One of the things my work has allowed me to do is get to know people who have done horrible things. Part of my job as a Mitigation Specialist is to have individuals who have committed crimes tell me the story of what they did. I’ve listened to detailed accounts of murders, sexual assault, and the procurement and creation of child pornography that were very hard to hear. There are images I will never forget. Though I know this isn’t always the case, I can say that each time I’ve heard one of these stories, it was told from a place of deep remorse and pain.
By the time someone tells me the story of their crime, I’ve also heard the details of the person’s upbringing – the difficulties they faced, the people they loved, the trauma they endured, the things they were good at, the ways their caregivers let them down, their first loves, their struggles with drugs, alcohol, money, or loneliness, and what they wanted to be when they grew up. By the time they tell me about the crime, even the most gruesome I’ve heard, I end up thinking “I understand how you got there.” It’s kind-of a strange experience, to feel as though a terrible decision was all but inevitable, to see heinous outcomes as practically logical. It turns out that most terrible choices have layers of roots, and those roots are not all rotten.
So much of the way that we address crime (and these days vote, or choose where we live, or which family members we talk to) is based on an impulse to sort people into two categories: good guys and bad guys. There is a human need to categorize – there’s too much information flying at us not to. But I think this particular binary costs us opportunities for connection and healing every single day, and it leads to poor policy choices.
Many of you have probably heard the distinction made between guilt and shame described by Brene Brown and others: guilt is feeling that you did something bad while shame is feeling that you are bad.
Most of us feel shame regularly, and it’s not great. It can be easy to feel like our flaws define us and our mistakes, careless actions, and bad behavior or mean thoughts set off nagging voices of self-criticism. We internalize shame for all kinds of reasons – things we experienced as kids, messages we take in from the media, difficulties in our relationships, and genuine desires to be good people. It is very hard to respond well to things that make us feel like a bad person. That doesn’t mean we don’t or shouldn’t try, but it is exponentially harder to climb one’s way out of a belief that they are a bad person than to a belief that they are a good person who did something bad.
In my last post, I wrote about the ways we accept mass incarceration and “tough on crime” approaches out of a desire for safety, but I think there’s another reason as well: it provides a counterweight to all the shameful thoughts we have about ourselves. Bad people go jail. I haven’t done anything to warrant that, so I must be a good person.
It’s not that we walk around consciously thinking in these terms. The idea is baked into messaging around crime everywhere. A perfect example of how politicians across the political spectrum use the “bad guy” narrative is the casual way a former Madison mayor discusses the proposed bail amendment in this blog post (which lays out an argument I disagree with entirely, not just on the bail item). He writes that he wants, among other things, “bail reforms that keep the bad guys locked up longer.” This is language we hear all the time. He flippantly ignores two huge truths with that simple (and reductive) sentence: (1) people who are eligible for bail have not yet been convicted and so are presumed to be innocent (2) “bad guys” aren’t a thing.
That first point is objectively true, and I promise will have a post more directly outlining the bail amendment soon. The second is an opinion that I hold as true, and many people will disagree with me on that. But between my experiences hearing the direct stories of people who have caused great harm and wrestling with an almost pathological need of my own to feel like a “good person”, I am convinced that there is no such thing as a bad person or a good person. Reacting to bad behavior as though there is harms all of us in the end.
Next post in series: Harm & Accountability – Grumble ~ Wonder ~ Grow (grumblewondergrow.com)