Generally speaking, my students have all presented the following (as) facts:

1. Rule-breaking is a universal feature of human societies;
2. Punishment is the universal response to rule-breaking in human societies;
3. While the penalty must be “proportionate” to the offence, generally speaking, the harsher the penalty, the lower the rate of rule infraction;
4. However, regardless of how harsh the penalties are, rule-breaking continues at a greater or lesser rate.

To an extent, many of the students recognize that these “minor offences” have social causes of some sort: i.e., being non-white, being male, living in a city, and being poor. Nonetheless, these social causes are psychologized to the effect that even though they recognize that petty theft or dealing small amounts of drugs is caused socially (i.e., in a context of limited education, limited resources and, therefore, limited opportunities, the best option might be deal drugs), they nonetheless want to hold individuals responsible for their own social circumstances. The equivalent would be holding an infant responsible for being born with cancer–and then punishing the infant for having had the audacity of being born with cancer. My point is that they recognize the child is nonetheless not responsible for having cancer, but they want to punish the child all the same for having cancer because they are responsible for having cancer. Plainly, this does not make sense.

My replies to most of my students have been to take one of two (or both) approaches:

1. If punishment is a universal response to the equally universal rule-breaking and if rule-breaking persists despite punishment, why bother punishing at all? Either punishment is not about the offender and is about the punisher or people have recourse to punishment when it is plainly obvious it doesn’t work. Either way, punishment does not deter and, therefore, justifying punishment on the basis of deterrence is nonsense.
2. If the infractions under discussion–drug dealing/possession, minor theft, inconsequential street fights, unruly behaviour, etc–are attributable to social conditions, then isn’t the best response to address the underlying social conditions rather than holding black, urban, male youth responsible for being black, urban, male youth?

I’m curious to see how or if they respond to this line of argumentation, especially given that most of them are or have expressed interest in being “criminology” majors. I’m also curious to see what happens when they get to developmental psychology and social learning, if they’ll make any connection between positive reinforcement and positive outcomes.

How, for example, is the sociologist to include a household pet as an actor in her analysis without having the knowledge of the animal behaviourist? And if the pet is infect by (`has connections with’) a particular virus, and this too is part of the story, then the sociologist must be a virologist too.

The argument is rather stunning: if you do not have professional qualifications and/or advanced training in a given area, then you are not sufficiently competent to engage in sociological analysis of that area. How, might I ask, does a medical sociologist do research without an M.D.? Admittedly, I’ve only met a few medical sociologists, but none of them had medical or even nursing degrees. They did, however, have sociology degrees. If an M.D. is not necessary, should they have a degree in, say, epidemiology? Again, those sociologists who study the spread of disease in society that I have met do not have advanced degrees in epidemiology. What about a sociologist who is interested in studying how gay men live with AIDS–should that sociologist be both gay, male, have AIDS and an advanced degree in epidemiology, virology, or medicine? I think not. What about the economic sociologist: should they have a PhD in both sociology and in economics? If not, how are they to do their work without such training?

To put this in other terms, why can’t the methods and theories of sociology be used to study non-humans? Admittedly, this would require work–theoretical and methodological–on the part of the sociologist who would seek to study such things, but this is not an unsurmountable obstacle. But then, it isn’t clear how you can talk about humans–whatever that means–without also talking about non-humans–again, whatever that means. It is not as though humans (contrary to the dogmatic humanists) live in a zone of autonomy completely detached from relations with non-humans. How would I write this post without non-humans? How would I even be sitting down on a chair? At a desk? In a room in a room? In a town? A serious answer is expected.

As a result, we come to an observation made by Emile Durkheim in his Rules of the Sociological Method: to study something sociologically is not the same as studying something biologically. That is, it is clearly the case that all living beings must eat. This is a biological question–why must organisms eat? How do they digest and process foods? And the like. The sociological question is–as E.P. Thompson pointed out in his essay on bread riots–”feeling hungry, what do people [or animals] do?” Or, again as Thompson points out, “feeling randy, what do people [or animals] do?”

