S15 E4: The One About Criminology

Calling all teachers of Religion, Crime and Punishment. This weeks guest is Dr. Evelyn Svingen who's specialist subject is criminology.  We discussion reasons for crime, aims of punishment, types of punishment, the history of punishment, the death penalty, women in prison,  and the relationship between foriveness and retribution.

Evelyn mentioned lots of amazing resources to explore; 

I was almost a school shooter: Ted Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azRl1dI-Cts

Gagaca Courts, Rwanda

https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/assets/pdf/Backgrounder%20Justice%202014.pdf

The innocence Project

https://innocenceproject.org/

When they see us documentary

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80200549

Elizabeth Loftus, False memories Ted Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB2OegI6wvI

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

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SPEAKER_04: 1:54

So my name is Dr. Evelyn Sungen. I am an assistant professor in criminology at the University of Birmingham, but I also split my time between the criminology department and the liberal arts and natural sciences team here at the University of Birmingham as well. So we really try to look at complex problems and complex solutions, of which, of course, crime and punishment is one. Yes. And I think criminology is a fascinating subject because I always say that to people, you know, when I'm sitting next to someone on a plane, and if I'm feeling in a talky mood and they ask me what I do, I say I'm a criminologist. And if I don't want to talk to anyone, I say I'm a lecturer.

SPEAKER_00: 2:33

Oh, that's so good. But I think criminology kind of gets to the heart of who humans are underneath, and sort of human psychology, I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_04: 2:42

I think the point of criminology is that nobody really knows, or at least from the people who sign up for criminology courses, or think that they're talking to a criminologist, they don't really know who they're talking to because they oftentimes, well, and I should be really thankful for Criminal Minds and for all of the procedural justice shows, for having a job because it really sparked interest. All of those shows, and now they're obviously Jeffrey Dahmer documentaries and Netflix is spitting out more true crime, they're true crime podcasts, and it really is in the public imagination. And I do say that one of the difficulties with this job is that everybody has an opinion with physics. You know, if I say this is how physics works, people just say, Oh, yeah, you're a physicist, you understand. And if I say, Oh, I'm a criminologist, and this is, by the way, how punishment works, people say, No! My grandmother was mugged once, therefore I know everything about crime, and you're like, uh but it is because it's such a big part of human experience, and it's not just about uh well and exactly right, as you said, is you know, going into the psyche of why people commit crime, but it's not it's just one side of it. Another side is well, actually, how do we define something as a crime? Because we've seen, you know, societies are very different, you know. In some societies, yeah, you can get stoned for not covering your head, and some societies that you know you're not allowed to do things like chew chewing gum, right? The crimes and what we consider a crime is very different society to society, but also just temporally. In this country, well in the United Kingdom, we had completely different laws. And I don't know if any of you have ever gone to stuff like Nottingham Justice Museum and you know looked at the way we used to punish people or how these procedures worked. It's completely different now. And so just also asking, well, as a society, why do we decide that some things are a crime and some things aren't a crime? But also the next step is what do we do about it?

SPEAKER_03: 4:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 4:41

So criminology is really three fundamental questions are why we make the rules, why we break the rules, and how do we enforce the rules? So those are the three big questions that are really intertwined and they're really interesting to look at.

SPEAKER_00: 4:55

Yeah. And actually sort of behind those three questions is a sense of power, is in who defines what a crime is, who decides what a crime is, who decides how people are going to be punished. And do you find that there may be in the past hasn't been huge amounts of nuance in that we kind of define crime very simply, it's just whatever the government says is wrong, and we kind of assume that those decisions are logical, and that actually sometimes we kind of define humans into criminals and law abiders, and there are good people and bad people, and therefore if you're a criminal, you're a bad person and you deserve punishment. The nuance of those kind of discussions and debates are lost somehow. And I think that's possibly to do with contemporary culture in the past, how it's defined and portrayed crime. And actually, now we are starting to get a bit more nuance in our media and the sort of programming around criminology where we're kind of thinking we as an audience, we sometimes understand the criminal behaviour, and I think that's kind of much more interesting. But do you find that there is a lack of nuance sometimes in the discussions you have?

SPEAKER_04: 6:00

I find it so interesting that you started with in the past. I think that's very much in the present, isn't it? Again, defining something as a crime is a really powerful thing to do because exactly what you said that you associate, and again, I've been saying the word a criminal, that's defining a whole person. Right? You know, I've done many things in my life that I'm not proud of. You know, there are many embarrassing things that I think about at night when I'm trying to fall asleep, and then instead of shop on Amazon and then wait for parcels to arrive. But like I don't define myself by the worst thing that I've ever done. You know, I don't say it's like, oh yes, hi, I'm Evelyn. I'm the person who's, I don't know, once a you two when somebody told me to have a nice flight. I would say, oh yeah, you know, I'm an assistant professor, right? I'll define myself by the things that I'm proud of.

SPEAKER_03: 6:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 6:49

Whereas actually when somebody goes to prison and comes out of prison, you know, we say you're a criminal. You know, we wouldn't even say person who committed a crime.

unknown: 6:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 6:56

We would say, yeah, you're a criminal. And the language is important, kind of the same way that you know we would refer to somebody as an expat and somebody as a migrant.

unknown: 7:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 7:04

Because the language makes a difference. We're saying that, you know, if you're coming from a poor country, you're a migrant, and we have this negative connotation that we've created around this word. Oh, but if you're from a rich country, you're an expat. Because language is important. And if you define something as crime, then suddenly it's important. And I always say that I should stop doing that, but always confess in crimes that I've committed. In my lecture hall, my students always go and I say, Well, yeah, for example, I cycle around town and I always jump the red light.

SPEAKER_03: 7:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 7:36

And they're like, Oh, it's not a crime. I was like, Well, it is. It's a clear violation of a traffic code, it's actually quite dangerous and it's really not good. And they're like, Yeah, but it's not a crime. But it is, it's just you've decided to attach the word crime to a bad person and you don't see me as a bad person. But again, if I was, I don't know, a teenager belonging to certain ethnic minorities doing the same thing, you would say, Oh, it's yes, you're those irresponsible ruffians. Yeah. But because you know, I'm a lecturer and you respect me, you think, oh, that's actually okay. And my other example that I always bring is actually, well, it's kind of tying to, you know, things like reciprocity and retribution and how we see these things. But I said that I was once in Sainsbury's and, you know, I was doing the self-checkout, and you know, I was listening to a podcast, as we do now. And, you know, I was putting my bags in groceries, and then I tapped my phone and then left. And I came home and realized that, you know, and I got this little notification saying the payment didn't go through, so I stole a lot of groceries from Sainsbury. And I thought, you know what, that's actually fine. I really don't care. I'm sure they'll be okay. And then another example, there was a very nice little independent coffee shop run by these two elderly women. Same thing happened when I was getting up coffee. So tapped went away. Fourty minutes later I noticed the same notification. I ran back. And I was like, no, take my money. And these ladies looked at me like that's fine. I was like, no, I need to pay for my coffee. And it's because, yeah, again, you know, it has to do with how we relate to things and how we relate to places. Frankly, I think Saint de Breeze can handle it. They're probably fine, they're probably abusing some workers somewhere. Whereas you know, those very sweet old ladies, I couldn't do it to them. And again, it's the definition of it's the same act. Oh, if anything, I stole way more money from Saint Breeze than I did from old ladies. But it's the act itself, you know, in one case I thought it was acceptable and it was fine, and I, you know, it doesn't prevent me from sleeping at night. Whereas taking a coffee from an independent coffee shop just felt so awful to me that I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't come back and do it.

SPEAKER_00: 9:44

It's so fascinating. Yeah. So your relationship to your action and to the people that you're committing the crime against is really significant. And I've had exactly the same thing, Evelyn. Full disclosure, I've been in court twice. Both times for driving violations, and it's for getting more than 15 points on my license through speeding. And both times I justified my actions. Both times my psychology was, but actually that's not fair because, or it's not fair to find me because, or you can't take away this because. And actually I I had to go into that courtroom and not make excuses. But my natural instinct was to go, but the speed camera is a stealth speed camera. It was put up with no warning, it was put behind a tree, and on one road there's no signs to say what the speed limit was. You have to do that thing where you measure the lines and the measure the lights and all that kind of stuff. And actually, it was on my way home from work when I was kind of stressed and I was picking the kids up and all that. It was really interesting to see my psychology and my reaction to that crime that it felt unjust, even though it wasn't. I just didn't like it. And so I don't meet the profile. An RE teacher, a white middle class woman, doesn't meet the profile. And so therefore, people don't think I'm a bad person even though I've committed a crime.

SPEAKER_04: 11:01

But I think many of us do, and I think that's everybody's committed the crime, and it's usually twelve-year-old teenagers lifting a protein bar from a shop, and it's fine. And I think if you look at I'm a social criminologist, and so I am looking at brain development and how the brain develops and how that ties on to kind of our behaviors, and when we are at this age between somewhere between twelve and sixteen, so the limbic system responsible for emotions and risk-taking behaviors firing in all directions.

SPEAKER_03: 11:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 11:29

And the brain area responsible for self-control is just not there yet. It just hasn't developed yet.

SPEAKER_00: 11:34

And it's although I was in my forties, so I didn't have that as an excuse.

SPEAKER_04: 11:38

But the thing is, I think what I'm trying to say is we all commit crime.

SPEAKER_03: 11:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 11:42

But we always say, Oh, but that's not a crime because and again, you know, when I run the red traffic light, it's usually six o'clock in the morning. There are no cars. And that's another thing I say, because I'm on a bike. I say, well, I would never do that on a car.

