“REINTEGRATIVE SHAMING”

John Braithwaite (1989)

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It would seem that sanctions imposed by relatives, friends or a personally relevant collectivity have more effect on criminal behaviour than sanctions imposed by a remote legal authority.  I will argue that this is because repute in the eyes of close acquaintances matters more to people than the opinions or actions of criminal justice officials.  As Blau (1964: 20) points out: ‘a person who is attracted to others is interested in proving himself attractive to them, for his ability to associate with them and reap the benefits expected from the association is contingent on their finding him an attractive associate and thus wanting to interact with him’.

                A British Government Social Survey asked youths to rank what they saw as the most important social consequences of arrest.  While only 10 per cent said ‘the punishment I might get’ was the most important consequence of arrest, 55 per cent said either ‘What my family’ or ‘my girlfriend’ would think about it.  Another 12 per cent ranked ‘the publicity or shame of having to appear in court’ as the most serious consequence of arrest, and this was ranked as a more serious consequence on average than ‘the punishment I might get’. (Zimring and Hawkins, 1973: 192)  […]

BEYOND DETERRENCE, BEYOND OPERANT CONDITIONING: CONSCIENCE AND SHAMING

Jackson Toby (1964: 333) suggests that deterrence is irrelevant ‘to the bulk of the population who have introjected the moral norms of society’.  People comply with the law most of the time not through fear of punishment, or even fear of shaming, but because criminal behaviour is simply abhorrent to them.  Most serious crimes are unthinkable to most people; these people engage in no rational weighting of the costs and benefits of crime before deciding whether to comply with the law.  Shaming, we will argue, is critical to understanding why most serious crime is unthinkable to most of us.

                The unthinkableness of crime is a manifestation of our conscience or superego, whatever we want to call it depending on our psychological theoretical preferences.  […] We will leave it to the psychologists to debate how much the acquisition and generalization of conscience is a conditioning or a cognitive process.  The point is that conscience is acquired.

                For adolescents and adults, conscience is a much more powerful weapon to control misbehaviour than punishment.  In the wider society, it is no longer logistically possible, as it is in the nursery, for arrangements to be made for punishment to hang over the heads of persons whenever temptation to break the rules is put in their path.  Happily, conscience more than compensates for absence of formal control.  For a well-socialized individual, conscience delivers an anxiety response to punish each and every involvement in crime – a more systematic punishment than haphazard enforcement by the police.  Unlike any punishment handed down by the courts, the anxiety response happens without delay, indeed punishment by anxiety precedes the rewards obtained from the crime, while any punishment by law will follow long after the reward.  For most of us, punishment by our own conscience is therefore a much more potent threat than punishment by the criminal justice system.

                Shaming is critical as the societal process that underwrites the family process of building consciences in children.  Just as the insurance company cannot do business without the underwriter, the family could not develop young consciences in the cultural vacuum which would be left without societal practices of shaming.  Shaming is an important child-rearing practice in itself; it is an extremely valuable tool in the hands of a responsible loving parent.  However, as children’s morality develops, as socialization moves from building responsiveness to external controls tom responsiveness to internal controls, direct forms of shaming become less important than induction: appealing to the child’s affection or respect for others, appealing to the child’s own standards of right or wrong.  […]

                However, the external controls must still be there in the background.  If the maturation of conscience proceeds as it should, direct forms of shaming, and even more so punishment, are resorted to less and less.  But there are times when conscience fails all of us, and we need a refresher course in the consequences of a compromised conscience.  In this backstop role, shaming has a great advantage over formal punishment.  Shaming is more pregnant with symbolic content than punishment.  Punishment is a denial of confidence in the morality of the offender by reducing norm compliance to a crude cost-benefit calculation; shaming can be a reaffirmation of the morality of the offender by expressing personal disappointment that the offender should do something so out of character, and, if the shaming is reintegrative, by expressing personal satisfaction in seeing the character of the offender restored.  Punishment erects barriers between the offender and punisher through transforming the relationship into one of power assertion and injury; shaming produces a greater interconnectedness which can produce the repulsion of stigmatization or the establishment of  a potentially more positive relationship following reintegration.  Punishment is often shameful and shaming usually punishes.  But whereas punishment gets its symbolic content only from its denunciatory association with shaming, shaming is pure symbolic content.