“First and last, relational sociologists and critical realists care deeply about the human capacity for fulfillment and the human liability to multifarious forms of suffering. As it becomes increasingly popular to blur the human/non-human distinction in social theory, nothing could be more welcome than to find that in relational sociology we encounter not just an abstract theoretical convergence but a shared commitment to the promotion of human thriving.”

It’s stunning, really. Admittedly, I haven’t read the fuller treatment of this issue in her Being Human, but the title alone suggests we might only find a more elaborated version of the above.

The proposed solution to the prison is probably one which no right-thinking person could agree with: flogging. Strangely, Moskos views this as the only humane solution: at least so long as corporal punishment is a free choice on the part of the criminal between flogging and incarceration. One might, of course, quibble as to whether it is a “free” choice when you are given the option of five to ten years in prison versus five to ten lashes. This is a point that Moskos does address directly–indeed, at the level of argumentation and evidence, the book is somewhat of a disappointment. (There is a bizarre footnote on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish [157-8] and an equally bizarre “reading” of Marx as being objectively in favour of prisons [102-3].) It is also disappointing–albeit not surprising that a former patrolman in Baltimore’s Eastern District (recall Herc, Carver et al in the Eastern Western)–would endorse dark alley beatings as a key component of justice. (You see, policemen are highly trained professionals who are, at the core, good people and they need a wide range of discretion to deal with wife-beaters, bullies, and dealers selling drugs around children–it’s all part of the game, as Omar Little might point out.)

Moskos’s view–and one that I agree with–is that the prison cannot be reformed. Reform and regulation, as animal advocates know, has the unfortunate consequence of legitimating a bad institution by making concerned people feel alright about their guilt. And, worse, reform and regulation leads to limited–at best–improvements in the quality of life of those trapped in the institution. Reform, in effect, is having your cake and eating it, too: it misses the point and, over time, leads to something far more monstrous than what you began with. Clearly, this should be unacceptable to any right thinking person. There are some good reasons to keep the prison in a minimal capacity, such as to prevent truly incorrigible people who have committed horrible crimes from ever hurting people again. He has in mind here repeat, violent sex offenders, serial killers, and the like: the sort of criminal that we routinely see on television, but rarely ever encounter in our lives. This seems agreeable and correct to me. I don’t see any good reason why Paul Bernado or Russell Williams should ever be allowed out of prison. The question remains, however, regarding what to do with the remaining 99.9% of prisoners.

The effectiveness of American prisons is confounded by the so-called War on Drugs; that is, while it is the case prisons don’t work anywhere, they are especially dysfunctional in the United States such that a strong case could be made that the penitentiary system is akin to the Gulag or Apartheid given that prisoners are overwhelmingly black, their rights and interests are significantly violated (many cannot vote while incarcerated and many are permanently disenfranchised after “doing their time”) and blacks are significantly more likely to be incarcerated for a crime that a white will not be incarcerated for (let alone prosecuted for). Much of Moskos’s argument comes down to efficiency: not only do prisons fail to meet their stated goals (a failure on any terms), their cost doesn’t justify that failure. Indeed, “the cynical among us might even say we’re spending billions of dollars to pay poor rural unemployed whites to guard poor urban unemployed blacks” [77]. Surely there are better means to address the socio-economic needs of the permanently poor than incarcerating the ones with dark skin and employing the ones with light skin to make sure the dark skinned ones don’t try to escape. Further, it must surely be the case that even the most generous social welfare system–complete with full medical!–would cost less than what the penitentiary system presently costs.

Predictably, given the above, the defence of flogging is primarily on economic grounds: lashing costs significantly less than incarceration, even when antibiotics are figured into the cost of lashing in the rare case of infection. Moskos is even willing to go so far as allow lashings to replace the criminal record: after all, if you’ve got giant scars on your ass, it’s pretty clear that they were inflicted by the judicial system. Moskos’s proposed system would allow for summary judgment: arrested, charged, guilty plea, lashing all in one night and, a month later, the criminal’s wounds are healed and he is able to return to work. While liberal human rights regimes defend the body’s integrity as sacred, it is kind of hard to argue with this logic: on the one hand, the criminal can freely submit to a lashing and get on with his life and, on the other hand, it’s not like bodily integrity is protected in any meaningful way in prison–indeed, the long-term physical, mental, social, and economic consequences of incarceration likely far outweigh the consequences of a half-hour of excruciating pain.