SPEAKER_03: 11:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 11:56

And that's the line that I've arbitrarily decided to draw, because I've decided for myself that that's okay. Again, the same way I've decided that it's okay to steal from a large corporation and not okay to steal from an independent business. And that's just the line on the sand that we draw, but we do that for ourselves and we do that for other people because I'm absolutely okay saying, you know, I've committed a crime. I once I had the same thing, I was in a canteen, and I just well, I I had my lunch, and you know, I finished eating it, and I thought, I really want a yogurt, I just really am really craving a yogurt, and it was right next to me. And the queue was so long, and I thought, I'm just gonna take this yogurt, right? And I knew what I was doing was a crime, but then I thought, oh, it's not bad, because first of all, I eat here all the time. I'm basically you know the main spender. And second of all, you know, they're not gonna lose that yogurt really. And that's what we do.

SPEAKER_00: 12:50

Yeah. So you kind of it's about the victim, isn't it? It's that actually if we can justify that there's a victimless crime in this action that we're doing, then actually that helps us justify our behaviour. So let's get on with these. I mean, it is really complex if we're thinking about reasons for crime, and it's kind of there are lots of different reasons that kind of interplay with each other. But can you just sort of try and break it down? What do we know about why people commit crime?

SPEAKER_04: 13:14

So I think the biggest predictor, and it's funny that this is where we arrived to, the biggest predictor of crime is morality. So if we think that's the right thing to do, then we do it. If we think it's a wrong thing to do, we don't do it. And that's that simple because again, it doesn't matter if we know it's a crime or not, but if we think actually in this case it's justified because for example, there is a lot of study on theft from the workplace, and that when wages have been cut or the bonuses haven't been given, there is a huge spike in theft of stuff from workplace, because again, people just don't think that it's fair and therefore they commit a crime. Or sometimes obviously we're forced to act against our morality, you know, if somebody has literally got a gun to your head, then that's a different conversation. But usually the act either fits with your personal morals of whether it's a right thing to do or wrong thing to do, or it doesn't, in which case crime will happen or not happen. But then, you know, the interesting question to ask is what influences our morality, and at what point do we decide that some acts are okay and some acts are not okay and how they're influenced by circumstances? And then you can roughly, well, I think in the past we used to break criminological theories into like biological, psychological, sociological, but I think we've now arrived at the era of integration. I think there is very much a firm understanding that you can't really look at all of these things alone. Again, for example, I look at brain development and I think there's a very clear picture. And if you Google the age crime curve and the dual processing model, which is what I was referring to with the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex, they map onto each other beautifully. But you can't say that this is what causes crime, right? Because then all of the teenagers all the time would be committing a crime, and that's an important thing to note, is that crime is an action. It's not a personality, because even Jeffrey Dahmer spent like four years not attacking anyone. So even if you think about the most horrible, vile, serial offender you can think of, they spend very little of their time actually committing a crime. So even if you shoplift every day, the act of shoplifting is gonna be what, 20 minutes, half an hour, depends on how complex your plan is, but then you're still spending most day not committing a crime. So we really need to explain an action. So an action is when a person with certain criminal propensities ends up in a certain environment with its own criminogenic setting. So it's usually when a criminogenic person ends up in a criminogenic environment, and then boom, interaction happens. So again, if I'm desperate to punch someone in the face, but I'm alone at home, I can't do it. I just can't do it. And it's the same thing, you know, you might really want to shoplift, but there is a camera right on your face, or you might really want to shoplift, but then I don't know, you're with your mother and you feel bad. Or you really want to steal a coffee, but then suddenly your best friend walks in and you just can't do it. So the setting is really important, and there are many features of a setting. And then obviously you as a person are important. Again, what morals do you bring to the situation? What experiences do you bring to the situation? But also what motivations you bring to associations? Like why did you decide to do it? But also why now? And that's the important question, why now? So you might be, again, as I said, run red lights at six in the morning. Why? Because there's nobody around. Because if there was a car in the near vicinity, I would never dare because I'd fear for my life. Or if there's a person in a near vicinity, I wouldn't do it because I'd fear for their life. Um so there are certain circumstances of a setting which allow me to think this is okay now. So there are some people that I met who would never violate traffic code, never. That's just not in the moral code. That just doesn't pass the moral filter. And so they just wouldn't do it ever. And so we really need to think about yes, there are biological mechanisms going on, but then biology is influenced by your environment. Yes, there are sociological principles going on, but at the same time, everything goes through your brain. You know, you can't experience the world without your brain. And your brain processes way more information than we do. It's like you know when you're talking to somebody in a party, and then suddenly somebody screams your name from the other corner of the room, like you weren't paying attention to the other corner of the room. But your brain was, but it just wasn't telling you, it was just filtering it all out. Same as, you know, I will be talking to you, but if a fire alarm goes off in a building, I'll hear it even though I'm not paying attention to it. So your brain is doing all of that in the background, and actually how your brain looks and feels like and has developed and what it's dealt with before, and you know, any neglect, abuse, malnutrition, you know, all of these things are affecting the way your brain looks and feels like. I was actually reading an interesting paper, it was a very small sample, so I'm not actually sure how accurate it is, but things like so taking paracetamol in pregnancy can actually is more likely to result in ADHD in a child. And I just thought, that's amazing. It's like, you know, how your brain can literally rewire itself based on a small medication, again, it's a small sample, I'm not sure how much science there is. But there is a lot of evidence on all of these things and how your brain rewires itself as you are growing up, depending on where you are and how the world looks like around you. So we really need to take all of those explanations in, and I don't think it's good enough anymore to just say, oh, here is this theory, it's sociological, and here is this theory, it's psychological, and here's this theory is biological.

SPEAKER_00: 18:57

It's just the interplay between all of those three things to create that perfect storm. And I think what's interesting just listening to you is it feels as though the human drive or the human instincts that are behind punishment are the same ones that are behind committing the crime in the first place, which is a sense of justice, a sense of survival, a sense of cause and effect. These big kind of ideas underpin everything. And I remember watching a documentary like probably 15 years ago, and it was looking at the brain scan of serial killers, and they saw that the brain scan of a serial killer was very similar to the same ones that get ahead in business that are CEOs and things like that. And they were saying, Because your empathy is much, much lower. So people that commit serial crimes, but it's not like they're going, Oh, this is such a bad thing to do, but I'm gonna do it. They don't have that empathy. And actually, to become quite high up in business, you need to have a lack of empathy. So they had to look at what makes one person become a serial killer and another person become a CEO, and often it was upbringing. So often if you've come from a safe, loving, nurturing environment, then actually that lack of empathy will be used for something that is seen as positive in society, which is becoming the leader, and vice versa, that actually if you've come from a damaged, problematic childhood, then you're more likely to use that lack of empathy to do pain to others that is criminal.

SPEAKER_04: 20:25

But it's more complex than that.

SPEAKER_00: 20:27

But yes.

SPEAKER_04: 20:27

I have those three examples that I always give it open days and it always blows everybody's mind. I love those. And one was, well, you know, the first one was, I don't know if you've seen How I Met Your Mother. Well, the older I get, the less reliable this reference gets with students. But there's a character, Barney, who flirts with women at the bar, you know, trying to get into intimate relationships with them, right, by lying to them repeatedly. And I tell my students, you know, do you think that's a crime? And they were like, Well, well, no, it's not a crime because, you know, these women actually consented. I was like, yeah, but you know, he was not the inventor of the nacho. And maybe they wanted to have intimate relations with the inventor of the nacho, and then they say, Well, if the women are that stupid to fall for this, it's kind of their fault. And I'm like, well, we wouldn't say that if he was a scammer. So if he emailed someone saying, I'm the inventor of the nacho, please wire me a thousand pounds, we would say, Yes, the bank has the responsibility to refund this person, then the police needs to investigate that person, that's a crime. We wouldn't say, Oh, if somebody's that stupid to fall for this scam. And I was like, so how come when it comes to financial, we think, yeah, that's definitely a crime if somebody's taking your money. But if it comes to emotional or, you know, potentially damaging your relationship with other people, we say, Oh yeah, that's fine. We don't think that's a crime. And it's again it comes back to our definition of what a crime is. And another example is well actually timbering in Liberia, is that the government is selling its own forest in huge amounts to private companies to cut down and sell for private. Profit. And again, kind of the argument is, well, it's is the government. They own the forest. They can sell the forests, right? But can they? You know, because then the future generations will have nothing to rely on if the entire business of a country relies on this. And the last example was actually about COVID repayment. So Amazon and Walmart, they quadrupled their profits. And while the compensation for frontline workers that were still working was really, really low. And that was kind of the question. And again, people say it's not a crime because it's just business, or that's just how we do business, that's just profit. But is it though, you know, at what point did we decide that this level of collecting money, and again, like gas companies, electricity companies, they were all recording record profits when people were dying from not being able to heat their homes? And it's like, should that be legal? You know, is this allowed to have this level of greed? And so it's well, it's interesting what you're saying, kind of for God. And again, they're usually trying to tap into psychopathy and well, lack of empathy and illusions of grandeur and stuff like that with these studies. And again, you know, these people are doing things that are not okay and they're creating a lot of harms, and they are people literally dying from not being able to heat their homes.

SPEAKER_03: 23:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 23:21

When they're getting all this money. So at some point we as a society decided that's not a crime, that's just business.

SPEAKER_03: 23:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 23:28

How how did we get there? And why are we saying that that's not a crime? But let's say if a person without home steals ten pounds from me, that's definitely a crime. Even though that doesn't really bother me, really. But we will consider that an obvious case of theft. We wouldn't even think about it.

SPEAKER_03: 23:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 23:46

But then making people lose their lives as a result of increasing greed. Yeah. But like that's not a crime. And this is where it gets interesting. Again, that's where definitions of crime are important.

SPEAKER_03: 23:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 23:56

Because we actually allow many people to do many, many harmful things.

SPEAKER_00: 24:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 24:00

Uh without necessarily keeping them accountable for those things.

SPEAKER_00: 24:04

And actually it comes back to that what we're saying earlier about power. That power is who decides what a crime is and who decides what the punishment is, but also who is able to get away with things that are quite criminal. So if you are very, very wealthy, you can steal off other people through tax avoidance, through legal means, but essentially you're taking money from people that don't have very much. So if you are in power, you are able to cause harm through stealing, but it's just not defined as that. So therefore people don't see you as a bad person.

