anchoresses warding off beastly, devious, desperately importuning men

Written by Douglas Galbi on February 24, 2013, filed in category prisoners

Bishop enclosing an anchoress

In the early thirteenth century, a friar in England offered instruction to anchoresses in dealing with men. The friar wrote lovingly and compassionately to his “dear sisters.” He strove to identify with women. Through that identification, he expressed emotions that women might be too embarrassed to acknowledge even to themselves:

“But do you think,” someone says, “that I am going to leap on a man even if I do look at him?” God knows, dear sisters, stranger things have happened. [1]

The friar thus counseled anchoresses against gazing upon men.

The friar treated men less personally and less sympathetically. He figured men as beasts who might fall into the pit of a woman’s beauty: “a dog will happily go in wherever he finds it open.” The friar counseled anchoresses:

my dear sisters, if any man asks to see you, ask him what good may come of it, since I see many evils in it and no profit. If he is importunate, trust him the less.

The friar offered words of scripture for anchoresses to use in warding off men who might reach out to the curtain in their window or utter words of earthly love. He advised anchoresses to say to such men:

Depart from me, you evildoers, that I may keep the commandments of my God; Godless men have dug pitfalls for me, men who do not conform to your law. [2]

The friar warned strongly against women having sympathy for men. Men lamenting their sleeplessness, suffering, and incipient madness should be ignored:

No wooing is so base as that in the guise of a lament — as if someone spoke thus: “I would not, though I died, think of doing anything filthy with you,” and swore deep vows: “But even if I’ve sworn not to, I have to love you. Who’s worse off than me? It stops me sleeping a lot. Now I’m very sorry that you know it. But now forgive me that I have told it you. Even if I go mad, you shall never more know how things stand with me.”

The anchoress forgiving the man and talking about something else is a mistake, according to the friar. The suffering man is merely devious:

Afterwards he looks for his moment to break his promise, swears he has to, and so the evil grows, getting worse the longer it goes on.

The friar advises treating the man as a false friend and an enemy.[3]

While friars and anchoresses sought to lead lives of extraordinary spirituality, the friar had fundamental sympathy for the human weaknesses of anchoresses. At the end of his thirteenth-century book of instruction to anchoresses, the friar wrote:

If you find that you do as you read, thank God earnestly. If you do not do it, pray for God’s mercy and in the future work at keeping it better according to your strength.

In our times, elite men righteously join with elite women to help advance the welfare, as they understand it, of anchoresses and ordinary women. Persons involuntarily incarcerated in jails and prisons have replaced anchoresses and anchorites.[4] Those modern-day involuntary anchorites and anchoresses are predominately men. Sympathy for ordinary men’s sufferings remains beyond the realm of public expression.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] Ancrene Wisse, trans. White (1993) p. 29. Subsequent quotes are from id. pp. 31, 49, 199.

[2] Psalm 199: 115, 85, which Ancrene Wisse (id. p. 31) quotes in Latin. Authorities now counsel person subject to such harassment to get a restraining order requiring the man to stay away upon threat of imprisonment. At work, a person could be accused of sexual harassment and fired for such behavior.

[3] The friar-author of the Ancrene Wisse may have formed this advice with knowledge of the Life of St. Mary the Harlot (Mary the niece of Abraham). In that hagiographic Life, Mary, a twenty-seven-year-old anchoress, was lured out of her house by a man who softened her firm resolve:

the girl {Mary} eventually opened the door of the house where she lived as a recluse and came out to see him. He assaulted her with his blandishments, bespattering her with the mud of his lust.

After “this sinful episode took place,” Mary felt deep regret. She exclaimed:

I have rebelled against God and slain my soul … Alas, what have I done! … Alas, how did I fall? … How my downfall occurred, I was unaware; how I become corrupted, I do not know. A dark cloud overlaid my heart, preventing me some seeing what I was doing.

After Mary lost her virginity as described above, she ran off to a town and became a harlot. From the fifth-century Syriac Life, trans Brock & Harvey (1998) p. 30. In accordance with contemporary academic norms, Beresford (2007) states that Mary was raped. In the U.S., such a conviction could put the man in prison for nearly a decade. The friar-author is less oriented toward punishing men than preserving the welfare of the woman, as he understands her welfare. That means her not losing her virginity and not becoming a harlot.

[4] A formal proceeding, and approval from a bishop, was required in fourteenth-century England in order for a woman or a man to become an anchoress or anchorite. Modern court proceedings impose incarceration against a person’s will as punishment for criminal guilt and, in some cases, for inability to pay a court-imposed financial obligations.

[image] From a 14th-century manuscript, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 79, fol. 72r. Clay (1914) Plate 28 reproduces the image in two-tone.

References:

Beresford, Andrew M. 2007. The legends of the holy harlots: Thais and Pelagia in Medieval Spanish literature. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis.

Brock, Sebastian P., and Susan Ashbrook Harvey. 1998. Holy women of the Syrian Orient. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.

Clay, Rotha Mary. 1914. The Hermits and Anchorites of England … With fifty-four illustrations. Methuen & Co: London.

White, Hugh. 1993. Ancrene wisse: guide for anchoresses. London: Penguin Books.

Tagged: love

Mann Act criminalized men’s sexual activity

Written by Douglas Galbi on November 12, 2012, filed in category prisoners

In 1910, the Mann Act criminalized persuading or helping any woman to cross state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Conviction under a Mann Act charge carried punishment of up to five years imprisonment and a fine of up to $5000.[1] U.S. courts interpreted the Mann Act’s description of purpose to encompass a man seeking to have sex with any woman other than his wife. Intending to have sex with a woman, but not actually having sex with her, was sufficient for conviction under the Mann Act. Whether the woman voluntarily engaged in sex was irrelevant under the Mann Act.[2] A Mann Act violation was typically charged against only the man, and not the woman, in a consensual, non-commercial sexual affair. The Mann Act’s name literally indicates its concern. The Mann Act primarily criminalized men’s sexual activity.