Despite the detour into back alley justice meted out by well-meaning, professional, and basically good cops in the second half of the book, there was one passage that was particularly interesting. Moskos notes the similarity between the factory farm/slaughterhouse and the prison [136-9]: both are excessively violent and are almost entirely closed to outsiders. This connection is often missed in discussions of animal rights and it is one that should be taken up more vigorously. There is no good reason to make the comparison between the animal abolitionism and slavery abolitionism but not also prison abolitionism. Sadly, Moskos’s solution to the slaughterhouse is to kill your own meat because it is the least that a meat eater can do–anything else is disrespectful, or some-such. It is a palpably silly argument, but at least Moskos’s thought is taking him, more or less, in the right direction.

Some thoughts:

First, I am not aware of a single problem in sociology (“great problem”) that has received a “great solution.” There have been any number of creative solutions and convincing solutions, but sociology seems unable to provide generalizable, certain claims about anything that it studies. In effect, ths is because sociology is not a nomothetic science: it can produce reasons, rationalizations, and evidence, but it cannot produce certainty. Indeed, problems and solutions seem to go in cycles: as Org Theory itself demonstrates in a recent post talking about the re-emergence of cultural explanations of poverty. In other words, once culture was an adequate explanation. Then it was not. Now it is again.

Second, by any standard, any “great solution” will require significant theoretical work. Evidence–be it drawn from archives, ethnography, or surveys–is merely evidence. It shows that there is a problem, that it is taking to be a problem, but it cannot on its own provide a solution to a problem. This is the role of theory: whenever you making a claim about causality or correlation, you making a theoretical claim; not an empirical claim. To say, “X causes Y” is to have–explicitly or implicitly–a theory on the relation between data and explanation, between cause and effect, and, indeed, a theory on causality itself (often parsed in terms of “structure vs. agency”–both of which are themselves theoretical categories).

Third, it isn’t clear why a theoretical problem does not meet the criteria of “great problem, great solution.” Talcott Parsons presented a number of great problems (can there be a general theory of society?) and a number of great solutions (yes, of course!–which, by the way, remain the unstated ideology of much American sociology: AGIL and such that undergrads are forced to learn). In response to Parsons, Harold Garfinkle presented a number of great problems (yes, but how does this work at the micro level?) and solutions. Later, in response to both, Jurgen Habermas attempts a synthesis of general and micro theory. Robert K. Merton proposes another solution. All of them are, by any standards, “great problems” with “great solutions” and, yet, the most recognizable names in sociology of the past sixty years are at the bottom of the list!

Fourth, as is evinced by comments such as “conceptually, social capital research is a bit of a mess,” theoretical work is absolutely necessary in order to produce coherent empirical research. In other words, the theoretical work is a logical and necessary step before empirical work can be done at all. After all, how can “social capital” be identified, measured, compared, discussed without an underlying concept of “social capital”? The same goes for any other field of research in sociology: race, gender, class, poverty, wealth, education, family, income, equality, inequality, ….

Fifth, and last for now, why is empirical work the benchmark for social science? For instance, “Honestly, it’s hard to learn about the Black-White test score gap by rereading John Rawls or even social science classics like Max Weber.” Sure: but what does Black-White test scores have to do with understanding Rawls or Weber? The standard alone does not even make sense.

(I note, in passing, that Org Theory carries an epigraph from Toqueville: not just a theoretical text, but a classical text! The entire justification of their work comes about through the pithy statement of a nineteenth century French tourist in America.)

