America appears to believe that punishment is the cure for all of society’s ills.

Pesky homeless making your city look like a hobo-ville, taking up your parks, smelling up your public transit? Punish them enough by, say, making it illegal to sleep or sit in public and making it illegal to feed them and presto change, they’ll create an app start-up in San Francisco’s Silicon Gulch and become multi-gazillionaires!

Poor people living in poverty? Ditto. Punish them hard enough by taking away their food stamps and Medicaid, and they’ll magically become NOT poor!

Unemployed people losing their homes and desperate for jobs? Take away their unemployment compensation and jobs will magically appear for them!

What’s missing from all of this is agency. What process or agent, exactly, is going to magically turn an unemployed person into an employed person when there aren’t enough jobs for all the unemployed people out there? What process or agent, exactly, is going to magically turn a mentally ill homeless people (it’s estimated that 50% of homelessness is caused by mental illness) into a San Francisco app gazillionaire?

I guess these people believe in the “punishment fairy” (see left), who with an application of his magic wand of wood will somehow cure the mental illnesses of the homeless and will somehow make jobs appear out of vapor and somehow make someone with a 4th grade education whose only aptitude is for physical labor into a rocket scientist.

Even if you thought people were poor because they want to be poor, or people were homeless because they want to be homeless, or people were unemployed because they want to be homeless, punishing them for being poor/homeless/unemployed is stupid. Punishment doesn’t teach proper behavior. Punishment teaches avoidance. Specifically, avoidance of the people punishing them. Avoidance is a behavior, but if you do not teach proper behavior elsewhere via the standard techniques (modeling, instruction, opportunities for successfully learning and completing the desired proper behavior and yes, rewards for doing what’s desired), all you’re teaching the man / woman / child is to be sneaky and lie a lot in order to avoid the punishment.

Punishing the poor will not make them not-poor. Being poor is already misery, been there, done that, know that from personal experience. Making them more miserable by punishing them even more will just make them more miserable poor people, it won’t make people with a 4th grade education and 90 IQ suddenly employable as rocket scientists. It’ll just make them sneaky and lie a lot in their attempts to avoid the punishment. The way to make them not-poor is to make it pay to be not-poor. Which means jobs that pay well but can be done with a 4th grade education and 90 IQ.

Punishing the unemployed will not make them employed. Being unemployed is already misery. It’ll just make them sneaky and lie a lot in order to avoid the punishment. The way to solve unemployment is with jobs. Doh.

Punishing the homeless will not make them not-homeless. It’ll just drive them into back alleys and eating lots of scraps out of dumpsters, and yeah, some of them will become not-homeless by the simple expedient of dying, but surely we have more humane ways to do that? But if we want to solve homelessness, proper mental health services and sufficient housing for the homeless will make them not-homeless. And for the not-mentally-ill homeless, they need jobs, and furthermore jobs that pay enough to afford a home. That’s how to solve homelessness.

Punishing people for consuming drugs won’t make them consume less drugs. It’ll just make them sneaky and lie a lot in order to avoid the punishment. The way to solve addiction is with anti-addiction programs and rewards for staying clean (like having good paying jobs available if they stay clean). How well has that punishment-oriented War on Drugs been working, yo? I mean, other than for the police-prison-judicial-industrial system which profits greatly from it?

Yet every year we hear people whine that we should punish more in order to eliminate social ills. Whenever I asked how that works given that punishment only teaches avoidance, they call me un-American and claim I have no solutions so theirs is best. Despite the fact that solutions are obvious, and have been implemented in other countries and shown to work. I guess Americans are just addicted to punishment, a nation of S&M aficionados. Go figure.

– Badtux the Baffled Penguin