SPEAKER_04: 24:36

But also policies have been passed. So the most famous example, I think, is the war on drugs in the US, that crack cocaine, which was cheaper and easier to get, was criminalized. And powdered coke, that's what film producers did at Beaches of California, that was not. It was literally criminalizing poverty, which is so obvious what's happening. But we're not questioning it. And then there are many things that go into it, and of course, it's still I think it's important to ask a question of why people break the law anyway, because when something is the law, it does make a difference.

SPEAKER_00: 25:09

Yeah. And actually a good example in this country right now is this kind of small boats policies that are coming out. That if you come here legally, that's okay. If you come here illegally, that's not okay. So on the surface, that feels right, that feels just. Unless you look at the reason why people are having to come here illegally. They're not coming illegally here out of choice. It's because no one will allow them to come here legally. So they have a human right to move from one country to another, but there are policies and areas within their own country where they're not allowed to have a passport, or they're stuck in poverty, or they're being oppressed or tortured or murdered or whatever it might be. And so they have no choice but to come here illegally. They're not choosing to become illegal immigrants. They're trying to flee and seek refuge, but we're labelling them a particular way. Nobody would choose to come across any channel on a small boat. So the very fact that they're coming on a small boat suggests that they're not doing this by choice. They're doing this out of desperation.

SPEAKER_04: 26:09

And it's always a question I ask with, for example, I really hate graffiti in general. You know, I do like murals, but generally, I don't know, I just don't like it, it's annoying. But at the same time, every time I see graffiti, I just think, what possibly could have pushed these people, these young people, to think that the only way they can get hurt is through drawing their name on a wall. And that's the same question here, is like, well, I don't get on a boat and try to row to a different country for fun. That's just not something I do. So to what extent were these people pushed if they think, yes, I'm gonna come to a different country where I can barely speak the language, where I have no connections, probably no prospects, and might be detained for years at a time. You know, you wouldn't do that for fun. It's just like, mm-hmm, you know, you don't come here for this. So you must be in a desperate situation. And it's similar again with people who join gangs and people who join other groups. It's really interesting. There is a lot of research on radicalization. And I was once writing a paper on ISIS, and I was looking for ISIS on Instagram. Obviously, you know, you don't have an official account with a blue tick, but you know, that you can actually find them, and it's really interesting in the stuff, the way the advertise, and you can Google this, it's called like ISIS with cats. So there's a whole thing, you have those those men with guns and they have you know little kittens, because that's how they portray themselves. But also all of the posts are like, oh, shooting practice with my boys, and you know, it's the same posts you'll see from a university rowing team or university rugby team. They're all like, Yeah, just finished training, yes, you know, having a match with this other country because it's a sense of community. And nobody comes to these people and says, Hey, do you want to blow something up?

SPEAKER_03: 27:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 27:54

They usually say, you know, they find, you know, you say you don't like the word broken home, but it's actually oftentimes fatherless boys, and they come to them and come to their you know, football practice, you know, they come to their school, they help them pick trainers, they you know, help them buy their first beer, and you know, that's how it works. And then they join this community, and then they have friends and they have support, and then all of a sudden they say, Could you help us build a bomb? And they're like, Oh no, not really, but these people have done so much for me, that's something like I feel like I need to contribute. And again, it usually doesn't start with a place of hatred, even.

SPEAKER_03: 28:34

No.

SPEAKER_04: 28:34

It actually starts with a place of belonging to a community. Yeah. But at which point is, how come we've broken down our community so much that the only place where you can get any support is from, you know, radical groups or gangs?

SPEAKER_00: 28:50

Yeah. And actually that really nicely brings on to my next question because actually if this is kind of what we're learning about why people commit crime, then the next place is not how do we punish these people, the next place is what needs to change in society to make less people susceptible to becoming labelled as criminals. So is there like two or three things that society could do at large to maybe do preventative measures?

SPEAKER_04: 29:16

I think most people who are in prisons don't deserve to be in prison.

SPEAKER_00: 29:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 29:19

But there are definitely some people who are dangerous individuals and need to I'm not trying to say that, yes, let's get rid of all prisons because they are there for a purpose and there are some people who are genuinely dangerous.

SPEAKER_03: 29:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 29:29

And obviously, you know, that there is some semblance of retribution that does work, right? You know, punishment is there for a reason. But yeah, for many people, they're not supposed to be in prisons. And we have those overfilled prisons. You can get to prison for TV license evasion. And actually most of the women who go into court who appear in court appear there for TV license evasions. And you know why? Because they're more likely than men to be at home when an inspector is knocking on their door. And then, you know, if they can't repay the fee, and then it becomes an unrepaid fee, and then it can go into the criminal proceeding. Like it's not there isn't a prison sentence associated with TV license, but you know, that's where it goes to, and it's again kind of going to criminalizing poverty, etc. But in many ways, you know, the start is the community, and to get people to belong to a community, there is so much research being done on why young people carry knives, for example, and actually more of them in this country are carrying knives. And if you talk to them, they say, Well, I needed to protect myself, and you ask them a question, well, don't you trust the police to protect you? And they say, No. I just don't trust the police to be there for me. I just don't trust it to be on my side or support me to protect me. And I get it, you know. Say if you're growing up mostly alone because, you know, you have a single parent that's working three jobs to support you, and then your school is falling apart, you have 50 students per classroom, to have this one, I don't know, 22-year-old teacher that's just trying to hold it together, and they're not getting the support that they need, they don't see the future that they need, they don't see well, if the society is not cooperating with them, why would they cooperate back? And they don't see a way of getting out of this, and they don't see a way of society ever treating them justly, so of course they're gonna turn into crime, because what else are they gonna do? And again, it's this morality that justifies it to them.

SPEAKER_03: 31:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 31:28

And then again, it's also something you can learn. You know, for example, if you see a lot of abuse go unpunished, you know, in front of your eyes, and could be within your family or within your school, or within society in general, your neighbors, then you think, yeah, that's a normal way to behave. So I'm just gonna behave the same way, and then if no punishment follows, that that's where we are. And so it's very easy for us to push people away, and they only go if you ever listen to any school shooters or anything or any of the interviews, and it's the sense of this crippling loneliness and isolation, and they say, I just didn't see a way out, there is a beautiful TED talk called I Was Almost a School Shooter, which I do recommend.

SPEAKER_03: 32:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 32:13

And so there's this man, he's talking about how you know his family lived in a van and so they were moving a lot and he didn't have good hygiene, so everybody was picking on him and he was changing schools, and at one point he just decided that he was gonna get a gun and shoot everyone. And then there was this one kid that sat next to him and said, Are you okay? And they're now best friends, and you know, he was best man in his wedding. But that's literally what it was, it was the one kid that sat next to him and said, Are you okay do you want to chat? And that's what stopped him from doing it. And again, I'm not saying all people are like this, you know, there are some people who are, you know, who would have been dissecting squirrels from when they were ten and they need a lot more intervention than just one person saying hi. But actually for many of us, and that's why I was talking about graffiti, the fact that some young people just feel so misheard or so ignored in all of this that they feel they need to draw graffiti. And again, if you listen to the polls about Gen Z, that's what they talk about. And do you remember when the whole Brexit debate was happening in this country? And there are so many really, really young people who are saying, Well, you are taking this from us without consulting, and there was so much anger within young people that they are making this decision, and there's absolutely no consideration for the future that they're taking from them or climate change that they also feel like, well, it was you know some generations that were dying in and they're the ones to foot the bill. I can see why they're angry and radicalized, I would be.

SPEAKER_00: 33:42

Yeah. So it's almost as though if we look at society and we don't see justice. Yeah. And we see bad people getting away with things in power, you know, we have a situation now where a lot of people that are in places of power are criminals and haven't been prosecuted, haven't been punished. So if we're seeing people get away with crimes, then we lose our trust in the justice system, so we don't want to be part of it. But also if if our life has become unjust to us, that actually there are things that are happening to us that we cannot control that are not fair, then actually that also turns you off of that whole justice system. So we have to see justice working in society in order to buy into it.

SPEAKER_04: 34:28

Yeah, so I research retribution and reciprocity. So reciprocity is literally I'm nice to you if you're nice to me, if you're terrible to me, I'm terrible to you. And that is how it works. You know, yeah. We don't usually when we see a person on the street, we don't immediately think, hmm, I could punch them in the face. I need to think about this. And there's some theories of criminology that talk about, you know, self-control or stuff like that. And you're like, well, I don't need to stop myself from punching a person because I don't usually want to do that, it's just not in my interest. But if they insult my mother, I'm considering.

SPEAKER_03: 35:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 35:03

And everything we ever do is a response to the environment. You know, you ask me questions, I give you answers. You know, if somebody smiles at me, I smile at them, or I think what a weirdo, you know, it it depends. But it was always a reaction. And again, the reaction is usually kind of appropriate to the setting. So this is where psychological theories of crime are important because you know, we have sort of frames, and we're like, you know, we're trying to look at the setting around us and think, okay, well, I'm now in my office, what are the normal behaviors I express in my office? Or when I'm in a bar, I'm thinking, okay, I'm now in a bar, what are the normal rules that happen around the bar, right? So I'm attaching my expectations to a setting. And my expectations come from obviously my experiences, learning, etc. And this is kind of what happens that I'm now attaching frames. And usually my frames where I meet a person, I'll say, Hi, how are you? How do you do? And then we kind of go a separate way. So then a setting in a meeting, let's say, would be to introduce myself in my business capacity. Whereas when I'm in a bar, you know, I can speak louder and I feel I can swear more. We attach our behavior to settings. You know, I'm way more likely to punch someone in the face in a bar than in a lecture hall.