The Mann Act was biased against men from prosecution to imprisonment. In the Pacific Northwest from 1910 to 1930, an estimated 532 men, and only 15 women, were prosecuted under the Mann Act for interstate non-commercial heterosexual affairs. Nation-wide from 1927 to 1937, an estimated 2988 men were imprisoned for Mann Act convictions, while only 41 women were. Men imprisoned under the Mann Act on average received longer sentences of imprisonment than women did. In the Pacific Northwest from 1910 to 1930, men sentenced to imprisonment under the Mann Act averaged a sentence of 17.5 months, while women averaged 15 months.[3] Because women were charged in more aggravated cases than men, that difference in average sentence length underestimates the gender bias in sentencing. For example, a man and a woman having an affair in 1931 traveled together from their homes in Pennsylvania to West Virginia, where they stayed in the same hotel room. Convicted under the Mann Act, the man received a 30-month prison sentence, and the woman, an 18-month sentence.[4] In another case, an unmarried couple traveled together from Pennsylvania to Alabama in 1934. Convicted under the Mann Act, the man received six months imprisonment, and the woman received probation.[5]

Legal scholars have downplayed the effect of the Mann Act on men and highlighted its effect on women. In 2008, a law professor’s short note “Sex, Corruption, Federalism, & the Mann Act” exclaimed:

The defendant {in Mann Act cases} was frequently the woman who, when she drove the car, was indicted as a co-conspirator in transporting herself across state lines for immoral purposes!

That claim is highly misleading. Probably less than 4% of Mann Act defendants were women charged as co-conspirators for transporting themselves.[6] That claim is also not relevant to the substantive point of the author’s note, although it may have served to enhance the author’s standing among this peers. The leading scholarly monograph that a man wrote on the Mann Act declares:

One of the ironies of the Mann Act’s evolution is that women, as the protected class of the statute, in fact became its chief victims. … The statute distinctly inhibited women from taking trips with their male friends. It not only deprived women of opportunities for vacation and travel but effectively prevented women from using the vehicle of interstate travel as a method of expressing their own sexuality. Women were deprived of a fundamental human activity which caused no harm to anybody. They were also subjected to a double standard, since males could travel in interstate commerce to meet women, but no couple without fear of prosecution could allow the woman to similarly travel to meet the male.[7]

The pairing of the nouns “woman” and “male” emphasizes that men comprise a relatively bestial gender. These sophistical arguments about the greater victimization of women, placed against the punishing reality of the Mann Act, indicate men’s keen interest in publicly showing concern for women’s welfare.[8]

imprisoned white slave girl, impetus for passage of the Mann Act

Sensational public concern about “white-slave trade” in women motivated the passage of the Mann Act in 1910. Women from rural areas and from foreign countries — France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, and others — were allegedly duped and forced into involuntary servitude as prostitutes. Once captured, they were allegedly bought and sold like black slaves had been. Leaders in the fight against the white-slave trade greatly exploited sexual and racial biases. For example, a book published in 1910 was entitled Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls or War on the White Slave Trade. The title page sensationally advertised:

THIRTY-TWO PAGES OF STRIKING PICTURES
Showing the workings of the blackest slavery that has ever stained the human race.

The book included essays on white slavery from persons in the following positions:

United States District Attorney, Chicago
Assistant United States District Attorney, Chicago
Assistant State’s Attorney, Cook County, Ill.
Secretary of the National Vigilance Association, London, England
Member of the National Vigilance Committee, New York
President of the National Florence Crittenton Mission
Superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls
Missionary of the Moody Church, Chicago
Deaconess of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Chicago
Principal, Red Water Institute, Red Water, Texas
Professor at Rush Medical College, Chicago
Professor at Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago
Pastor of the Lexington Avenue Baptist Church, Chicago [9]

In that book, the United States District Attorney in Chicago warned rural girls coming to Chicago:

One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards “white slavery” in places of this character. [10]

Interest in theater, the Assistant State’s Attorney explained, was also a common path into white slavery:

The most worked method of securing the confidence by appealing to the ambition of the girl is by the stage or theatrical route. It is because so many girls are “stage struck” now-a-days that this method has been worked most successfully. Perhaps of all the cases that have been tried in nearly the last three years in Chicago, the girls who have been procured by inducements to go upon the stage outnumber all others. The slave trader represents himself as the agent of some theatrical manager, or perhaps as the manager himself. Going to a factory town, for example, he makes it his business to meet some girl who is working there who he has learned is “stage struck.” After the formalities of an introduction, which he secures in one way or another, he leads up to the subject by telling that he is a theatrical man and is looking for new recruits.

The girl is at once interested. She is naturally ambitious. She wants to better her condition in life. She doesn’t suspect that a fiend with the heart of a devil is masquerading before her as the agent of some theatrical manager. He explains to her that if she will accompany him she can make from $15 to $20 a week at the very start and in a year she will be playing a part, and a year or so later she will possibly be leading lady. The picture is an alluring one to this young girl, for she is now making only perhaps $4, $5 or $6 a week, and the thought of securing such a large salary at the very start almost sweeps her off her feet. She is entranced by the beautiful picture that has been painted and she goes, perhaps to a stage from which she will never return. [11]

The old white men who made up the political and intellectual elite vigorously expressed concern about young white girls being turned into sex slaves. A New York Times editorial in 1909 declared:

In his belief that the white slave trade is a great as well as monstrous evil, President Taft has the support of all the commissions and individuals who have given the matter examination at once honest and careful. The denials come partly from people who are loath to admit that such things can be going on in modern communities pretending to be civilized, and partly from those who profit directly or indirectly, by the abhorrent traffic. [12]

That position recognized no room for honest, reasoned, public-spirited judgment that “white-slave trade” was rare, not systematic. Some persons nonetheless evidently persisted in denial. In early 1910, the New York Times headlined its front page, “White Slave Traffic Shown to Be Real.” The article reported on a press conference in which the District Attorney declared that a “light mulatto” woman and a “colored man,” as well as a man with a typically Jewish last name, had been arrested in conjunction with the sale of two white girls (“white slaves”), ages 17 and 18.[13] These white slaves subsequently testified that they were ages 25 and 23, and had voluntarily accepted money to travel to Seattle to work there as prostitutes.[14] That was probably the sort of transaction typically associated with the movement of prostitutes.[15]

White slavery was a successful fictional and non-fictional, multi-media theme. John Marvel, Assistant (1909), The House of Bondage (1910), The Rose Door (1913) and other novels exploited the theme, as did the 1913 Broadway plays, The Lure and The Flight. A formally non-fictional white-slavery genre was “books filled with lurid case studies and grossly distorted real events combined with chapters contributed by public officials and social workers.” Such works included Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls or War on the White Slave Trade (1910), The great war on white slavery, or fighting for the protection of our girls (1911), Chicago’s Black Traffic in White Girls (1912), and Canada’s War on the White Slave Trade (1912). White slavery also made fictional and documentary movies such as The Fatal Hour (1908), Traffic in Souls (1913), The Inside of the White Slave Trade (1913), House of Bondage (1914) (a film version of the book by that name), The Little Girl Next Door (1916), and Is Any Girl Safe? (1916).[16] The New York Times, perhaps concerned to strengthen its reputation for non-fictional stories, changed its position and declared that an organized white slave industry didn’t exist:

By July 1914 it {the New York Times} declared “sensational magazine articles had created a belief in the existence of a great interstate ‘white slave’ trust. No such trust exists, nor is there any organized white slave industry anywhere.” By 1916 it referred to the “myth of an international and interstate ‘syndicate’ trafficking in women” as merely “a figment of imaginative fly-gobblers.” [17]

That change in position hardly mattered. White slavery had too much support in real sexual and racial biases to be regarded as largely fictional.

