Page 310 - The Social Animal

292 The Social Animal

colleagues. 101 In this study, hyperactive boys were punished by their
teacher by having privileges taken away from them. Specifically, the
boys had earned some tokens exchangeable for a wide variety of en-
joyable things, but each time a boy aggressed, he was deprived of
some of the tokens. During and after the application of this tech-
nique, the frequency of aggressive actions among these boys practi-
cally doubled. This was almost certainly the result of an increase in
frustration.
What about the prisons in our own country—institutions of
punishment that are quite severe and restrictive? Though it may
seem intuitively correct to think that putting a criminal in such a
harsh environment would deter that person from committing crimes
in the future, there is precious little evidence to support such an as-
sumption. 102 In fact, as this analysis would predict, imprisonment
may have the opposite effect. Determining its specific consequences
is difficult, however; in most instances, it is impossible to isolate the
effects of being incarcerated because too many other factors influ-
ence the person in that situation. Does the harshness of prisons ac-
tually promote future criminality or do former inmates wind up
returning to prison simply because they are criminal types? Although
these possibilities usually are hard to test in the real world, evidence
from a natural experiment suggests that prisons fail to deter crime
among the inmates who are released. A Supreme Court decision
made the experiment possible, 103 isolating the effects of imprison-
ment on recidivism. In 1963, after the Gideon v. Wainwright ruling
that people could not be convicted of a felony without being pro-
vided with a lawyer, a number of the inmates of Florida prisons were
released early—way before they served their full sentence. The only
systematic difference between these prisoners and those remaining in
prison was that the released prisoners had not previously been rep-
resented by counsel. Thus, researchers could compare two groups of
convicts that were nearly identical; some had been prematurely re-
leased, and others had been punished and “rehabilitated” to the full
extent of their sentences. A startling difference emerged between the
two groups: The prisoners who served their complete term were
twice as likely to return to prison as those who were released early.
Does this mean that harsh punishment does not reduce crime?
Not necessarily. Although this study does offer persuasive evidence
that lengthy prison terms do not deter the future criminal behavior