SPEAKER_03: 36:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 36:18

And this is where it becomes interesting to think about these things and really think about how we select the frames based on our experiences and based on what we do, because sometimes we learn some horrible things from the world. So we don't usually think about punching a person unless that's just what you grew up with. And my example is always, I don't know, if I come to somebody's house and I see a vase and it's beautiful, I say, Oh what a beautiful vase. And now imagine you're coming from a shop where you, I don't know, sell antiques and you're like, oh, this vase costs 5,000 pounds because it's from, I don't know, the Ming dynasty. And then you think about stealing it because now suddenly you know that it costs a lot of money. So depending on our experiences, our frames are different as well. And so yeah, we're nice to people who are nice to us and terrible to people who are terrible to us, because that's just what we grew up with, and there is a lot of neurological basis, and there are theories of evolutionary psychology which are trying to bring that together. But yes, retribution is the interesting one because we have an inbuilt desire to punish a violation of a social norm. We hate the violation of a social norm, even if it has nothing to do with us.

SPEAKER_03: 37:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 37:30

So negative reciprocity would be somebody was terrible to me, and then I punched them in the face. Retribution would be I see somebody use a racial slur, and then I want to punch them in the face. And my favorite example is actually, I don't know if you watched the Great British Bake Off, but there was the Baked Alaska incident, or the Bing Gate. There was one lady, she allegedly, well the way they edited it, because BBC came forward and explained the situation, they were saying they edited it for dramatic effect, but it looked like she took somebody's ice cream out of the freezer, it then melted. I mean in reality the ice cream was out of the freezer for like ten seconds, so it couldn't have affected it. It was just a very, very hot day in a tent and they had two freezers working. So then that contestant got really angry and threw his ice cream in the fin and then got kicked out. That woman got so much she got death threats on Twitter and stuff like that because she took somebody's ice cream out of the freezer.

SPEAKER_03: 38:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 38:27

And if anything, I just find it amazing it's a baking show. We don't care. But we do, you know, we really, really do. And my other favorite example is the Lion King. And by the end, Scar gets eaten by his hyenas, he gets eaten alive by hyenas. What an awful way to go. That's a horrendous way to go. We put that in a children's show.

SPEAKER_03: 38:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 38:48

And nobody even bats an eyelid because he's a bad person that deserves to be punished. So in Back in the Future, the bad guys, you know, end up in a pile of manure, right? It's like bad things should happen to bad people at all times. It's inbuilt. Again, they've detected brain areas that just fire when we see injustice and we hate it. And for my experiments, I actually had a public goods game, so I had like four people playing with each other, and they could share the money. Well, they needed to invest in the public good, and then it shares the money between everyone. Obviously, the self-centered thing to do would be to let everybody else invest the money and keep your money for yourself and then profit from the public good. And I was showing my, well then PhD supervisor um the interface, and I just put the other three people to act at random because, you know, I just wanted her to see how it works. And then she went like Blue! Because Blue started stealing the money, and I was like, well, she she knew they were fake, and not only they were fake, they were said to behave at random. But blue ran away with her fake money that doesn't even exist, and she got so angry because yeah, we hate it, we hate it, we hate it. And that is why we're so punitive, and that is why we're allowed those horrible criminal justice practices to persist, and kind of to tie it back to our earlier conversation about definition of crime and labeling somebody a criminal. We say you're a bad person, and we know that horrible things like getting eaten alive by hyenas should happen to bad people.

SPEAKER_00: 40:17

And that's it. So is there like a bit of a hangover, maybe in terms of like old testament law in terms of an eye for an eye, that actually for a long part of human history, that is the messaging that we're getting, that there has to be I mean, that's reciprocity. Yeah. There we go. I don't think I've said that word out loud before. Whereas actually when Jesus said treat others the way you want to be treated, which obviously wasn't his say, it came from ancient China, you know, and Confucianism. That's actually quite radical because that goes against our natural inclination to want eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. But also that we match other people's energies almost, we treat people the way they treat us. That seems to be it. Whereas actually to say treat others the way you want to be treated, that's quite radical. But that seems to be sort of like maybe quite strong religious teaching that has maybe infiltrated our psychology, or maybe the vice versa, that that is our human psychology, and that's why we have those ancient writings that kind of put those down.

SPEAKER_04: 41:20

That is usually what happens, right? That's how religion came from most of history, right? We're trying to explain something that we can't quite explain, and therefore we come up with teachings. But when it comes to morality, you know, and there is no rational explanation for why we feel the way we feel, and that's why a lot of it is coming from the brain. So the evolutionary explanation would be it's just we survived as a group, we survive as a species, all alone, we're useless, right? We can't run very fast, you know, we can run far, but then we're kind of scavenge, we would die in ourselves. And actually a lot of human society, and the reason why we survived at all as a species, is hinging on cooperation.

SPEAKER_03: 41:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 42:00

And obviously you can't test evolutionary psychology because you can't go back in time, but you know, they've done simulations and they've looked at kind of society, so what makes a good society and how it survives, and it's reciprocity and retribution come. And it's really interesting because the worst thing you could possibly do to a person is banishment. So the worst thing you'd say you do not obey rules, therefore go and live alone and actually exile or you know, excommunication, right? These were all actually the worst punishment you can instill on someone. You know, when Henry VIII was the excommunicator, that's the scariest thing that could happen to you.

SPEAKER_00: 42:36

Like as a kid when you're sent to your room, that for me was like the worst thing, 100%.

SPEAKER_04: 42:41

Because on the evolutionary level, that's it for you.

unknown: 42:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 42:45

If you cannot stay with a group, you're done.

SPEAKER_00: 42:46

And do you think that's why we get so annoyed when people break social norms? Because actually part of our survival mechanism has been to all cooperate together and work together for a common good. So when someone comes along and disrupts that norm, then actually there's a survival instinct. I'm wondering, I don't know if this is too much of a reach, things like the trans debate, whether the underpinning because I'm not entirely sure I understand the animosity towards trans people on a psychological level. I just don't really get what it is that's being tapped into. And I wonder if it is that breaking of a social norm, and therefore, like on a very, very basic evolutionary survival level, this is somebody breaking a social norm, and we're fearful for our survival.

SPEAKER_04: 43:33

Part of it is also in-group, out-group, because we just see some people as not belonging to a group. And again, if you define yourself, you're saying my group is the very conservative sort of people, and there's only one real type relationship type that exists, and I will not allow anybody to violate that. Yes, part of that is that. And we do have an inherent desire to punish a violation of a social norm, because you know, and you're exactly right, or survival. Hinges on group cooperation. When you have free riders in a group, it's very difficult. And that's why we get annoyed, you know, when you're doing a group project and you have this one person that doesn't do anything, you're like, but that's not fair. Because we just inherently dislike a free rider because then the group cannot work. And we know that, again, on the survival level, that if we don't have cooperation happening, then it's terrible. And that's why loneliness is such a terrible thing as well. Because if you don't feel the sense of belonging to a group, then you think you're gonna die. You think you're alone, you think you've been banished. And I think that's why all of those radical groups on the internet also start existing, because people, you know, have thoughts that they were always afraid to express out loud. For example, about people making decisions about their body that really don't concern them, but whatever. You know? And then all of a sudden they get in this group of people who understand, and there's this group that they belong to and they communicate with, and they're saying words out loud that they only thought to themselves, and you know, they know that usually they're not said in polite society. And all of a sudden they're like, Yes, those are my people, this is my group, this is the group I belong to. And we see this rift. There's so many graphs that I've seen recently of this rift in political leanings between men and women, that women are becoming more liberal and men are becoming more conservative. And part of it is that is because you know, men have been told repeatedly that, you know, they're gonna get everything and they don't need to try very hard, and you know, they're gonna achieve the success and they're gonna achieve the you know the desired partner in life. And then obviously, you know, women are saying, No, I don't need this. I don't want to clean your dishes all day. That's just not my definition of fun. I'm just gonna go and you know have a drink with my friends. And it's all this expectation. People feel like the fabric of society is falling apart, even though it isn't. But I think when you belong to a certain group that has a certain social norm, and then you see the society not conforming to the social norm that you yourself think is happening, I think this is what causes a lot of distrust. And yeah, then people start attacking everything, you know, if they think that it's the trans people that are causing this disrupt of a social norm, then they don't really even need a logical explanation for this. They just say, I've decided that you are the problem and just for no reason, just because you don't fit into what I've been told when I was growing up, and I feel the need that I need to instill the social norm, like I need to make sure that we are all doing the same thing, because otherwise this whole thing is gonna fall apart, we're all gonna die.

SPEAKER_03: 46:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 46:30

And I think it leads to some ugly places. You know, the idea of divine retribution, the idea of the flood, right, is like, well, the society's fallen so far that there is beyond saving, so I'm just gonna destroy everything and start again.

SPEAKER_03: 46:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 46:47

It's also an interesting dynamic, right? To be like, well, at what point are we saying that this is beyond saving?

SPEAKER_00: 47:06

So we could start with aims and then go into history, or start with history and then go into aims? I'll just go for it.

SPEAKER_04: 47:12

I think Yeah, well, I think the thing is historically, again, punishment has always been part of society, and again, the starting point has been, you know, like exiling a person.

SPEAKER_00: 47:24

Which is Garden of Eden, which is Adam and Eve.