The racial bias supporting concern about white slavery is more widely recognized today than the sexual bias. The Mann Act entitled itself the White Slave Traffic Act.[18] Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extended women’s right to vote uniformly across all jurisdictions and all elections. The Mann Act nearly always in application assigned men sole criminal responsibility for a consensual interstate heterosexual affair.[19] When women gained equal voting rights, they did not also gain equal criminal responsibility. The Mann Act continued essentially unchanged until 1986. Amendments in 1986 removed the sexist language and limited the application of the Act to activities that were criminal under state law.[20] Those amendments did not signal the end to the sexual bias underlying the White Slave Traffic Act, also fittingly known as the Mann Act. Men and women are much more likely to express publicly concern about women’s welfare than about men’s welfare.

* * * * *

Data: Statistics on Mann Act cases (Excel version)

Notes:

[1] Here’s the text of the Mann Act.

[2] Caminetti v. United States, 242 US 470 (1917), clarified that the Mann Act applied to non-commercial consensual sex. Even prior to that decision, Mann Act convictions included buying a railroad ticket for a seventeen-year old girl/woman to travel from Atlanta to Florida to work in a theater associated with debauchery. See Athanasaw v. United States, 227 US 326 (1913). The Mann Act, Section 3, encompassed:

any person who shall knowingly persuade, induce, entice, or coerce, or cause to be persuaded, induced, enticed, or coerced, or aid or assist in persuading, inducing, enticing or coercing any woman or girl … with the intent and purpose on the part of such person that such woman or girl shall engage in the practice of prostitution or debauchery, or any other immoral practice, whether with or without her consent

The Mann Act thus criminalized sexual intent, as well as sexual practice.

[3] For statistical details and sources, see Mann Act statistics workbook.

[4] Beckman (1984) p. 1127 (case of Elizabeth and Russell).

[5] Langum (1994) pp. 1-2 (case of Eleanor Becker and Maurice Shannon).

[6] United States v. Holte, 236 US 140 (1915), affirmed that Clara Holte, a 41-year-old married woman, could be charged as a co-conspirator in violation of the Mann Act for traveling with a man across state lines to engage in adultery. Gebardi v. United States, 287 US 112 (1932), greatly narrowed the applicability of Holte. After Gebardi, the U.S. Attorney General directed U.S. Attorneys not to bring Mann Act cases against women in noncommercial (non-prostitution) circumstances. Beckman (1984) p. 1127. An estimated 8% of Mann Act cases, 1927-1937, had female defendants. In the Pacific Northwest from 1910 to 1930, 2.7% of Mann Act cases had female defendants. Women were charged as co-conspirators only in non-commercial cases. Non-commercial cases with female defendants probably amounted to no more than half of total cases with female defendants. For data, see Mann Act statistics workbook.

[7] Langum (1994) pp. 10-11. Ch. 4., id., is devoted to the issue of blackmailing men with the threat of exposure to a Mann Act prosecution. Such blackmail was widely regarded as a serious problem. The conclusion returns to expressing particular concern about women:

In the area of noncommercial sexual expression, and particularly as regards women, the intended beneficiaries of the Act, this majoritarian morality profoundly oppressed those whose harmless conduct did not conform.

Id. p. 259. The next paragraph, referring to consequences of the Mann Act, makes no specific reference to men or males, but does refer to consequences “such as … repression of female sexuality.” Id.

[8] The effect does not seem to be sexually symmetric. Beckman (1984), an article by a woman author, provides detailed data on women imprisoned under the Mann Act. No such data exist for men. McCoy, another woman author, in McCoy (2010), p. 10, declares:

Men imprisoned for interstate affairs while their mistresses faced no consequences may be viewed as victims of the overzealous enforcement of this law. But their abandoned families—left to fend for themselves while the men served their sentences—may have been the ones who suffered the most.

Not seeing direct harm to men as a compelling social concern and emphasizing the effects of harm to men on their instrumental value to others supports social devaluation of men as intrinsically valued persons.

[9] Bell (1910), title page.

[10] Id. p. 71, from Ch. IV, Edwin W. Sims, United States District Attorney, Chicago, “Menace of the White Slave Trade.”

[11] Id. pp. 165-6, from Ch. XII, Clifford G. Roe, Assistant State’s Attorney of Cook County, Illinois, “The Auctioneer of Souls.” Roe’s story itself is quite theatrical. In mid-nineteenth-century America, respected authorities considered theaters to be a leading source of crime.

[12] Editorial, “There is a White Slave Trade,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 1909, p. 10.

[13] “White Slave Traffic Shown to be Real,” New York Times, Apr. 30, 1910.

[14] “Belle Moore Guilty of Selling Girls,” New York Times, May 20, 1910. The transcript of the Belle Moore case is available online.

[15] Chicago was an epicenter of concern about white slavery. A study of white-slave prosecutions in Chicago from 1910 to 1913 found that less than 5% of cases involved a woman held against her will. Langum (1994) p. 35 judges that figure to be “as close to the truth as we can come.” The share of women held against their will in prostitution within the total population of female prostitutes would be much smaller.

[16] Examples from Langum (1994) pp. 33-4.

[17] Id. p. 33.

[18] The name “Mann Act” arose from the name of the Act’s sponsor, Congressman James R. Mann from Chicago. Sec. 8 of the Act declared:

That this Act shall be known and referred to as the “White-slave traffic Act.”

That latter name is typically standardized to the White Slave Traffic Act.

[19] McCoy (2010) p. 230, ft. 61 declares:

Although it may have been technically possible for a woman to be charged with transporting another woman for an “immoral” interstate sexual affair, it was not conceptually possible for most early-twentieth century Americans. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever suggested the possibility that women could be noncommercial violators for having same-sex affairs across state lines. It simply would have almost never occurred to contemporary observers that women traveling on trains together or sleeping in the same hotel room might be engaged in interstate love affairs, even if some were.

The issue seems to me less lack of knowledge of lesbianism than lack of interest in prosecuting women.

