Teachings of Alfred Adler and Clarence Darrow

Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the renowned psychologist and founder of the School of Individual Psychology and Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), one of the most famous American lawyers, civil libertarians and advocates of the downtrodden, provide outstanding insights into criminal behavior, serious flaws in criminal justice systems and measures that should be taken to help provide restorative justice.

Alfred Adler devotes chapter nine of his book What Life Could Mean to You, to Crime and its Prevention. Everyone interested in restorative justice should read at least this chapter. Pertinent points paraphrased from this chapter include:

Individual Psychology can help us recognize all the various types of human beings and understand that, despite this variation, human beings are not remarkably different from one another. We find, for example, the same kind of failures exhibited in the behavior of criminals as in that of problem children, neurotics, psychotics, suicides, alcoholics and sexual deviants. They all fail in their approach to the problems of life; and, in one very definite and noticeable area, they fail in precisely the same way: every one of them fails in social interest; they are not concerned with their fellow human beings. Even here, however, we cannot distinguish them from other people. No one can be held up as an example of perfect cooperation or perfect social feeling, and criminals only differ from the common run in the severity of their failure.

Corporal punishment is ineffective because it only confirms to criminals that society is hostile and impossible to cooperate with. Something of this sort happened to individuals who became criminals, perhaps, at school. They were not trained to cooperate and so they did their work badly, or misbehaved in class. ... They feel that people are against them. ... The children lose whatever shreds of confidence they had. They are not interested in their schoolwork, their teachers or their school friends. They begin to play truant and to hide where they cannot be found. In these places they find other children who have had the same experience and have taken the same road. ... , since they are not interested in the social demands of life, they see these other children as their friends and society in general as their enemy. These people like them and they feel better in their company. It is in this way that thousands of children join criminal gangs, ... if in later life, we treat them in the same way, this will only bear out their view that we are their enemies and only criminals are their friends.

There is no reason at all why such children should be defeated by the tasks of life. We should never allow them to lose hope and we could prevent this very easily if we organized our schools so that such children were given confidence and courage.

Corporal punishment is ineffective for other reasons too. Many criminals do not value their lives very highly. Some of them are very near suicide at certain moments of their lives. Corporal or even capital punishment hold no terrors for them.

... No one need be defeated by the problems of life. Criminals have chosen the wrong way of dealing with them; we must show them where they have made the wrong choice and why, and we must develop in them the courage to be interested in others and cooperate.

I would like to emphasize that this ability to cooperate must be learned. There is no question of its being hereditary. There is a potential for cooperation, and this potential must be regarded as inborn, but it is common to every human being, and to be developed it must be trained and exercised. All other points of view about crime seem to me irrelevant, unless we can produce evidence of people who were trained in cooperation but still became criminals.

The value of cooperation can be taught in the same way that geography can be taught, for it is a truth and we can always teach the truth. ... All our problems require a knowledge of cooperation.

... We know, therefore, exactly what we must do: we must train criminals in cooperation.

... we ought to make it possible for everyone who wants to work to secure a job. This would be the only way to realize the demands of life in our society so that a great part of humankind would not lose the last remnants of their ability to cooperate. There is no question at all that if this were done the number of criminals would go down.

We should also avoid in our society everything that can act as a temptation to criminals or to poor and destitute people. If great extremes of poverty and luxury are apparent, it offends those who are badly off and incites them to envy. We should, therefore, cut down on ostentation: it is not necessary to flaunt one’s wealth.

It would be very helpful if we increased our efforts to improve our crime-solving record. As far as I can see, at least forty per cent of criminals, and perhaps far more, escape detection, and this fact is always at the back of every criminal’s mind. ...

... Criminals should never be threatened. It is also important that criminals should not be humiliated or challenged either in the prison itself or after they leave prison.

It would be much better if we were more discreet and did not mention the names of criminals or give them so much publicity. This implies that before indictments are made public, criminal proceedings and the documentation should be kept, discreet, confidential and private and not revealed or “leaked” to the public.

An increase in the number of probation officers would be useful, if the right type of person is appointed; and probation officers themselves should be taught about the problems of society and the importance of cooperation.

Clarence Darrow

In his book, The Story of My Life, first published in 1932, Clarence Darrow outlines the serious problems we have with our criminal justice system, i.e. On my return from Europe I was deeply grieved and somewhat surprised to see the cruel results of the steady and unscientific campaign against crime. This was well under way before I left America. The whole movement was directly in conflict with modern psychology and, in fact, with all the teachings of science.

Darrow also provides an outstanding strategy for restorative justice: All of those who for any reason cannot or do not adjust themselves to important rules [i.e. have violated a serious law] should be examined by experts to find out why it is and what can be done; if need be they should be kept under proper and sufficient inspection. They should be helped in every way possible. Regardless of what they have done they should be released when it seems safe; meantime they should be kept under supervision in kindness and sympathy instead of harshness. It is entirely possible that a person guilty of homicide could safely be set free in a short time, and that a sneak-thief or a beggar could never be changed or cured or released. Each individual should be considered by himself. To subject every inmate of prisons to the same treatment is like giving every hospital patient the same doses of medicine, or the same surgical operation, and, of course, however absurd this might seem to those who do not think, the time will come when something like this will take the place of the archaic, costly, and pernicious system that has long since been outworn.