SPEAKER_04: 47:26

Very much the first example of cancel cultural. It's very much, yeah, this is the rule, you broke the rule, goodbye, live by yourself. That was very much the first example, and I think again, there's so many ideas of divine retribution. But even again, it's also in our imagination, isn't it, that oh, if you were a bad person, they're gonna be punished in the next life, or you know, God is gonna interfere. Or we talk about karma, right? We think, well, you know, if you did a bad thing, that means that something bad is gonna happen to you. We always have this expectation of justice is gonna prevail somehow. So I think even if we're trying to say that, yes, so there are conflicting teachings of you know, you should forgive your neighbor uh or you should do unto others as you want to be done to yourselves. It is conflicting with the idea of punishment and kind of being punished for your crimes. But I guess the argument there is you don't need to do anything, just be nice, and then something horrible is gonna happen to them through divine punishment of some sort. But it's because it is appealing to our retributive thoughts and feelings. So in terms of philosophy of punishment, there are kind of two main groups. So there is utilitarian. So utilitarian means that it serves as a means to an end. So it's kind of saying, well, we're inflicting pain on this one person, which is not a nice thing to do, but we're doing that for a reason. And within that, there are different aims. So for example, one is incapacitation, so that means that's a bad person. We literally take that person from society, place them in a cell where they can't hurt anyone. So they're physically incapacitated, they're unable to commit a crime because they're locked somewhere else. So that's supposed to prevent future crime because we're saying that's a bad person needs to be kept away. So now it's fine. Well, the other reason could be deterrence, and I think that's something that we see a lot. Like, you know, when you're in a train and it says like, oh, you know, if you haven't bought your ticket, there might be a thousand pound fine. We're trying to scare people. Or you know, there's posters with eyes on shops, or there's like you know, like on bargans, it's got cardboard police officers at the door to remind you that if you do a bad thing, a bad thing will happen. And the argument there is, well, we're gonna make an example of this person, and then nobody's gonna commit crime because they're so scared. So they're literally not going to be there. And the other idea is rehabilitation, which sounds nice. Actually, the initial thoughts behind rehabilitation were actually not quite nice. Because now we say rehabilitation, you almost think of physiotherapy, and you're like, oh yeah, you know, I'm fixing an illness, you know, I'm fixing something. And that's very much where it started. So I don't know if you've ever heard of the panopticon.

SPEAKER_00: 50:15

No.

SPEAKER_04: 50:15

But the idea was it was invented like a round prison. And so you have a watchtower in the center, and then all of the cells are around the outer cells of this watchtower. And so you can have a couple of people just in the watchtower, and then they could theoretically see everyone else, but then as a prisoner, you don't know if you're being observed or not, but you know that at any moment you could be observed. And so actually the first idea was that, well, these people will adjust their behavior because they know that they could be watched. And it's a powerful tool, really. Like if somebody installed a camera over my office space, I would behave differently. I don't know if somebody's ever watched it or not. I don't know if it's even on or not. I don't know if it's a real camera or not, but the fact that there's a camera over my desk is just making me feel a little bit uneasy. And obviously that's why, you know, people put stickers on the cameras on their laptops and stuff, because like, well, we have no reason to suspect that somebody's watching us, but somebody could be watching us. So that was the idea of the panopticon as a very efficient prison, and then you put people in the middle, and then they have a couple of guards and they can observe everybody, and everybody will behave well because they will think, oh, that could be observed, so I'm gonna pretend I'm not. So the idea of rehabilitation initially was yeah, take this quote unquote bad seed in society, put them in this setting, and it will force them to behave better. And again, it was all about returning people back to the factories and actually kind of serving the gains of the economy. So it's like yes, you're gonna create this obedient individual who will just go back to the workplace and do the thing. And then at some point in the fifties, rehabilitation meant psychiatric or psychological, and this is where there was this very creepy movies that you get in psychiatric hospitals, like horror movies or psychological thrillers. And obviously now we are trying to look at rehabilitation a bit more openly in terms of, you know, some people actually just need help, you know, they might need therapy, you know, they might need anger management classes, they might need to deal with their alcohol problems or trauma or actual physical illnesses that might be preventing them. So the idea is to try to rehabilitate people. But again, you know, my question is rehabilitate them to what and to where. But the idea is, yeah, you put the person who is committing a crime, you put them in the setting, then you do something to them, you change them, and then they come out and they don't commit the crime, so that's rehabilitation. So those are utilitarian goals. So those are all the argument is we need this system because we think that it will reduce the crime in the future. And then obviously, number two, so the different way of looking at it is retribution. And as we discussed before, like there is no rational way of explaining this, right? There is no rational reason. It's like with most of our moral judgments, there is no explanation for this, and you can't just say, well, you know, you once you start questioning why, why, why, at some point you say, just because, just because I feel angry when injustice happens, like just because this feels wrong, and that's it. And so retribution is just all about it really doesn't matter if it's going to reduce crime or not, it really doesn't matter if it's overall net worth good thing for society. What matters is you did a bad thing, therefore you should be punished accordingly. And accordingly is important. So one of the tenets of retribution is that it needs to be proportionate. And that's kind of where eye for an eye comes in. Obviously, at the moment we don't try to take people's eyes, but that is the setting, you know. The idea was, yes, if you take somebody's eye, then you should lose an eye. Or, you know, you still have various iterations of that. But obviously at the moment we've got more serious offences carry a tougher sentence than others, and also we feel that some things are worse than other things. It's hard to compare, but at least we're trying to make sure that the punishment is always proportionate to the harm that you've created.

SPEAKER_00: 54:17

Which I think makes sense. It makes sense that punishment is proportional to the crime if it actually was in practice. And some of the you know, examples you've given us that you know you can go to court if you don't pay your TV licence, which is like£12 a month or something like that. But somebody else can make huge profits even though other people are dying, or people can evade tax and somehow that's not seen as worse than not paying£12 a month for your TV licence. And so I think if we truly had proportional punishment to the crime, I think it would be very effective. But it doesn't feel as though in reality we actually do, because it depends who's committing the crime. So people can commit horrendous crimes, you know, genocide or tax evasion or lying to the public. You know, all of these huge things that people in power often do, and there isn't a punishment that's proportional.

SPEAKER_04: 55:17

And that's why the whole bordered castle just made people so angry. And again, what you see on Twitter, you know, after the Boris party and everything, everybody said, Well, I wasn't allowed to see my dying parent at the hospital at that time, literally on the day you're having this party. Yeah, it's this mismatch between what people do and what people get as a result and what punishment they get. Because I think it's difficult. But you know, there is another side of this, and again, kind of talking about cancel culture. There is also a sense of lack of forgiveness sometimes that we go and say, yes, well, you posted this tweet five years ago, and even though you apologize three times, we're not gonna talk to you, or we're not gonna engage with you because we think you're a terrible person forever. Which again feels disproportionate but for a different reason. And they are also vigilante groups that are running around and saying, Well, you did a bad thing, therefore we're gonna kill you. Which is also disproportionate for a different reason. And this is where retribution only really works, exactly as you say, like when it's actually predictable.

SPEAKER_00: 56:28

Consistently applied. Yes.

SPEAKER_04: 56:30

But it's something that actually happens and people can rely on. And I think if you're gonna say, yeah, let's rely on retribution, and again, you know, when it comes to morality, you just need to agree that that's what you're doing, because you you can't rationally decide that morality should be the defining characteristic here. But if retribution is what you're going with, then you really need to think about, well, how do you make sure that it's actually fair? And obviously now there is kind of another movement towards restorative justice. So in this country we only really do that with young people, which is feels fair enough, because you're trying to help them. But there are many societies, and if you've heard of, you know, how different countries recover from gross human rights violations and genocide, like the Truth and Reconciliation Committees or Gachacha courts in Rwanda. It's fascinating because they'll have just a circle of the whole village, and then they'll have the village elders, then you have the perpetrator and the woman. I was like, I saw this incredible there was this journalist that was trying to cover that. And it was this woman, she was explaining to this man, he was like, Yes, you killed my husband, you burnt down my house. It was like horrendous, horrendous things. And then it was like, Well, I want you to build me a new house and buy me groceries every week. And it was the journalist that came to her and said, Well, don't you want him in prison? And she was like, Well, how is he gonna get me groceries? He's in prison. He was like, No, but don't you want him like punished? It's like, Well, what do you mean? How is he gonna get me groceries?

SPEAKER_00: 58:07

Yeah. So the end result is I'm angry at him because he took away my house and everything. So therefore, the justice is I get those things back.

SPEAKER_04: 58:15

Or like I get something back, and that's an interesting thing. So the idea of restoration is that they come into the community, right? So they kind of come together and they are like, you know, they've repaid their debt by contributing back to the community. And people often see it as soft justice, but I think it's a really, really difficult process for everybody involved, including for the community. And you see that there are so many examples, if you're interested, of restorative justice interviews with young people in this country. And yeah, there was like a kid, so he stole this woman's car just for joy ride. And then you see that woman sitting in front of this kid, and she was like, Well, I came out of the grocery store and I couldn't get into my car, I couldn't get home, I couldn't bring my daughter, you know, she was just explaining the effects it had on people. And this kid was first, you know, obviously really apprehensive, not participating. But then he was like, Oh, you know, I'm sorry. He was like, Oh, I didn't understand, or I didn't think about this, you know, I just wanted to write in a car, I didn't understand it was gonna have these consequences. And it's a difficult, difficult process. And I think in the end they were trying to say, Well, do you draw? Well, how about you draw some posters? And again, people say, Well, that's just soft justice, or there's people getting away with crimes. But again, if it works for things like crime of genocide in some places like Rwanda, mm-hmm. Yeah, and it was a whole process of so the International Criminal Court, you know, kind of came in and put everybody in prison, and they say, Well, first of all, we have no people left. Yes, everybody's in prison. So how are we gonna rebuild at all? And second of all, you know, that's just not how we do things. We just don't understand. And it was so interesting seeing this conversation because the journalist was like, I don't get it, like you don't want the punishment? It's just like, what do you want me to do? I want groceries. It's like it's just a complete mismatch of where they thought they were gonna be. And my explanation of this is mostly trust and community again. You know, when we live in huge cities and it's completely anonymous and we don't know anybody, we don't know who to trust and how to trust them. Of course our instinct is punitive, because we don't know these people. We don't know who they are, we don't know what they do, and it's very easy to label them as somehow exploiting the system or stealing our jobs or being a criminal, while at the same time smaller communities probably have more of that trust and social cohesion to actually take somebody who's violated this trust, work through it together, and arrive to a conclusion that will help that person re-enter that community. Because that's what restoration means.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:46

Yes. And actually what it seems is though, retribution is easier in terms of it fits easier into our head. It's easy to punish somebody than to think about a solution to preventing this in the first place. And I think even for the criminal, I think for them it's sometimes easier to be punished than it is to work through what they've done, why they've done it, the consequence of it, and that they therefore need to change. Because I think humans, we don't find change easy. We quite like being labelled and working within our little labelled way. That's much easier. So I'm just gonna kind of summarise. We've got this idea of protection, of exile, we've got the idea of deterrent, we've got the idea of retribution as aims of punishment. If we look at the evidence, those things don't appear to be hugely effective, in that we've had those kind of systems for thousands of years, but we're not seeing less criminals. And so what we're seeing with restorative justice, it seems to be much more effective, but people are resistant to it because it it's actually harder, but people think it's soft.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:58

But it's really interesting with I mean, you said that we had systems for thousands of years, obviously, but you know, the systems were very different. So in the past, yeah, when we had the feudal system, it was just you know, whoever runs the land. And I find it really interesting because every time you go to a museum or something, you see all of those images of, you know, this sovereign of some sort, you know, when people come into them pleading for mercy, you know, asking for the resolution of a conflict, right? Because the sovereign of the land would then decide how things get done. So the idea of prison didn't really exist because that's a very modern way of looking at punishment, because before we would only use prison cells to keep people until they get punished. So, you know, like the Tower of London, right? We had the cells just to keep people in until they go and get hanged or or fined, so they had debtors' prisons where you had to work until you repay your debt. But the actual end goal of punishment was never confinement. It was just let's keep people in. Okay. Until they get punished. And the punishment was oftentimes brutal. So we had the bloody code in this country for a while, where you could get hanged for stealing the equivalent of what is today twenty pounds. But actually you weren't in that much trouble for violence, but you were in a lot of trouble for stealing things, and again, because it's all appealing to who's in power and who's making the laws. And the bloody code was all based on this idea of deterrence and also public shaming, you know, that put people in stocks in the middle of the square where everybody would be throwing tomatoes at them. But yeah, the bloody code, well, it was named for a reason, and there were many people killed, and that was the punishment, and you only kept in a cell for long enough for you to get killed or hanged or beaten or whatever the punishment was, but the punishments were really, really bloody as they were, and then at some point they decided that, well, you know, that's not really the right way to do things. But yeah, the guillotine was used in France until way more recently than we realized, and I think we need to think about prisons as a very modern creation, even though obviously cells existed, but they weren't the end goal in themselves. Okay. And so now we've decided that the idea of taking away somebody's freedom is the most civil way of punishing them, because at least we're not beating them, or at least we're not chopping things off or killing them, right? We're saying, well, that's a merciful way of looking at it. It was almost convenient, because you think, oh, we already have these cells things, so we just keep people in as a punishment. But we haven't thought this through, and I don't think we realize that, because in our mind we see prison as just the obvious consequence of something. But again, if you look at justice, you know, in feudal times, they would say, okay, you know, you stole this man's sheep, now you have to give him your cow, right? There was always some sort of resolution there, but it was never okay, now I'm gonna lock you in my basement for five years, and then you go your merry way. Once you start thinking about it, it doesn't make any sense. And kind of part of it is incapacitation, so it helps, you know, the person is there, and that's why it's convenient because the cells were always there, because it would prevent people from escaping justice. But what point is taking away somebody's freedom to move a helpful thing to do for anyone, really?

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:19

So it's very finite. So whilst they're in that prison, you are safe from that one person, but it doesn't make society safer overall, because at some point that person's got to be let out. And actually, if you've confined them for five years or ten years or whatever, they're actually more dangerous. Yeah. Because you haven't fixed the initial problem of why they committed the crime, and you've added more problems. You know, they become institutionalized and they become resentful and they're less likely to be able to get a job because they've got a prison record, and so they're more likely to commit other crimes.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:50

But also they come out, and that's the problem with short sentences. We had the whole discussion when we had this announcement that short sentences are gonna go and everybody want bananas. So usually you only really serve half your sentence. in prison and then you can get out if you violate the rules at any point you go back, but then usually you can kind of go back into society whilst you're serving your sentence. But what is the point of putting somebody in prison for half a year? So say if they got a year long punishment. So they will be serving six months. So they're gonna miss rent, they're gonna lose their job, the children are gonna go into foster care if they are a single parent. What is the point of that? Who is that helping? Really? It's like and that was kind of the point of getting rid of short sentences because this is just rough humans' lives enormously while doing nothing. Really? So sure, if that's a serious crime, completely understandable, but like if it is something silly like you know stealing food for your kids, again how many of these thefts are like formula thefts especially for women, right? So more often they are in prison for nonviolent crimes. It's very rare for women to be in prisons for violent crimes. And oftentimes yeah it's money related and the money relation is usually family related. So it's either their partner who got them into something or they're doing it for their family, like to feed their children. So again, take this single mother of I don't know a two-year-old put her in prison. What does that do? Really? But also if you think that's gotta be a deterrent, like I imagine seeing her child starve to death would be more scary to her than spending six months in prison, so she's gonna do it again. That's not a scary concept and then her child would go into foster care then her child would come out with all sorts of problems because of that. She wouldn't be able to find a job she would have lost all of her friends and she would have she would have missed friend. Now she's homeless, jobless and childless. Yeah. What is that achieving or what is that doing? And again if the idea is retribution, and this is where it gets difficult because you know I'm definitely a utilitarian kind of in in this scenario like I personally I care about the outcome of what we're doing more than the protests because I think it's important for us to create a better society. Some people will disagree and I'm not saying they're wrong. It's very difficult to argue against our morality right because that's just morally we feel and obviously I agree with retribution as an idea because again I'm almost like I'm built to feel this way. I'm built to feel like something needs to be done. But that fills me with a sense of injustice of why we're just ruining people's lives for no reason at all. That just feels really really wrong to me and I think we need to rethink that especially because prison is such a modern invention really as a punishment.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:40

And statistically not working so it just seems interesting that we keep doing something that is not working constantly. So is the kind of outcome of this then that restorative justice seems to be the most effective in reducing crime. Even if it doesn't meet that sort of sense of retribution, in terms of the outcome what we want as a society is for there to be less crime and therefore we need to find a consequence to actions that reduces crime and what we've been doing up until now is not that. Is there any evidence that restorative justice is much more effective in meeting that aim?

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:24

There is a lot of evidence for restorative justice but I think obviously it's important to caveat it doesn't work for you know at the moment you know both parties have to consent. So you need to have a victim of the perpetrator to want to be in that place. There's some incredible TED talks about restorative justice for things like sexual violence which you would think would be the least amenable crime to that but actually they're really incredibly powerful and moving stories. And yeah because once you confront the perpetrator with the consequences of their actions it's actually a really difficult process and it's quite difficult for them. There is a lot of evidence of it working but I think it does require a sort of culture shift and a desire to kind of invest in these people and I think it's very difficult. Again I feel like most of crime could be prevented by us just changing our culture and our society just being nicer to each other and you know actually just trusting each other and letting us be ourselves without trying to you know force our stereotypes on other people or without saying what we should or shouldn't be doing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:33

But that comes from the top we are not seeing in our leadership the model of respect and kindness. If I watch the House of Commons or I watch anything like you know Primus Question Time there's no kindness there. There's no mutual respect. They're just attacking each other all the time. There's no nuance there's no discussion there's no trying to understand anything and they're constantly backbiting and saying slanderous things. If our leadership cannot model what we want society to become then society cannot become that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:11:03

Yeah I agree with you entirely and I think it's very easy to get very disheartened and just go, whatever, why am I even trying? Like why am I even bothering and you know especially when you have you know some people coming on TV or whatever, you know and claiming that they are you know hate a certain group of people or you know passing laws that are undoing so much of progress that we've done. It can feel very difficult and very disheartening but I think it's very important to remember that a lot of reciprocity and retribution does happen on an individual level and I know it's stupid but you know if you smile to somebody on the street that can do a good thing you know if you compliment somebody I don't know have you ever given a compliment to someone and then they wore that shirt for like 10 days straight you know again most of my interactions and most of how I'm feeling about the world doesn't come from watching TV and seeing what's happening in the House of Commons. It's actually you know my office mate that left a chocolate bar on my desk because she thought that I was going through a hard time you know that restored my faith in humanity or you know there are people who would call me or talk to me or when we go for a drink or somebody congratulates me on a small win. And that makes a huge huge dent in community and society and I think it's very easy to feel powerless but actually for the people who you surround you know for the people who you talk to every day you know be it a bartender be it your co-worker your child your parent anyone like you can do a lot of good by just actually spreading out a little bit of this kindness and I know it might sound a little bit silly but that's just the best we can do. And that's actually has the most profound impact and my life most profound impacts that ever happened were just people saying nice things to me or giving me small gifts or yeah leaving chocolates or telling me that they appreciate me or smiling to me or anything like when I was down I remember an interaction with somebody I was buying a coffee from just because it was a nice chat and that's what I needed. So I think we need to remember that that's a starting point and we're not gonna be able to you know change politicians right now. But I think if we build the foundation of society with beliefs in each other and trusted each other then there would also be more of a belief that we can change that.

unknown: 1:13:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:32

Because again remember why these people come to power you know remember all the people who voted in the American elections are you know a feeling deeply thrown at the deep end with the current government, right? All they're saying is we need change. And it's the same with the UK elections as well all the people were saying were we just need change because this isn't working you know same thing in the US that there are so many groups of people coming out the extreme poor they're like I feel betrayed. I don't know why I just feel awful so I just want to throw everything out of the pram and start again. And I think that's how we end up with these people. We end up with these people because we feel lonely and isolated and we feel the only way for us to express that is for a vote and I think that's partially why Brexit happened because that's a protest vote, you know, I'm just gonna say that whatever is happening now is not working. You know I know that the European Union has nothing to do with it but I want some way of expressing that I feel betrayed and lonely and scared. And I think partially if we try to stop that by talking to people it can do a lot of good.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:41

And actually it reminds me of that story you said earlier about the TED talk about I I was almost a school shooter. That one person who just said are you okay changed the course of one person's life. And so actually it seems maybe ideological or simplistic to say we can't change society but we can change ourselves but actually if we did take that time to just kind of check in with somebody or say hi or talk to someone who looks lonely then actually that's what we have control over. You know we can't change the whole of society we can just change how we act to that one person. And so that I think sometimes when we're looking at all these big problems with crime and punishment it becomes overwhelming but actually if we break it down on a granular level to what we can do individually then that's what we have control over and that's very very powerful. And I think we've got this kind of ideological restorative justice let's be nice to each other but you've mentioned a few times that that's not going to work in every situation and there are some people who that's just simply not going to work. And I want to kind of lead that on to a discussion of the death penalty so in terms of its effectiveness or maybe in terms of its history why it even exists as a thing where that came from and any situations where it worked or does it not work or is it absolutely necessary for certain people what is the kind of research behind death penalty as a form of punishment?

