11. Crime and the death penalty
No topic draws a clearer line between liberals and conservatives than that of violent crime. Strict Father morality sees the cure for violent crime simply as strict punishment. This derives from the Strict Father model of the family that demands that disobedience must be punished, preferably in a painful fashion with an instrument like a belt or a rod. It assumes the Morality of Reward and Punishment, which says that punishment is the moral alternative. And it also assumes a behaviorist theory of human nature that says punishment will work to eliminate violence.
In addition, conservatives claim that violent crime has been the result of "permissive" childrearing practices. They claim that violent crime in later life is caused by a lack of strict discipline at home, a lack of painful corporal punishment in response to disobedience. A mother's nurturance without a father's discipline, they imply, produces antisocial, uninhibited, violent children with no respect for law. Conservatives, using this reasoning, attribute the rise in violent crime to the corresponding decline in the presence of fathers in American homes, due to divorce and illegitimacy. The assumption is that a father would administer strict discipline, with painful corporal punishment for disobedience, and that this would teach children to behave and to grow up as law-abiding, self-reliant citizens.
The Nurturant Parent model of the family makes exactly the opposite claim. It says that children are best socialized and taught responsibility through a nurturant upbringing where discipline is maintained through loving, respectful, and firm interactions and a constant attention to mutual responsibilities and explanations. Painful corporal punishment, the nurturant model says, does just the opposite of what it is intended to do. It teaches violence and violence begets violence. Children who are made to submit through pain to the will of a parent are taught to make others submit to them through their use of violent methods. Correspondingly, neglect has a similar effect. Neglect is a lack of the nurturance in which discipline comes out of loving, responsible interactions. Neglect is thus a form of violence, a denial of needed nurturance.
Liberals respond that violence among fatherless children living in high-crime districts is a result of one or more of the following: (1) mothers who act like abusive strict fathers, administering corporal punishment for disobedience and berating their children; (2) mothers who are neglectful; or (3) social causes, such as poverty or peer pressure. Liberals further argue that mothers who are abusive or neglectful were abused or neglected themselves. The long-term cure for violent crime, liberals argue, is (1) nurturant environments in which there are no neglectful or abusive strict-parent models and (2) the reduction or elimination of poverty by the provision of job training and jobs. From the liberal perspective, what the conservatives are suggesting would just increase violence.
Advocates of nurturant-parent child-rearing practices cite research indicating that strict-father families and corporal punishment contribute importantly to delinquency and violence in later life. Such studies will be discussed in Chapter 21.