[20] Langum (1994) pp. 248-51. A 1978 amendment changed only the section of the Mann Act dealing with juvenile victims. Id. pp. 244-5.

References:

Beckman, Marlene D. 1984. “The White Slave Traffic Act: The Historical Impact of a Criminal Law Policy on Women.” Georgetown Law Journal, v. 72, pp. 1111-1142.

Bell, Ernest A., ed. 1910. Fighting the traffic in young girls or, War on the white slave trade (Project Gutenburg version).

Langum, David J. 1994. Crossing over the line: legislating morality and the Mann Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCoy, Kelli Ann. 2010. Claiming victims: the Mann Act, gender, and class in the American West, 1910-1930s. Ph.D. Thesis, History Department. University of California, San Diego.

Tagged: sexism

self-punishment in the genealogy of forgiveness

Written by Douglas Galbi on October 23, 2012, filed in category prisoners

Righting interpersonal wrongs in the ancient Greek and Roman world did not generally involve the wrong-doer accepting responsibility, expressing remorse, and reforming. The proper classical behavior for a wrongdoer was to offer excuses and act lowly.[1] Behaviors now associated with seeking forgiveness require more self-consciousness than was part of the social repertoire of reconciliation in the ancient world. The Christian Gospels, which both addressed readers with realistic details of their world and pointed to eternal truths, show in descriptions of brutal bodily self-punishment developing self-consciousness for forgiveness.

economist suffers self-punishment

Brutal bodily punishments were well-known in the ancient world. The Code of Hammurabi was widely and prominently distributed across Mesopotamia 3000 years ago. Among the cases memorialized in the Code of Hammurabi:

195. If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off.

196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.

253. If any one agree with another to tend his field, give him seed, entrust a yoke of oxen to him, and bind him to cultivate the field, if he steal the corn or plants, and take them for himself, his hands shall be hewn off. [2]

An elite historian, writing in Rome early in the second century, described punishments under the Roman Emperor Augustus:

{Augustus} forced Polus, a favourite freedman of his, to take his own life, because he was convicted of adultery with Roman matrons, and broke the legs of his secretary Thallus for taking five hundred denarii to betray the contents of a letter. Because the tutor and attendants of his son Gaius took advantage of their master’s illness and death to commit acts of arrogance and greed in his province, he had them thrown into a river with heavy weights about their necks. [3]

Persons facing such punishments undoubtedly sought to avoid them. Avoiding punishment, which differs from appealing for forgiveness, was a matter of excuses and self-abasement.

While atoning for wrongs against God and returning to God are themes throughout Jewish and Christian scripture, the Gospel of Matthew contains a section particularly concerning interpersonal forgiveness. Jesus praising the humbleness of children and Jesus blessing children enclose six pericopes concerning forgiveness. Some of those pericopes are now central to Christian understanding of forgiveness:

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. [4]

Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. [5]

Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ [6]

More difficult for contemporary persons to appreciate are statements about brutal bodily punishment:

whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. … if your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the Gehenna of fire. [7]

These verses plausibly teach that corrupting the young and innocent is a great wrong, and that painful changes may be necessary for a person to lead a better life. Such teachings are only tangentially related to the current understanding of forgiveness. Do these verses more directly relate to forgiveness?

Verses on brutal bodily self-punishment in the New Testament reflect ancient Greek and Roman practice of reconciliation and point beyond them toward forgiveness. The threat “you would be better off dead” — better off “drowned in the depth of the sea” — denies the possibility of forgiveness and warns of unappeasable anger that will be expressed brutally. Death now is preferable to further life if further life will be nothing but torture, and after death nothing better. That threat comes from a powerful person capable of great anger and brutality. That’s half of the God of the Bible.[8] The forgiveness not possible after causing “one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble” is reconciliation in ancient Greek and Roman practice.

The Bible at least suggests another possibility — what has come to be understood as forgiveness. Cutting off one’s own hands or feet or plucking out one’s own eye enacts ancient practices of interpersonal punishment. Brutal bodily self-punishment appeases God with self-abasement. Self-abasement was central to reconciliation in the ancient Greek and Roman world.[9] Yet these self-punishments also indicate new self-consciousness of wrong. The present tense of “causes you to stumble” indicates awareness of wrong separate from a specific act in the past. Bloody bodily mutilation can express remorse, self-anger, and self-reform. Change of body, described in the specific practices of the ancient world, gave birth to change of heart in the current understanding of forgiveness.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] Konstan (2010). Excuses for wrongs typically were claims that the wrong was involuntary or unintentional.

[2] From the King translation (1910) of the Code of Hammurabi. The Harper translation (1904) refers to cutting off fingers rather than cutting off hands. Deut. 25:11-12 specifies cutting off a woman’s hand as punishment. Hand may actually have meant part of the female genitalia. Female genital cutting, like make genital cutting, predates Islam. Al-Jahiz, in “Boasting Match over Maids and Youths,” reports one of the Prophet’s companions referring to a “clitoris-circumcising woman.” Trans. Hitchins (1989) p. 140. Qur’an 5:38-39 refers to cutting off the hand of a thief.

[3] Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 67. Josephus, Antiquities, 14:15:10, describes the Galileans revolting and drowning members of Herod’s party.

[4] Matt. 18:15-17. All the Bible texts are from the Revised Standard Version of the English translation. By tax collector, Jesus was representing a person to be avoided. Sadly, this verse historically has contributed to unjust disparagement of bureaucrats.

[5] Matt. 18: 21-22.

[6] Matt. 18:32-33. Rejoicing over recovering a sheep that has gone astray and relating divorce to hardness of heart are themes in two other pericopes between the praise and blessing of children (Matt. 18:1-5 and Matt. 19:13-15).

[7] Matt. 18:6, 8-9. I’ve used the more literal translation “stumble” for “sin”, and “Gehenna” for “hell”. These statements are incorporated elsewhere in the synoptic Gospels. See Matt. 5:29-30; Mark 9:42-48; Luke 17:2. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima observes:

For men are prepared to have their own feet and hands cut off if they feel these belongings to be harmful.

See Symposium, 205e. There Diotima is speaking abstractly about the physical body and love. Jesus also spoke about bodily sacrifice and love. He spoke in terms much more directly related to life experiences in his time and place.

[8] See, e.g. Exodus 34:6-7.