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:06

There is a lot of research and as I said before things like you know the bloody code in this country you know we used to kill people all the time there was actually a very very common punishment. I think the biggest argument that we've got against the death penalty is that there's so so many wrongful convictions and I think killing one innocent person is just not the risk that anybody should be taken in any situation or in any setting. And if you're interested there is the innocence project and that's something that you can look it up. They have so many stories of people and people think oh you know it's like how can you be convicted of this horrendous crime if you're innocent, right? But people confess to crimes they've never committed. Mm-hmm like for example if a police officer says listen it looks very bad can you just confess? Well there was a horrible case of this Dutch woman she was accused of killing her child and then they said well if you don't confess you know you're still gonna be here when your child's funeral is taking place and so she confessed because she was like well you can always you know undo it and it's important for me to go to the funeral and then she was in prison for killing her child even though she she didn't or there often times they also come and say oh we found some DNA evidence and again we think DNA evidence is this irrefutable thing which is it's anything but you know it gets mixed with everything all the time but then you know some police officers will say we found this DNA evidence and then the person would confess and say well because oh obviously DNA evidence is going to exonerate me and then there was never any DNA evidence and they were lying to you. So people end up serving sentences for crimes they've never committed a lot.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:47

So I'm thinking of When They see us the Netflix documentary about Central Park 6 and that is a very very good example of racial profiling first of all but also forcing confessions out of children. You know if you take a teenager put them into a cell hold them overnight they're sleep deprived food deprived they're away from their parents and you've got this big authority figure saying that actually if you confess you'll get less time so you better confess and then they confess and then that confession is seen as fact and then people were given life sentences for something that they did not do. I mean it's a completely completely heartbreaking story so just a bit of a content advisory.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:27

And there's so many examples of that there is this woman called Elizabeth Loftus and she studies false memories as well so oftentimes you also get you know eyewitness testimonies and they say I definitely saw this person. But obviously our memory is really unreliable and she opens her TED talk with this case of this man who was just you know he had a good life he was engaged and then all of a sudden he was stopped by the police because he was identified as a person who's committed a crime and then he's like well I didn't do it and then he served a lot of time in prison and then you know his life was completely destroyed as a result because he got obsessed with getting justice for this and then you know his fiance left him because she couldn't stand this anymore etc etc so there's so many cases and again if you look at the innocence project there would be some people who are innocent and I think I mean obviously just putting somebody in prison is already damage enough but obviously being in the situation that you could possibly execute an innocent person is just not okay. But it also just doesn't work as a deterrent. They've done studies on so they compared the states where the death penalty was still a thing and the states that they aren't and the murder rates weren't lower in states with the death penalty so there's no real reason to suggest that it's gonna work.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:47

Actually the statistics is higher. Yeah yeah yeah that if you live in a state that has the death penalty you're more likely to commit murder because actually you're justifying murder in certain situations and so psychologically you're getting that messaging that it's sometimes okay to kill somebody. But also I think the problem with deterrent is it doesn't understand human psychology. That nobody in a moment of passion is thinking rationally so no one's gonna go I really want to kill this person. Hold on let me think rationally about this if I do this I might die oh okay I won't kill somebody there's just a real lack of understanding of how human psychology works and so that's why deterrent tends not to work.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:26

But also motivation again oftentimes when you are in a situation where you're about to kill someone you really don't care because you feel like that's just the right thing to do and you just have to do it for whatever reason you know like honor killings you know are justified. You know they're not thinking oh you know I think I'm gonna get away they're thinking I have to defend my family's honor regardless of what's gonna happen. Or again, you know in some murder cases they're like well I think that's my only way out and they're looking at things like battered woman syndrome and that's how women tend to have murders that are premeditated and I was like well of course because a man can claim that oh I got so angry and I threw my wife in the wall and she accidentally died. They can claim that there was a spur of the moment decision but actually for women you know they need to use things like poison that look premeditated even though they're equally in an as helpless situation in those cases. I mean the problem with deterrence is that you would think you know murder is really big and it's really graphic but again it's not looking at the motivation. You're not committing a murder because you think that you're gonna get away with it. It's usually because you don't see any other way out. And again we're going back to you feel so betrayed by the situation. You know if you're looking at things like Mexican drug cartels they are the government right they are running utilities you know they're giving hot water they're doing health care for people and if you ask people like you know do you like living under drug cartel they're like no but you know the government's never given us health care and these guys do and sure they behead a bunch of people and sometimes we feel forced to participate in that but that's still safer than trying to kind of be against them. When it comes to other deterrents such as you know people negotiating how long a sentence should be for something. I'm a criminologist and if you ask me at the top of my head what's the average sentence for groated assault? I don't know. Genuinely no idea.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:23

Yeah. Is that because it's just so random like there isn't it could be anything from like one year to five years to ten years depending on previous convictions or you know even things like that. So the death penalty doesn't work as a deterrent because deterrent tends not to work particularly well, not really effectively. Is there any other reason why the death penalty doesn't work or are there situations where it does work?

SPEAKER_04: 1:22:47

So the thing about deterrents so it's about you know the severity of punishment but it's also about the certainty of punishment.

SPEAKER_03: 1:22:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:22:54

So that's another kind of big thing, you know, because if the punishment could theoretically be very very serious but the certainty of punishment is low, again you're not really thinking about it very much. But that's why things like situational crime prevention such as you know a CCTV or having a police officer right behind you work really well because you know that the certainty of punishment is quite high because you know if I commit this crime now I'm gonna be caught. And so usually people again when they commit crime they don't think oh if something happens I don't mind that punishment they usually think I'm gonna not gonna get caught. So again you know 12 year olds stealing protein bars they usually don't think oh prison's not that bad they think oh you know nobody's gonna notice and I'm just so good look at my sleight of hand so that's usually how it works. And that's the research of deterrence that there is some effect you know I think it would be silly to say that there is no effect. You know I would behave very differently cycling to work thinking about a red light if there was a police car right behind me. You know I would change my behavior accordingly because I know that the certainty of punishment is actually quite high in that particular situation. And then it doesn't matter what the punishment is I struggle to accept my mistake even when it's like a friend you know but if I've done something that I know shouldn't have done, you know, this dreaded feeling of telling your friend that you've really really cocked this up and you know it's nothing is gonna happen. You know realistically you know that your friend is probably going to be angry with you for two days and then forgive you. But that's an awful awful feeling or even being told off. And you were saying you know stay in your room as a child you know was an awful fee because we hate being punished. It's not nice and it doesn't matter what it is, it's not nice.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:36

Because we want to exist in society and when somebody's flagging that you violated the social norm, we are scared again going back we're scared for our survival we're scared for does this mean I'm gonna be excluded from this society in the future and actually I interviewed someone on this podcast actually that had been to prison for fraud and it was really interesting to understand that one, he kind of viewed what he was doing as wrong but he genuinely didn't think he would go to prison for it. Like he thought it was a bit of a grey area and it you know I think he lied to some investors about something and went to prison for fraud and he said but the worst moment the part of the punishment that was absolutely worse was when he got his sentence. That was the worst. He was a prison was awful absolutely awful but the moment you get the sentence that's the worst bit which I find fascinating. There's two things I want to talk to you just as we close because I think they haven't sort of come up naturally but I think they're really fascinating. So one is the kind of legacy of the Hammurabi code and what we have learnt or what's kind of a hangover from that, what was said in that that still kind of impacts our attitude toward crime and punishment and things like that. And then the second one is just having a look at the concept of forgiveness and where that kind of plays into this whole sort of idea of crime and punishment. So let's start with the Hammurabi code what's sort of hangover from what is written in that?

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:58

I think it's just the first time like we really talked about retribution, kind of we really talked about laws, right? So kind of it's the idea of justice and wrongdoing and we always had it as I said before. You know we always had the idea that a bad thing should be punished because that's just how we run our society. But it's very difficult kind of it's very interesting to see it codified in such a way and it codified so many crimes that we still abuse you know like false charges or like false testimonies and well obviously things like stealing, burglary, kidnapping so you know it was obviously but assault and marriage and property and stuff like that. And it's really interesting actually how much of these laws are um still around and how many of the settings are still around. And you know obviously it was written so so long ago and it's one of the first examples that we've got of well there are some other examples but I think this one is the more prominent one in our culture that it's an example of trying to codify the laws, right, and kind of codify how we should be behaving and that there should be a punishment. And there's this attempt to systematically deal with these things. Again going back to retributions, the idea that here are the types of crimes and you know here is the punishment that should follow these particular types of crimes. It was meant to be enforced as legislation hence why it's called the code. And that's why it's just a very interesting piece but also again how similar those crimes are and I started this conversation by saying oh you know the laws are very different in different countries but they do still share similarities. Technically in in most places stealing is not a good thing. In most places killing is not a good thing unless it's in war. In most places bearing false witness or lying is a bad thing. So actually our idea of what's a good thing and what's a bad thing and what's a crime what's not a crime, again if if you open a hammer I code it's not that weird. Not that dissimilar. You're looking at it at this document from centuries away, and you think, yeah, if somebody wrote this today, I would think, well, it's lacking a little bit, but actually it's got some of the main things that I'm thinking about. Obviously, it's not thinking about like commerce and stuff like that, but you're like, well, these are actually it's a moral code of yeah, this is how people should behave. And it does kind of make you think about how inherent some of these moralities are, you know, how inherent some of our well, first of all, desire for retribution, how it's always been there. But also just how inherent our ideas about society building are, which does feed into this again very interesting idea of evolutionary criminology, right? To what extent are, you know, the rules about what we call a crime are codified in the culture. So to what extent we've decided as a culture to decide on certain things, and to what extent it's just a natural instinct, like again, punishment of a violation of social norm, but also what social norm violations do we decide are worth punishing or not? Because again, if you're successful, like we've seen with businesses, you know, we're gonna let you commit crime, but if you're not successful, we're not gonna let you. So it's very interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:20

And just for anyone who isn't okay with that, so it's around, I don't know, so it's probably about four thousand years ago that the code of Hammer Rabbi was written by Hammer Rabbi or his people, sort of in the sort of Mesopotamian era of the world. I mean it was almost the sort of precursor to human rights, you know, there was a sense of that there is a right or wrong way to treat other human beings and there has to be a consequence, so let's kind of formalize it. I mean, it's hugely problematic and it's very patriarchal.