                Nevertheless, just as shaming is needed when conscience fails, punishment is needed when offenders are beyond being shamed.  Unfortunately, however, the shameless, the remorseless, those who are beyond conditioning by shame are also likely to be those beyond conditioning by punishment – that is, psychopaths (consider, for example, the work of Mednick on conditionability and psychopathy – which would seem equally relevant to conditioning by fear of shame or fear of formal punishment (Mednick and Christiansen, 1977; Wilson and Herrnstein, 1985: 198-204)).  The evidence is that punishment is a very ineffective ultimate backstop with people who have developed beyond the control techniques which were effective when they were infants.  This is the problem with behaviour modification (based on either rewards or punishment) for rehabilitating offenders.  Offenders will play the game by reverting to pre-adolescent responsiveness to reward-cost social control because this is the way they can make their life most comfortable.  But when they leave the institution they will return to behaving like the adults they are in an adult world in which punishment contingencies for indulging deviant conduct are remote.

                The conscience-building effects of shaming that give it superiority over control strategies based simply on changing the rewards and costs of crime are enhanced by the participatory nature of shaming.  Whereas an actual punishment will only be administered by one person or a limited number of criminal justice officials, the shaming associated with punishment may involve almost all of the members of a community.  Thus, in the following passage, when Znaniecki refers to ‘punishment’, he really means the denunciation or shaming associated with the punishment:

Regardless of whether punishment really does deter future violations of the law or not, it seems to significantly reinforce agreement and solidarity among those who actively or vicariously participate in meting it out…  Opposing the misdemeanours of other people increases the conformity of those administering the punishment, thus, leading to the maintenance of the systems in which they participate.  (Znaniecki, 1971: 604)

                Participation in expressions of abhorrence toward the criminal acts of others is part of what makes crime an abhorrent choice for us ourselves to make.  […]

                When we shame ourselves, that is when we feel pangs of conscience, we take the role of the other, treating ourselves as an object worthy of shame (Mead, 1934; Shott, 1979).  We learn to dot his by participating with others in shaming criminals and evil-doers.  Internal control is a social product of external control.  Self-regulation can displace social control by an external agent only when control has been internalized through the prior existence of external control in the culture.

                Cultures like that of Japan, which shame reintegratively, follow shaming ceremonies with ceremonies of repentance and reacceptance.  The nice advantage such cultures get in conscience building is two ceremonies instead of one, but, more critically, confirmation of the moral order fro two very different quarters – both from those affronted and from him who caused the affront.  The moral order derives a very special kind of credibility when even he who has breached it openly comes out and affirms the evil of the breach.

                This is achieved by what Goffman (1971: 113) calls disassociation:

An apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts, the part that is guilty of an offence and the part that disassociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule.

                In cultures like that of Japan which practice disassociation, the vilification of the self that misbehaved by the repentant self can be much more savage than would be safe with vilification by other persons: ‘he can overstate or overplay the case against himself, thereby giving others the task of cutting the self-derogation short’ (Goffman, 1971: 113).

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                In summary then, shame operates at two levels to effect social control.  First, it deters criminal behaviour because social approval of significant others is something we do not like to lose.  Second, and more importantly, both shaming and repentance build consciences which internally deter criminal behaviour even in the absence of any external shaming associated with an offence.  Shaming brings into existence two very different kinds of punishers – social disapproval and pangs of conscience.

[…] Community-wide shaming is necessary because most crimes are not experienced within the average household.  Children need to learn about the evil of murder, rape, car theft and environmental pollution offences through condemnation of the local butcher or the far away image on the television screen.  But the shaming of the local offender known personally to children in the neighbourhood is especially important, because the wrongdoing and the shaming are so vivid as to leave a lasting impression.

                Much shaming in the socialization of children is of course vicarious, through stories.  Because they are not so vivid as real-life incidents of shaming, they are not so powerful.  Yet they are necessary because so many types of misbehaviour will not occur in the family or the neighbourhood.  A culture without stories for children in which morals are clearly drawn and evil deeds clearly identified would be a culture which failed the moral development of its children.  Because human beings are story-telling animals, they get much of their identity from answers to the question ‘Of what stories do I find myself a part?’ ‘Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words’ (MacIntyre, 1984: 138).

                Essentially, societal processes of shame do three things:

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