[9] Some early Christians practiced mortification of the flesh. That was not self-punishment modeled on pagan interpersonal punishment. Augustine linked self-punishment with self-anger and repentance:

Repentance, you see, always means being angry with yourself, seeing that you are angry you punish yourself. That’s the source of all those gestures in penitents who are truly penitent, truly sorry; the source of tearing the hair, of wrapping oneself in sackcloth, of beating the breast. Surely these are all indications of being savage with oneself, being angry with oneself. What the hand does outwardly, the conscience does inwardly; it lashes itself in its thoughts, it beats itself, indeed, to speak more truly, it slays itself.

See Augustine, Sermon 112A, On the Two Sons from the Gospel, trans. Doyle & Hill (2007) p. 186, discussed in Hawkins (2012) p. 168. Ancient Greek and Roman practice of reconciliation primarily concerned appeasing anger arising from perceived insult to interpersonal status. At the same time, Augustine is a leading literary figure in the development of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is crucial to current understanding of forgiveness.

References:

Doyle, Daniel Edward and Edmund Hill. 2007. Augustine. Essential sermons. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press.

Hawkins, Peter S. 2012. “A Man Had Two Sons: The Question of Forgiveness in Luke 15.” Pp. 158-75 in Griswold, Charles L., and David Konstan. 2012. Ancient forgiveness classical, Judaic, and Christian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hutchins, William M., trans. 1989. Al-Jāḥiẓ. Nine essays of al-Jahiz. New York: P. Lang.

Konstan, David. 2010. Before forgiveness: the origins of a moral idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

fear yourself more than you fear crime

Written by Douglas Galbi on October 14, 2012, filed in category prisoners

Homicide and Suicide Deaths
(men & women ages 18-40, in U.S. in 2010)
cause of death	dead men	dead women
homicide	8,242	1,531
suicide	10,764	2,641
Source: NCHS Vital Statistics System, via WISQARS

Fear of crime and violence against women are major U.S. public concerns. Statistics on deaths from homicide and suicide provide some critical perspective on those concerns. In the U.S. in 2010, more prime-age men and women killed themselves than were killed by another. Far more men died from both homicide and suicide than did women.

Murder makes for a much more sensational news story than suicide. Even more newsworthy is the murder of a women, especially a young, white attractive woman. Most newsworthy of all is such a woman murdered by a man with whom she had a sexual connection, especially if he is black. In the news business, the O.J. Simpson case was the Superbowl of news stories.

The Internet has vastly improved possibilities for persons to be well-informed. The Internet hasn’t changed, however, the fundamentals of the news business.

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Tagged: news

about half of prisoners receive no personal visits from outside prison

Written by Douglas Galbi on October 7, 2012, filed in category prisoners

Prisoners’ personal communication with persons outside of prison vary greatly. About half of prisoners receive across their whole spell of incarceration no personal visits from persons living in the outside world.[1] In Florida, prisoners who receive visits receive on average about one visit per month. In Minnesota, prisoners who receive visits receive on average about three visits per month. Compared to Florida prisons, Minnesota prisons are closer to the major cities where most prisoners originally lived.[2] The lower travel costs of visiting prisoners in Minnesota is consistent with its higher visiting frequency among prisoners who receive visits.

Immediate family don’t predominate among prisoners’ visitors. Spouses and significant others accounts for a much smaller share of visitors than do parents and friends. Troubled personal and social relations often contribute to motivating the criminal acts that cause persons to be incarcerated. Identifying persons who will maintain personal contact with a prisoner isn’t a simple matter of standard relational designations. Friends account for a considerable share of personal visits to prisoners.

Despite the public importance of the criminal justice system and the extraordinarily high prevalence of incarceration in the U.S., community groups show relatively little personal engagement with prisoners. Clergy, mentors, and other professionals account for less than 5% of visits that prisoners receive.[3] Given high public concern about crime and the importance of prisoners’ contact with the outside world in lessening recidivism, much more civic engagement with prisoners would seem to be in the public interest.

Online video visitation can help to increase prisoners’ communication with the outside world. Online video visitation with prisoners eliminates travel costs and lessens visit scheduling difficulties. Online video visitation can help to increase personal contact among prisoners who have none with the outside world. Online video visitation, by eliminating the significance of prison location, also supports more equal opportunities for prisoners to receive visits.

* * * * *

Data:

Workbook of prisoner visiting statistics for Florida and Minnesota (Excel version), extracted from Bales & Mears (2008) and Duwe & Clark (2011) .

Notes:

[1] Based on visiting data for prisoners in Minnesota and Florida. The average spell of imprisonment in the Minnesota sample is 20 months. The Florida data, which show that 58% of prisoners receive no visits, cover the year before release from prison.

[2] See Florida and Minnesota prisoner visiting data. In Florida, 30% of state prisoners lived in the Miami-Dade County area, but only 5% are held there. In Minnesota, most prisons are within 100 miles of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where about 40% of prisoners lived. Duwe & Clark (2011) pp. 3,4.

[3] See Florida and Minnesota prisoner visiting data.

References:

Duwe, Grant, and Valerie Clark. 2011. “Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism.” Criminal Justice Policy Review. Published online before print December 6, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0887403411429724

Bales, William D., and Daniel P. Mears. 2008. “Inmate Social Ties and the Transition to Society: Does Visitation Reduce Recidivism?” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 45 (3): 287 – 321.

visiting prisoners reduces recidivism

Written by Douglas Galbi on October 2, 2012, filed in category prisoners

Setting prisoners free is historically associated with jubilation. In practice today, many prisoners are released to the street outside the prison at midnight. A released prisoners has only the clothes and possessions that were on his person at the time of his incarceration. He typically has lost his job and lost his apartment. His driver’s license and credit cards have expired. He may have no money other than a small amount, e.g. $20, given to him at release. Freedom is a worthy cause for shouts of joy. But released prisoners often encounter harrowing struggles just for the basic needs of life that they received within prison.

Relationships that prisoners maintain with persons outside prison help prisoners to secure their basic needs outside prison and to re-integrate into free, law-abiding society. That’s not just common sense. An high-quality quantitative analysis of 16,420 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2007 indicates that prisoners who received visits from outsiders had a lower probability of being re-imprisoned (recidivism):

Any visit reduced the risk of recidivism by 13% for felony reconvictions and 25% for technical violation revocations, which reflects the fact that visitation generally had a greater impact on revocations. The findings further showed that more frequent and recent visits were associated with a decreased risk of recidivism. [*]

Increasing opportunities for visiting prisoners is relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of imprisonment. Hence increasing communication between prisoners and the outside world is not merely just and merciful, but also cost-effective.

* * * * *

[*] Duwe and Clark (2011) p. 19. Randomized experiments with prisoner communication liberalization would help control for unobserved prisoner social characteristics in estimating the marginal effects of visitation. Duwe (2012) illustrates use of randomized experiments. More generally, Duwe and Clark (2011) has the typical weaknesses of most current empirical social-science scholarship published in scholarly journals . It reports results of a statistical model (Cox proportional hazard model), but doesn’t report tests of the statistical validity of that model. It doesn’t provide the underlying dataset online for replication and validation of the reported results and for further analysis. It provides only a standard table of descriptive statistics and doesn’t advance broad understanding of the data. With widely available scholarship no longer constrained to 20-30 pages of paper, social science can become much more scientifically credible and intellectually interesting.

References:

Duwe, Grant. 2012. “Evaluating the Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan (MCORP): Results from a Randomized Experiment.” Justice Quarterly, 29:3, 347-383

broader prisoner communications market benefits everyone

Written by Douglas Galbi on September 22, 2012, filed in category prisoners

The Oregon Department of Corrections’ new prisoner communications service contract with Telmate significantly broadens the market for communicating with prisoners. In most U.S. prisons today, communication between prisoners and their friends and family outside of prison consists of in-person visits, paper mail, and telephone calls. In Oregon, prisoners’ approved family and friends can purchase additional communication services:

online remote video visit with prisoner (66 cents a minute, with a 30-minute maximum)
send text messages to the prisoner (44 cents per message, with discounts for multiple messages)
send photographs to prisoner (60 cents per photo)
leave voice mail message for prisoner (16 cents per minute, with three minute maximum)

In order to be able to receive text messages and photos, the prisoner must purchase a prison-approved MP3 player for $120 (4 Gig memory) or $140 (8 Gig memory). With the MP3 player, a prisoner can also download prison-approved songs for $1.75 per song.

This broader communication service market benefits everyone: prisoners and their family and friends, prison officials, prisoner communication service providers, and the general public. More communication between prisoners and law-abiding, caring persons outside of prison helps prisoners to re-integrate into law-abiding society when they are released. Everyone benefits from the associated reduction in crime. More communication between prisoners and their family and friends helps to keep prisoners busy and engaged in orderly life within prisons. That makes prison officials’ jobs easier. Moreover, email and video visits are more secure and provide better forensic resources than paper mail and in-person visits. That improves public safety. Prisoner communications service providers benefit from having a broader scope for their business. Since prisons typically receive a share of prisoner communication service providers’ revenue, improving the prisoner communications business generates more revenue for prisons.

Oregon’s expansion of the prisoner communications market is a good model for other state prison systems to follow.

* * * * *

Notes:

The above description of communications service offerings in Oregon prisons is based on the newspaper article, “New technology helps Oregon inmates stay connected,” Oregon Live, published Sept. 12, 2012. According to that article, the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) receives $3 million in commissions per year from the communications contract. According to an Oregon DOC webpage, domestic telephone calls with prisoners cost 16 cents per minute (for both collect and prepaid), with a 30-minute maximum call time. International calls cost 50 cents a minute (for both collect and prepaid), also with a 30-minute maximum call time. Telephone rates and commissions vary widely across state prison systems. The Prison Phone Justice website offers excellent documentation of telephone rates and commissions in state prisons.

qadi criminal justice in comparative perspective

Written by Douglas Galbi on August 19, 2012, filed in category prisoners

The U.S. criminal justice system features unlimited prosecutorial discretion, justice by plea bargaining unconstrained by due process of law, and mass incarceration with a world-leading number of person incarcerated per capita. A leading scholar of the U.S. criminal justice system has declared that it has “run off the rails” and collapsed. Another legal scholar describes the situation thus:

If the system is doing justice now, it is by accident – the accident that particular prosecutors bargain prudently and humanely. There is good reason to doubt that this happy accident is really taking place. And even if executive discretion produces now something tolerably close to justice, the grotesque concentration of power in so few hands conflicts directly with the rule of law. The system we have is far too close to “kadi justice” for comfort. [1]

The reference to “kadi justice” is an allusion to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949). In that opinion, Justice Frankfurter declared:

This is a court of review, not a tribunal unbounded by rules. We do not sit like a kadi under a tree dispensing justice according to considerations of individual expediency.

The rule of law and justice in the criminal justice system are crucially important public issues. Considering them in current U.S. circumstances can easily prompt despair. What to do?

To promote the joy and glory of reason, I will analyze Justice Frankfurter’s reference to “kadi justice”. A qadi (kadi) is a judge ruling under Islamic law. By the fourteenth century, Islamic law was well-respected, highly codified knowledge. Ibn Battuta, a visitor to the Maldives, became a qadi there by displaying his knowledge of Islamic law. Battuta recorded in his journal his key concern as qadi: “When I became qadi, I strove with all my might to establish the rule of law.”[2] Islamic legal scholars worked to keep Islamic law unchanged from the seventh century and uniform across the Islamic world. A qadi’s persona and public decisions represented the grandeur of Islamic tradition and the depth of Islamic legal scholarship. Sitting under a tree dispensing justice according to considerations of individual expediency would be completely inconsistent with the self-conception and public perception of a qadi.[3]

Looking back over unenlightened ages and cultures, the image of an official sitting under a tree dispensing justice according to individual expediency fits most directly King Louis IX in thirteenth-century France. A famous account tells of King Louis IX frequently sitting under an oak tree in the woods of Vincennes and dispensing justice directly to his subjects in accordance with his absolute royal sovereignty. King Louis IX was not a legal scholar. He did not strive to administer justice according to an unchanging, uniform corpus of written law and legal interpretations. He probably sought to treat petitioners fairly in their particular circumstances, according to his own personal sense of fairness. That’s not the sense of rule of law in our age of enlightenment.

Present-day U.S. prosecutors dispense justice much more like King Louis IX in thirteenth-century France than like a qadi in the ancient Islamic world. Making the U.S. criminal justice system more just can start with true enlightenment.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] Dripps (2005) p. 1159.

[2] Trans. Dunn (1986) p. 234.

[3] For roughly the past half-millennium, weaknesses in the administration of justice under Islamic law have been the opposite of excessive legal discretion and lack of legal uniformity and stability. Weaknesses of Islamic law over the past half-millennium are much better characterized as too little freedom for interpretation (ijtihad) and too little experimentation. Too little experimentation can be interpreted as lack of confidence that God is sufficiently great to create human beings who will, at least eventually, freely discover the truth about God and the world.

References:

Dripps, Donald A. (2005). Overcriminalization, Discretion, Waiver: A Survey of Possible Exit Strategies Penn State Law Review, 109, 1155-1179

Dunn, Ross E. (1986). The adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim traveler of the fourteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

theater causes crime?

Written by Douglas Galbi on March 18, 2012, filed in category prisoners

Media effects theory is currently an active area of academic study. Leading thinkers in mid-nineteenth-century New York were also concerned about media effects. In that era before television and video games, theater attracted considerable concern.

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, leading public figures regarded theater as a source of crime. John Stanton Gould, a well-educated, highly regarded lecturer on scientific subjects, was one such public figure. Gould studied for more than seven years the sources of crime and wrote a lengthy essay on that subject. In its tenth annual report (1855), the New York Prison Association published Gould’s “elaborate and valuable essay.” Gould identified twelve “leading and most widely operative causes of crime”:

Grog shops
Brothels
Theatres
Gambling houses and lotteries
Bad construction and bad management of our common jails
Pernicious books
Orphanage
Insanity
Ignorance
Want of trades
Poverty
Inefficient preventive police [1]

Gould’s list includes poverty, unemployment, and lack of education, which are commonly cited causes of crime today. Too little public spending on policing (“inefficient preventive police”) is a concern forcefully argued in a highly regarded recent work on the failings of the U.S. criminal justice system.

Gould’s concern about theater is more difficult to appreciate today. Here’s Gould on theater’s criminogenic effect:

Without pretending to decide whether theatrical exhibitions may not be so arranged and directed that they will not injure society or even subserve the purposes of schools of moral training; nothing is more certain than that as at present conducted they are fearful nurseries of crime. They operate both directly and indirectly to produce this result; they are themselves active causes of crime and they are the avenues which lead to other sources of crime.

Directly they fill the minds of youth with impure morality, making vice attractive and virtue ludicrous. Actors and actresses are generally notorious for the looseness of their lives, their society being eagerly sought by the frequenters of the theatres, the latter are gradually but certainly corrupted.

They tend to disgust the minds of youth with the sober pursuits of honest industry. The tinsel glitter, the radiant lights, the mimic kings and queens, the nobles and heroes of the stage, dance like phantasmagoria before the mental vision of the votary of the theatre. He is haunted at every turn with the memory of the luxurious revels, the obscene allusions and the many jests of the previous evening, and these quite disqualify him for that earnest attention and willing activity which are essential for success at the merchant’s desk or the mechanic’s bench. As the mania for the theatre grows upon its victim, as it is almost sure to do, he grows more and more neglectful of his duties, and more and more despises the homely details of every day life, at length he loses his situation or fails in business, and is cast adrift on the community. Unable to abandon the source of his pleasurable excitement to the drunkard or the opium eater, he still frequents the theatre, and of course incurs all the expenses incident to the indulgence. His income being stopped these soon exhaust his exchequer and he resorts to forgery, or passing counterfeit money or some other unlawful means of replenishing it, until the State relieves him of the necessity, by providing him quarters in a prison. That such is the routine run through by great numbers of the frequenters of theatres is asserted too frequently at the doors of our prison cells to leave its truth any longer a doubtful matter. That theatres are frequented by prostitutes, that they are supplied with bars, that they are recognised houses of assignation, and possess all the worst attributes of the grog shop, requires no demonstration here, their apologists are obliged to confess that they are vestibules of the brothel and the grog shop, nor is it more doubtful that these habitual frequenters gravitate towards these places as naturally as the stone to the bottom of the well. [2]

Gould’s account is oriented toward expensive, well-institutionalized theater. The New York Prison Association’s report on county prisons in 1865 identified similar effects from more informal theater:

Of the whole number of prisoners interrogated by the committee, nearly one-half owned themselves to be theatre-goers. This statement sufficiently indicates the connexion between habitual attendance upon this fascinating but demoralizing amusement and the perpetration of crime. But we have other proof of the same thing. In most of the counties there are no permanent theatres; but in almost all, strolling players, traveling shows, circuses, negro minstrels, and the like, are more or less common. The testimony of officers connected with the arrest, trial, and punishment of criminals is quite uniform to the effect that these exhibitions rarely pass through a county without making their influence felt in stimulating crime and adding to the tenantry of the jail. Petty thefts, especially, mark their track through the State, and a very considerable increase of commitments follows. Boys and servants are very anxious to go to them, and that they may be able to gratify their desire, they steal old iron and brass, clothes-lines, mats, &c, articles which are most exposed and least likely to lead to their detection. One man is now in Clinton prison for life, who murdered his wife because she refused to give him a quarter of a dollar to attend a circus, which was exhibiting in the town of Kinderhook. [3]

Other than some superficial attention to gender and equity in the allocation of family resources, none of the above concerns attract any attention today. Theater currently attracts much less entertainment time and spending than do television and video games. Change in the composition of entertainment, however, doesn’t seem to explain vanishing concern about theater. In 1935, years before television and video games were widely available, the U.S. government established the Federal Theatre Project. This government-funded project helped to bring theater to communities across America. Such a project probably would have been inconceivable in mid-nineteenth-century New York.

New ideas have real effects.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] New York Prison Association, Tenth Annual Report, Appendix A, p. 63. At the start of this essay, Gould noted that he has been studying the sources of crime since 1847. The annual report refers to Gould’s essay on p. 43.

[2] Id pp. 79-80.

[3] New York Prison Association, Twentieth Annual Report, Report on County Prisons, p. 218.

reasoning against harsh punishment

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 8, 2012, filed in category prisoners

An anger-driven justice system doesn’t necessarily generate harsh punishment. In ancient, democratic Athens, anger made a citizen’s case for public action against a wrongdoer. Yet anger-driven justice seems not to have supported harsh punishment. Executions in democratic Athens were limited to means that did not draw blood; specifically, drinking hemlock and being crucified by being bound, not nailed, to a board. Athenian themselves considered their city to have mild, even too mild, punishments.[1] Anger was not a recognized impediment to a just public order.

Scholarly development set reason against emotion. The relation between reason and emotion became a key issue among teachers (philosophers) competing vigorously for students. Among most philosophers, the favored position was that reason should control emotion. That’s the idea underlying Plato’s famous image of reason as a charioteer controlling conflicting emotions.