SPEAKER_04: 1:29:48

It was splitting people into different categories based on class and gender, which which we do anyway. But at least now we're pretending people are equal before law, whereas hammurabi code. But this is where the whole extalionis, the whole eye for an eye, tooth for two came from. And we're still using that exact phrase. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:08

And I think that's really interesting for us as RE teachers, because I think we sometimes think that the Bible happened in a vacuum when actually a lot of the writings of particularly the Old Testament was an amalgamation of what was happening in sort of Mesopotamia and other ancient cultures. And I think there's a challenge for us if this is the literal word of God, but actually it was borrowed from outside of the history of Israelites.

SPEAKER_04: 1:30:33

Well, this is Babylonian, right? That's that's it it's written in Old Babylonian language.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:38

Yeah. You need to see this in context. And I think we do use the quote eye for an eye as a quote to support retribution, but I think we're often interested in the hinterland knowledge around the things that we teach to understand that this was a phraseology used by the Babylonians, and that's how it made its way into the Old Testament, I think is really important.

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:00

And it's really interesting, like with most religious texts, right? How much of them they're borrowing from the culture around them. I feel like some of the text is quite prescriptive, but some of it is just, oh, people usually do that, and you know, in this culture, this is kind of what we do.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:15

Yeah. And then I want to sort of end with something a bit more positive, and that's this sort of concept of forgiveness. Is there sort of any research into the power of forgiveness in terms of as a consequence of actions, or that it goes alongside punishment, or it should be in replacement or separate to punishment?

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:34

I think a big thing is, and that's something that people sometimes struggle with, is that once you've served your sentence, you know, everything is forgiven. Do you know what I mean? And I think people usually think, oh, you know, forgiveness means that you're not getting the punishment. But actually oftentimes it means, you know, you address this, you address the issue, and then you trust the person again. And going back to remember I mentioned the simulation, so they've done simulated societies to try to see which one would survive. And they've had kind of computer programs and they had the titat program that was quite good. So if another program shared resources with it, it would share resources back, if it didn't, it didn't. But then it was immediately defeated by the forgiven tit. And the forgiving titfatad, or generous titfutat, that's how they call it, it would allow one error. Sometimes the programs will accidentally share or forget to share resources. So once you introduce the human error, then the forgiven tit fat were actually winning because you know they just took over the whole thing because they allowed this one error, and they said, okay, that's fine, let's deal with this and cooperate anyway, and then they just took over the whole thing because they were just cooperating, just showing that this just extra step of forgiveness can actually be very helpful. And I think we need to remember that we all committed crimes. I'm sure we all did. If somebody looked at, you know, all of the things I've you know, of the red lights have crossed, or you know, it's like the things I borrowed when I was a kid, or you know, again we forget about things like verbal abuse and we think like, oh, you know, how many teenagers shout at their parents? You know, if we've collected all of the really problematic behavior that we've showed throughout the years and were punished for it, we would all be in a terrible, terrible place. Because if we were all in prison for all of the things we've done, like shouting at our parents, stealing our neighbors' books, swiping a protein bar from a shop, or forgetting to pay at Sainsbury's something or other, we would all be a bad society that has all been traumatized. Whereas if we just yeah, think about all the times in your life that you've done a bad thing and have been forgiven for it, and think about how it would be different if you weren't.

SPEAKER_03: 1:33:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:33:58

And I think it's very important for relationships with people, and kind of mentioned it about cancel culture. It's like obviously you should keep people accountable, obviously you should establish boundaries, but at the same time, you know, should you be cutting off every person all the time just because they've crossed the boundary once or just because they didn't understand something. And I think we need to think about all the times that we've been forgiven, because there must have been a lot.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:24

And I think we live in a society where we don't put any boundaries in and then we cancel people. That seems to be the model. Whereas actually if you put boundaries in but don't have a cancel culture, then actually that's kind of interesting. And I think you're right. I think we sometimes think that crime is the only immoral action that we can do. Whereas actually, even if we haven't committed a crime, all of us have caused suffering to other people through our action or inaction, either deliberately or by accident. And so actually if we see criminology as part of a wider sense of human cause and reaction, then actually we've got to kind of see that crime is just one section of human actions that have consequences. And I think sometimes we see I've never committed a crime, therefore I'm a good person, but actually have you caused suffering to other people? Absolutely. So what do we mean by good? And I think there's a scale of that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:19

And restorative justice is exactly where it fits because sometimes, and it's a very common thing, we would do a bad thing and hide away from it. And actually, again, the hardest part of restorative justice is confronting your victim and actually saying, Listen, I've done a bad thing and I'm sorry, and letting the victim tell you how you hurt them. And that is the restorative protest that actually works, and it's the talking to people. And again, you know, sometimes we shouldn't be afraid of that kind of confrontation. So instead of yelling at someone and saying, Why have you done this? Sometimes it can be about, you know, I want to tell you how much hurt you've caused me by doing this and this and this and this. And if they listen to you, that is the restorative protest, and sure, it might not work, in which case you don't need to talk to that person anymore. But there is so much evidence that it does work. How it transforms the trust between people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:13

Because I think the example you use and all the examples I've seen is that quite often the criminal, I'm using inverted commas, does not have any concept of the consequences of the crime that they've done. They genuinely think it's a victimous crime because they see it in a very black and white way. So if someone who is poor steals from someone who is rich, they see it as a victimous crime because you're insured, so therefore we both win. You get your insurance, I get money to buy food today. And what they don't see is those kind of soft consequences in terms of you've made me feel unsafe in my own house. My one thing is to protect my family, and you've taken away my ability to protect my family. And actually, the criminal generally, who is generally a good person who's been forced into a situation where they've done the wrong thing, often feels empathy for that situation once they understand it. Not everybody, of course. And so I think we can do this in our human relationships. It's much easier to be angry at somebody, it's much easier to shout at someone, it's much harder to listen to someone who's hurt you. And that's why I think restorative justice is not the soft option, because it's so difficult to do.

SPEAKER_04: 1:37:23

It is, and I think in our relationships we just have to do it. I know it's a lot easier to block everybody on all social media and not talk to them again, but that's just not how we build a society that learns from its mistakes.

SPEAKER_03: 1:37:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:37:35

But it's also not how we learn to actually talk to each other as humans, because I guarantee in your life there are so many people that you've hurt without even realizing that you've hurt them, but have decided to forgive you and didn't have a difficult conversation with you. And I do encourage you to look at restorative justice videos. There's a beautiful example of this woman, so her husband was killed by this teenager. And so she goes through and she was saying that, you know, police came to her house and said, you know, we've arrested the kid, and she said, Well, can I meet him? And they were like, What do you mean? Why would you want to meet him? She's like, Well, I want to talk this through. And they just didn't understand what she was even talking about. So she's saying how they worked through these protests, and it was really long, it was painful, definitely not a soft option for anyone. But they've now kind of arrived at the point where they work through it, and it's better for the victims, and it's better for the perpetrators, and and it's better for the victims because usually the one question you have in your head is why? You know, when something bad happened to you, all you're thinking of is why did this happen? Yeah. Why did this happen to me? Yeah. Was there anything I could have done? It's always why, why, why? And that is the only way you're gonna get the answer.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:46

Mm-hmm. I think you're right. And it's such a beautiful way to end. And actually, what I really love is that throughout this discussion, we've talked about some really big themes, but actually when it comes down to it, this is about how we interact with other human beings. And so I think this is so important for us to communicate with our students that the bigger picture of crime and punishment is actually about how we relate to each other as humans on a human level. And I think that's a really lovely message to end on. So thank you, Evelyn, so much for this time. It's been so enlightening. And I love engaging with people that are experts in their field that can support us teaching, you know, more authentically effective lessons in the classroom. So thank you so much. Just before we end, I do ask all my guests, if you could wake up tomorrow and one thing was different, what would you want it to be?

SPEAKER_04: 1:39:29

I think it's just for everybody to be a bit kinder to each other. I think that's very much just to learn from these lessons, because I think yeah, it's so easy to underestimate what we can do on a small, small human level, because we just think we're tiny humans. And usually I imagine people say, Oh, I wish to not be war in this place, or I wish for this person to not be in power, I wish for this big historical thing not to happen. But yeah, I think it's all about how we relate to each other and how we behave with each other, because that's my immediate world, is the people I interact with every day. It's frankly not people on TV, even though they are, I know, affecting everything else.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:07

That's really nice that actually how do we make the world a better place? We make our world a better place. Thank you, Evelyn. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the RE podcast. The podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, but it is not. It helps us understand humans, it helps us understand the concept of justice and how we can think and act this world to become a better place. But thank you so much for letting us bore the life out of you.