No one seems to dispute any of the following:

• Diab has been accused of masterminding a terrorist attack on a synogogue in Paris in 1980, which resulted in the death of four people.
• Diab is presently under virtual house arrest pending an extradition hearing. He has been released on $250,000 bail, which carries a number of conditions; viz., electronic surveillance and to only leave his residence in the company of one of the five people who contributed money to his bail.
• Diab denies any involvement in the attack and even denies being in France at the time.
• Diab has a doctorate in sociology and has taught as a contract instructor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.
• No one has questioned his teaching ability.
• No one has accused him of displaying any bias, be it anti-semitic or otherwise.
• Diab was hired through appropriate channels and his hiring was approved by senior administration in full knowledge of his background, including consultation with in-house counsel.
• Diab was fired without notice or warning shortly after a press release denouncing his teaching at Carleton University on July 28, 2009. His firing was not discussed at the departmental or faculty level and was imposed by senior administration.

What are the relevant issues?

• Diab is a contract instructor whose relations are governed by a collective bargaining agreement. The CBA only allows firing in the case of offenses. Diab did not committ any offenses related to his employment. Consequently, it would appear that he was fired without cause and thus in contravention to the CBA. This is the first issue: senior administration has deemed that their actions are not governed by the CBA. This is an attack on organized labour and upon sessional instructors (myself included) without whom the university (that is, nearly any university) would be unable to function and deliver a significant portion of its undergraduate courses.
• Following Diab’s firing, senior administration assigned a faculty member to replace Diab for the remainder of the semester. Faculty allocation is a departmental responsibility and, thus, is the business of the Chair of the department and any other existing departmental institutions. This is the second issue: senior administration has deemed it has the power to interfere with the day to actions and management at the departmental level. This is in long standing tradition of collegial government. This is an attack upon collegial self-government.
• The faculty members of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, led by the Chair of the department, Peter Gose, have stood up in defense of Diab demanding his reinstatement. This is the third issue: in accordance with fiscal reality (i.e., increasing dependence upon sessional labour) and the principles of collegial self-government, the tenured and tenure-track faculty of the department (i.e., the permanent members) have correctly stood up for one of their own.
• The timing of the firing in relation to the B’nai Brith press release demands discussion. This is the fourth issue: did an outside organization manage to influence the decisions of senior management in contradiction to the normal principles of university management and government? If so, why was senior administration susceptible to this pressure? Has senior administration made any other rash decisions in response to external pressure? If so, what were they and in response to what?
• Diab has not been convicted of any crime. This is the fifth issue: his right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty has been violated.

What is not a relevant issue?

• The hiring and subsequent firing of Diab has never been about academic freedom. Any suggestion to that effect is disingenuous.

For my part, I support the actions of the faculty and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, both as a sessional lecturer at Carleton University, as someone who believes that tenured and tenure-track faculty owe a duty of care to vulnerable graduate students and sessional lectures, and as someone who strongly believes in collegial self-governance. At the same time, as a sessional lecturer at Carleton University, I cannot help but feel rather vulnerable just by writing this, especially given that I have not yet signed my Fall 2009/Winter 2010 contracts.

***

The firing of Dr. Hassan Diab from his teaching post at Carleton University on Tuesday is an attack on widely held democratic values, and on the need to achieve justice through the law and due process. The unfolding of Diab’s tale is also a bleak chapter in the story of injustice and discrimination in the dark shadow of 9/11.

Diab, a Canadian citizen since 1993, faces allegations by French authorities of having participated in a bombing of a synagogue in Paris in 1980. It has not even been legally determined yet whether there is any reasonable evidence to extradite Diab just to stand trial, let alone to convict him. The judge in his case, Robert Maranger, said, “In my view, this is not a case where extradition is a rubber stamp or foregone conclusion.”

Certainly, reasonable restrictions are, and should be, placed on those accused of violent crimes. But in our society, determining those restrictions and assessing any risk to the community is the role of the judge — not of media commentators with limited familiarity with the situation.

While Diab awaits an extradition hearing in January, the judge has approved his bail and, indeed, specifically approved his employment as a university lecturer.

Diab accepted an offer of renewed employment at Carleton that was vetted by the university’s upper administration. As his colleagues in Carleton’s Sociology and Anthropology department, we unequivocally oppose Diab’s abrupt and unacceptable dismissal, a decision taken by the university administration in undue haste, and one that we hope will be reversed.

