James Gilligan was a psychiatrist who at one time ran psychiatric services for the Massachusetts state prison system, including its hospital for the criminally insane. In his book “Violence” Gilligan makes a number of important observations about the relationship between crime, violence, and the structure of the society in which we live. He notes that law looks neither at the psychological causes of crime, particularly violent crime, nor its prevention. Instead law concerns the societal response to crime and violence, with punishment, not prevention. Gilligan states that what is called ‘crime’ is the kind of violence the system calls illegal, what is called ‘punishment’ is the kind of violence the state sanctions and imposes. Gilligan goes on to note that the psychoanalytic point of view traditionally holds that the character of the individual, rather than outside forces, shapes their destiny. In fact, the individual is subject to forces over which he or she has no control and which no amount of self-knowledge can reshape. Gilligan argues that the incidence of crime and violence within our society reflects definite moral choices about social policy. The conditions in many of our prisons are cruel, inhuman, and degrading to the point where Human Rights Watch has cited the US for numerous human rights abuses and frequent violations of the ‘ United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners’. The current system costs $60 billion dollars annually to maintain, at the price of cuts to education and basic services. Beyond incapacitating per capita 5 times as many offenders an average of 8 times longer than any other society the system does nothing to prevent recidivism. It addresses neither the social, nor psychological causes of crime and violence. Quoting from Elliot Currie’s book ‘Confronting Crime’ Gilligan asserts that arguments about what we can, or cannot, do about crime are ideological and political arguments that center on what we should, or should not do. We have the level of crime and violence we do because we have arranged our social and economic life in certain ways rather than others. It’s not because the problem is overwhelmingly mysterious, or because we don’t know what to do about it. We have decided the benefits of changing our approach to crime aren’t worth the costs. Behind the macho facade of the convict Gilligan found large numbers of men who feel inadequate to the responsibilities of everyday life. Lacking competence, skill, knowledge and training many are incapable of caring for themselves. For such men criminal conduct forces the wider society to take care of them, while allowing them to preserve their self-respect in a society where dependency is shameful, especially for men. Most of these men experience ‘freedom’ as a period of cold and hunger between sentences, spent with no jobs or money sleeping in abandoned cars, hallways, and alleys. It is no surprise to Gilligan, nor should it surprise us, that such men almost invariably return to the security of prison. Yet anyone who knows how brutal degrading, and dehumanizing prison is can only regard it as an indictment of our society that anyone would find they receive more care there than on the street. Echoing Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky Gilligan claims that society’s prisons are the key to understanding society itself. Through the lens of prison we can discern the patterns of motivation, symbolization, and social structure that underlie the whole of our culture. Both the perpetrators and victims of most crime, especially violent crime, are overwhelmingly very poor. Noting the obvious Gilligan observes that social inequity is closely related to crime, and the war on crime is really a war on the nation’s poor. By dividing the poor into criminals and victims, working and non-working, homeless and housed, deserving and undeserving, people are made to blame themselves and each other for their condition, rather than demand changes in the way we distribute the wealth of our society. At the same time the more people focus on crime and violence the more the middle class is lead to demonize the poor and members of certain racial and ethnic minorities. Yet as Gilligan observes most violence is not criminal, but structural violence that overwhelmingly targets the poor. The deaths caused by structural violence, such as lack of access to health care, are a function of our class structure, which itself reflects collective choices about how to distribute the wealth of our society. Citing a study done by two sociologists, Kohler and Alcock, that attempted to determine how many deaths worldwide could be attributed to economic disparities between the rich and the poor Gilligan claims that 14 to 18 million people are killed every year by poverty. As a society the US stigmatizes the dependency of the individual on the wider society as shameful. As a result the US does less for its people than any other industrial society in terms of health care, child care, housing, income support, and education. These unmet social needs re-present in the form of crime and violence and are then addressed through the chronic institutionalization of a large percentage of men in the bottom 20% of the society. By pitting middle and lower class people against each other the middle class voter is encouraged to direct his or her anger against the ‘welfare queens’, the ‘deadbeat dads’, the immigrant, the prisoner, the homeless, in short the poor rather than poverty. Gilligan notes correctly that for many men in our society it is only in prison that they are given 3 meals a day, a warm bed to sleep in every night, and a roof over their heads. The Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term cultural hegemony to refer to the process by which a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, who manipulate the its beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values so that the worldview of those who reap most of the benefits of any society, the ruling-class, is imposed as the norm, beneficial to all of society, whilst benefiting only the ruling class. While I myself was in prison I met men serving decades for such heinous crimes as the theft of meat from a supermarket, possession of a miniscule amount of some drug. In one instance (recounted to me by Dave Joslyn, a case manager at Western Colorado TASC which administers drug testing to prisoners on parole), a man was returned to custody for 6 months after taking a second sandwich for lunch while serving a sentence at Community Corrections. In the 150 years since Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” in which Jean Valjean serves nineteen years 5 for stealing bread, and fourteen more for numerous escape attempts, in many ways little has changed. Like Valjean who is required to carry a yellow passport that marks him as a prisoner, despite having already paid his debt to society by serving his time in prison. Mandatory parole follows every prisoner upon release today, and parole violations account for 40% of DOC prisoners. While Jean Valjean may still be a thief, we would do well to ourselves why. The reasons are ideological, rooted in entrenched concepts about poverty, crime, and the scope of government in capitalist society . Economically it would make more sense to give everyone who is out of work an $8.00 an hour job. According to at least one hedge fund manager (Mosler) quoted in the NYT this past Saturday doing so would stimulate the economy. It's not a new idea. Guaranteed full employment was of course a major demand of the Communist party in the 1930's. With the introduction of the Humphrey/Hawkins Act in 1970 the congress seriously debated the idea (before it was voted down) . The issue isn't money. In fact during the recent economic meltdown central banks in both the US and Europe addressed the crisis by simply printing more currency. Both Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have argued that the government should have bailed out the economy from the bottom. Unfortunately that's not what happened. Rethinking how we approach both poverty and crime makes economic sense. For a fraction of the trillion dollar cost of the US waging what every year seems more like "endless war for lasting peace" in Iraq and Afghanistan the congress could have eliminated homelessness in our country. The Bring America Home Act introduced by representative John Conyers in 2005 would have done just that. The CBO estimated the cost of its passage at 183 billion dollars which the congress found to be prohibitive. But congress failed to consider the externalities of its failure to pass the legislation. From kids in foster care to convicts in prison tolerating poverty and homelessness is more expensive than taking action to do something.