Preventing Violence by James Gilligan. Thames and Hudson, £6.99, pp 144. ISBN 0 500 28278 1. Rating: ★★★
Jim Gilligan knows something about violence. For 25 years, he has been directing provision of psychiatric care to inmates of Massachusetts prisons. He advises presidents and prime ministers; he influences policy and educates others. So when Jim Gilligan says he knows how to prevent (or at least reduce) violence, you want to listen.
Dr Gilligan has a number of radical ideas. He argues that traditional approaches to violence prevention, which emphasise punishment, actually make violence worse; and the more severe the punishment, the worse the violence grows. Violence is more likely where there is a culture of shame. Key risk factors for shame include rigid gender role stereotyping, with resulting distorted views of what is to be “masculine” or “feminine,” and entrenched social hierarchies, based on inequalities of opportunity, income, and hope.
One of the real strengths of Gilligan's analysis is the emphasis on both the individual and social contributions to violence. The complexity of violence often means that researchers and commentators focus on either the micro or the macro level view.
Gilligan concludes that we can reduce violence by reducing social inequality and other stigmata of shame. We should also stop putting people in prison except in those cases where people need a type of therapeutic restraint for the protection of others. If we do this, we should provide therapy and education for violent offenders, rather than deprivation, isolation, and more shame. Topically, he argues that the decriminalisation of cannabis would also help to reduce violence.
But here's the problem—that just by calling something a medical issue doesn't make it any less political. Although I think Gilligan would like to make violence a health problem, his proposals are not just the prescription of an excellent doctor. They are intensely political in terms of how power and goods are dealt out in human societies. He knows this, of course, and ends the book with an interesting discussion of who profits from the failure to prevent violence, who has an interest in keeping it going. This is a particularly painful example: Gilligan and his team started an education programme in their prison for the inmates. There was some evidence that six months after release those who had completed the programme were at reduced risk of offending. When the new (Republican) governor of Massachusetts heard about this, he stopped the programme “in case it encouraged people to commit crimes to get an education.”
It would be good to have some debate with Dr Gilligan on how to apply his ideas in the UK and on some other issues as well. For instance, Gilligan is critical of punishment as a “moral” response to violence, but I wonder if he really wants to dispense with the “moral” altogether. Violent men (and women—not much discussed in the book) do seem to have difficulties engaging in moral reasoning that includes others. However, this is not to say that they do not possess a strong moral sense of themselves and their offences. I wonder whether some of the violence we mete out to offenders is part of a sense of collective unconscious guilt; I also wonder whether theology has any part to play in developing therapeutic interventions for the violent.
All citizens have an interest in reducing violence, and this book is written in such a way as to be accessible to a range of readers. And here's another thought which may encourage you to buy it: I bet Dubya would hate it.