Diab is a widely published scholar, and an accomplished teacher. He has lectured effectively for years in our universities without incident. He was hired following the transparent rules laid out in the collective agreement that governs contract teaching at Carleton. As the candidate with the most seniority who also possesses appropriate qualifications, Diab was the obvious choice.

In a startling move, Carleton University’s administration fired Diab, thus breaching their legally binding contract with him and contravening the collective agreement. But why? The letter Diab received did not state a reason for the dismissal. What we do know is that Diab’s dismissal followed on the heels of a statement released by the Canadian chapter of the Jewish advocacy organization

B’nai Brith, a statement that suggests that Diab, who has lived peacefully and without conflict with the law in Canada for years, is a threat to “the safety and security of the community.”

The university administration, apparently succumbing to political pressure, issued its own brief statement, saying Diab’s dismissal was needed to provide a “stable, productive academic environment that is conducive to learning.” Surely, replacing instructors in the middle of a course is neither “productive” nor provides “stability.”

What is the university administration teaching our students? By demonstrating that the presumption of innocence and due process are not values to uphold, the university administration is offering a dangerous lesson. It is no surprise that the national professors’ union — the Canadian Association of University Teachers — has condemned Carleton’s move.

The administration’s decision that rules don’t matter, that contracts can be breached, that collective agreements can be ignored, and that rights can be violated, however, fits within a bigger picture. The bigger picture is one whereby Diab can be fired because of allegations, suspicions, and, apparently, external political pressure. Certainly, Diab faces accusation in another country, but we as a society have a duty to maintain his innocence unless he is proven guilty.

Many Canadians have good reason to be concerned that the “war on terror” has gone too far in trampling on basic freedoms — such as the right to be presumed innocent — not only in George W. Bush’s America, but also here at home, as horrific cases such as that of Maher Arar have shown.

Yet again, Canada is at a crossroads. We must make a choice about what kind of society we choose to live in and what sort of universities we choose to build: ones where the rule of law, due process, the presumption of innocence, freedom and human rights are our core values, which every individual enjoys equally — or ones where suspicion trumps all.

Signed by: Nahla Abdo, Claudio Aporta, Tullio Caputo, Nicolas Carrier, Xiaobei Chen, Jacques Chevalier, Andrea Doucet, Aaron Doyle, Peter Gose, Alan Hunt, Jared Keil, Jacqueline Kennelly, Bernhard Leistle, Rianne Mahon, Amina Mire, Michael Mopas, Carlos Novas, Augustine Park, Donna Patrick, Justin Paulson, George Pollard, Jennifer Pylypa, Blair Rutherford, Janet Siltanen, Frances Slaney, Daiva Stasiulis, Rania Tfaily, Pum Van Veldhoven, William Walters, Melanie White.

I don’t normally insert graphics of quotations, but I didn’t think anyone would believe me! And, if you can believe it, the passage comes from a contribution to a symposium on social movements and organizational theory. Go see for yourself!

Charles Perrow “An Organizational Analysis of Organizational Theory,” Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 3 (2000): 473.

It would have been better had Foucault said, “Perhaps one day this century will be known as Levi-Straussian.”

Claude dit

While I don’t claim to be nearly as smart or clever as Kojeve, it would be my suggestion, given the current financial crisis, to return to the classics of political economy. Turning to contemporary “analytical political philosophy” or, for that matter, contemporary “continental philosophy” will not reveal the answer. Although one would be better served, I think, reading Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition or Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria than G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense or John Roemer’s Analytical Marxism collection.

Therefore, I strongly suggest that everyone run to the library immediately and pick up the following: Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation; John Stuart Mill’s The Principles of Political Economy; and, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (all three volumes), the Gundrisse and his Theories of Surplus Value. Additionally, there are worse things one could do than read Max Weber’s General Economic History and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; likewise, Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is well worth the time. Once down with those, readers should immediately turn to Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, George Bataille’s Accursed Share (first volume), and Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death. The anthropologically inclined will surely want to read Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics.