JustAdvice

I was once asked to describe, in a nut­shell, what I had learned from being a pro­ba­tion offi­cer.  I couldn’t, at the time, give a con­cise answer, but now I know what I would say.  After close to forty years of work­ing with offend­ers, try­ing to assist, coerce, rea­son and pun­ish them into reha­bil­i­ta­tion, I am con­vinced of one thing.  Peo­ple have free will.  Bar­ring a men­tal or phys­i­cal inabil­ity, they will do any num­ber of things for any num­ber of rea­sons, but they will, for the most part, do what they want.

The very idea of try­ing to cor­rect crim­i­nal behav­ior seems to fly in the face of that state­ment, but there is no con­tra­dic­tion as long as offi­cers remem­ber one thing.  Our job is to con­vince the offender he or she needs to change his or her ways, and to help them do so, but we can’t “make” them do any­thing.  We can sug­gest, we can demand, we can even lock them up if they don’t do what the Judge tells them to do, but we can­not change their minds and their approach to life.  Only they can do that.

Young, sin­cere pro­ba­tion offi­cers usu­ally don’t fully under­stand where they end and the offender begins, so they tend to blame them­selves when pro­ba­tion­ers fail.  I took many such guilt trips before I learned the real­ity of the roles offi­cers and offend­ers play in each oth­ers’ lives.   I know, too, that offi­cers never totally lose that sense of fail­ure, although we do even­tu­ally rec­og­nize whose fail­ure it really is.

I need to add that drug addic­tion does tend to over­ride a person’s will.  How­ever, addicts, for the most part, did what they wanted when they chose to use drugs in the first place.  The excep­tions are those piti­ful chil­dren whose par­ents intro­duce them to drug use before they have had a chance to develop a sta­ble char­ac­ter.  Other kinds of abuse can cause dam­age that is dif­fi­cult to over­come, too, and can over­ride a person’s best inten­tions to change.  Unfor­tu­nately, that hap­pens more than we might like to believe and I still have a hard time not want­ing to hang those abysmal par­ents in a pub­lic square somewhere.

So what do we do with the rest of the offend­ers who absolutely, pos­i­tively refuse to change their ways?  Lock­ing them up should be a form of pun­ish­ment as a means of con­vinc­ing them to reform or, in the more extreme cases, to sim­ply remove the threat they present.  We used to call pris­ons pen­i­ten­tiaries, because that was where peo­ple would hope­fully become pen­i­tent.  They were expected to make pos­i­tive changes if they wanted to be released back into soci­ety. 

These days offend­ers can pretty well cal­cu­late the max­i­mum time they would spend for cer­tain crimes, even before they com­mit them.  One can do the crime and, if appre­hended, serve the time and wait for the release date, which has already been deter­mined. 

Given that premise, it seems to me the only suc­cess­ful way to approach crime, in addi­tion to giv­ing chil­dren the tools to suc­ceed early in life, is to teach them the dif­fer­ence between right and wrong, and to bring them up in a way that they grasp the con­cept not only in their heads, but also in their hearts.  A free soci­ety depends on cit­i­zens who are able to do what they want because what they want to do is right – even when no one is looking.