In the vibrant intellectual circumstances of the ancient Islamic world, a leading physician counseled an emir to administer punishment based on reason, not anger. According to a history that the physician’s son wrote, the Emir said to the physician:

I want you to take care of my physical well-being and of something even more important to me, namely my morals, for I have faith in your intelligence, learning, piety and devotion. I am greatly distressed by the fact that anger often drives me to actions such as flogging and executions, which I regret when my wrath has subsided. I therefore request you to watch me, and if you detect any defect in my behavior, do not hesitate to tell me so and advise me how to rid myself of it. [2]

The physician reportedly replied:

I have heard the Emir’s order and shall obey it. The Emir will at once hear some general rules from me as to how to deal with the failings he is concerned about, while details will follow as the occasion arises. Remember, O Emir, that you occupy a position in which no man can gain the upper hand of you, that you are free to do whatever you please at any time you choose. … Bear in mind, therefore, that anger intoxicates a man much more powerfully than wine. A man drunk with wine is apt to do what he will neither understand nor even remember when he is sober again and will regret and be ashamed of when reminded of it, and the same applies, only more so, to a man drunk with anger. So, whenever you feel anger rising in you, then, before its effect becomes too heady and you are no longer master of yourself, make it a rule to defer punishment to the following day, since you may be sure that what you were about to do can be done just as well on the morrow. … If you behave in this way, the fit of anger will pass during the night. It will subside of itself and you will sober up. … When recovering from your intoxication, reflect upon the matter which aroused your anger.

The physician encouraged the Emir to reason:

Think about God:”just as you would like God to forgive you, so other people hope for your clemency and forgiveness. … Great credit will accrue to you by being merciful. Remember the word of Allāh, the Most High: Let them pardon and overlook; do ye not like that Allāh should forgive you; Allāh is forgiving, compassionate {Qur’ān, XXIV, 22}”
Recognize that deterrence will continue to exist: “Neither the evildoer nor anyone else will think that you were too weak to mete out punishment or that you lacked power to do so.”
Think about proportionality: “mete out punishment commensurate with the crime, and no more otherwise you will be a wrongdoer and your prestige will suffer.”
Reason about your interests: “justice {is} much more profitable to the ruler than tyranny, as it leads to happiness in this world and the next.”

Such reasons have been continually discussed among scholars right through to present-day criminologists.

If emotions are recognized as an integral component of reasoned decision-making, then the Emir’s problem points to a different treatment. What events caused the Emir to get so angry that he would have persons flogged and executed? What could be done so that the Emir wouldn’t get so angry in response to those events? Discussion and particular training experiences could well be effective treatment.

Unfortunately, actual human decision-making is difficult matter for scholarly writing. Compared to abstract reasoning, actual human decision-making is much more contingent on persons and circumstances. Abstract reasoning, presented within actual or fictive history, can be much more easily marketed across an expert’s clients.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] On anger in relation to prosecution and punishment in democratic Athens, see Allen (2000) pp. 50-9, 148-51. The Athenian form of crucifixion was called apotympanismos. Archaeological evidence indicates that apotympanismos involved strap bindings around the neck, wrists, and ankles. It obviously was not a mild form of punishment. Other forms of punishment were fines, loss of political rights, and banishment. Citizens were not subject to corporal punishment, and imprisonment was rare. Given the limited evidence available, a good measure of the harshness of Athenian punishment doesn’t exist. Yet much more physically brutal punishments have been common across the world and throughout history. The Athenians apparently were proud of their mildness in punishment. See Hall (1996) pp. 73-4.

[2] All the above quotes are from HP pp. 425-8. The physician’s name was Abū Sa`īd Sinan ibn Thābit ibn Qurra. His son’s name (the author of the text) was Abū al-Hasan Thābit ibn Sinān ibn Thābit ibn Qurrah. The general thrust of the advice follows that of Galen, On the passions and errors of the soul, trans. Harkins (1963) pp. 42-3. Seneca, Of Anger, Bk. 1, Ch. 1, described anger as brief insanity (brevis insania). Fady (1998) interprets Sinan ibn Thābit as describing a case of Galenic psychotherapy. However, the historical circumstances and the textual style suggest that the case is probably fictive. Sinan ibn Thābit (the father) served as physician to three successive caliphs: al-Muqtadir, al-Qāhir, and al-Rādī. The brutal behavior of rulers clearly was a important public issue in Sinan ibn Thābit’s time. Consider, for example, the behavior of the caliph al-Qāhir:

With an outward affectation of godliness, al-Qāhir went to every excess of cruelty and extortion. He even tortured the mother of al-Muqtadir and his sons and favorites, to squeeze from them the wealth built up throughout the late reign. Many fled from his grasp. Al-Qāhir had his nephew, who was to have followed him, walled up alive. Thus relieved from immediate threat, al-Qāhir broke out into such tyranny, even against friend and foe, as to make his rule unbearable.

In fear of al-Qāhir, Sinan ibn Thābit at one point fled from Baghdad to Khorāsān. HP p. 422. Al-Qāhir was subsequently disposed, imprisoned, and blinded. Under the next caliph, brutal punishments continued. For example, the wazir ordered a wealthy, elite public servant, Ibn Muqlah (father of Abū al-Husayn), to be harshly beaten. Thābit ibn Sinān recorded his first-person observations:

On entering his room I found him stretched out on a shabby mat with a dirty pillow under his head and wearing nothing but a pair of trousers. His whole body, from head to toe, was the color of eggplant, without a single clear spot.

Ibn Muqlah subsequently had his right hand cut off as further punishment. Then his tongue was cut out. He was left in prison and prevented from receiving care and help. Thābit ibn Sinān records:

I heard that he even had to draw his own water, pulling the rope with his left hand and holding it in his mouth. He continued in wretched misery until his death.

For the details of Ibn Muqlah’s punishment, see HP pp. 430-3. Thābit ibn Sinān also recorded a high official’s compassionate treatment of prisoners. That text seems much more stylized than Thābit ibn Sinān’s first-person observations of Ibn Muqlah’s punishment.

References:

Allen, Danielle S. 2000. The world of Prometheus: the politics of punishing in democratic Athens. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Hajal, Fady. 1998. “Galen’s ethical psychotherapy: Its influence on a medieval Near Eastern physician.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 38: 320-333.

Harkins, Paul W, trans. 1963. Galen: On the passions and errors of the soul. Ohio State University Press.

Hall, Margaretha Debrunner. 1996. “Even Dogs have Erinyes: Sanctions in Athenian Practice and Thinking.” Ch. 5 in Foxhall, Lin, and A. D. E. Lewis. 1996. Greek law in its political setting: justifications not justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

Tagged: Ibn Abi Usaibia

anchoresses warding off beastly, devious, desperately importuning men

Mann Act criminalized men’s sexual activity

self-punishment in the genealogy of forgiveness

fear yourself more than you fear crime

about half of prisoners receive no personal visits from outside prison

visiting prisoners reduces recidivism

broader prisoner communications market benefits everyone

qadi criminal justice in comparative perspective

theater causes crime?

reasoning against harsh punishment

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