals argue that, in the long run, it is more effective, a lot cheaper, and a lot better for everyone to fund Project Head Start, day-care centers, and so on. But conservatives believe that there can be no such thing as social causes of crime, that crime is always a matter of individual moral weakness. It follows then that it is silly to spend money on countering nonexistent social causes.
Third, liberals do not believe in the overriding Morality of Reward and Punishment. They do not believe that it is mainly fear of punishment that binds society together and makes people act kindly, responsibly, or at least civilly, toward each other. Liberals believe that it is nurturance that brings this about, that loving and supportive parent-child bonding creates communities in which there are strong social ties. It is not that rewards and punishments are never appropriate, but they are not the basis of morality, nurturance is. Simply increasing penalties, liberals argue, will not eliminate crime. The death penalty, liberals argue, has been shown not to be a deterrent to murder. Murderers apparently do not do a cost-benefit analysis before killing someone, and so the death penalty does not deter them.
The Death Penalty
The death penalty itself is a major dividing line between liberals and conservatives. Supporters tend to be conservative and opponents tend to be liberal. Nurturant Parent morality militates against the death penalty. The major legal argument given rests on fairness, which, as we have seen, arises in Nurturant Parent morality from considerations of empathy and nurturance. The argument is that the courts do not have a way to guarantee that the death penalty is applied fairly. Prejudice and politics do enter into murder trials. If a person unfairly convicted of murder is executed, then there is no recourse if he is later discovered to have been innocent. Most of the people on death row are poor and black and are unable to afford adequate legal representation, which, it is argued, makes it more likely that they will get the death penalty. The same penalties should apply to all racial and economic groups. If that is not true of the death penalty, the death penalty should not be applied at all.
But liberals’ feelings about the death penalty run much deeper than that. Nurturance itself implies a reverence for life, which is a form of the unconditional love of nurturant parents for their children. If the government is conceptualized as a nurturant parent, then it should have such an overwhelming reverence for life itself. The death penalty denies such a reverence for life, and so is inconsistent with the conception of the government as nurturant parent.
In Strict Father morality, the strict father metes out punishment for the wrongdoings of children. The Nation As Family metaphor makes the government into the Big Daddy who is meting out punishment. Are there any limits on the harshness of punishment? The lack of such limits in the family would make it moral for a parent to kill his child in the name of discipline. When parents are abusive, this can happen, and all too frequently does. Infanticide is what the death penalty amounts to in the Nation As Family metaphor. The spectre of the state functioning like a murderously abusive parent is, I believe, what lies behind the constitutional prohibition against cruel and inhuman punishment and behind liberals’ abhorrence of the death penalty.
For these reasons, I believe, liberals find the death penalty uncivilized and point out that nations around the world have banned it. It sets a bad example for the state to be engaged in killing people, the worst crime someone could commit. Just as parents can set bad examples, so, according to the Nation As Family metaphor, can the government. Governments should not be in the business of killing people.
Arguments against the death penalty are not just about the death penalty itself. They are emblematic of a broader issue. They are about how the state should be conceptualized and how it should function in general.
The liberal arguments, of course, cannot possibly be persuasive to conservatives. If the very basis of morality is reward and punishment, then in a moral society the way to deal with crime is punishment, an eye for an eye—period. The argument that the death penalty does not deter murder doesn’t really matter that much. To conservatives, the death penalty is part of a moral society, in which the Morality of Reward and Punishment rules supreme.