Whereas the 20th Century dealt with the rise of mass-production, it appears that a big theme of the 21st Century will concern mass-customisation. The basic idea is that the organisations that succeed are those that are best able cater to the multiple specific tastes and whims of different individuals in the most efficient way.
Current examples of mass-customisation include clothing, footwear, helmets, computers, jewelry and printing. All fairly low-key stuff. It’s possible however that we all could be driving around in custom cars, drinking custom concoctions at the bar – exactly matched to our taste buds, and receiving custom prescription drugs exactly suited to our individual genetic makeup. The possibilities are endless and perhaps a bit frightening if taken to the extreme – custom pets and even custom babies perhaps?
Mass customisation applies not just to products, but also to many services we take for granted. From mobile phone plans to travel to insurance, we already experience a great many options so that we can choose something that best fits our lifestyle. Supermarket loyalty cards are used to generate unique discount plans for each shopper. There is even a trend towards personalisation in education, so that children get an education that is best matched to their innate interests and abilities. Many services, from utilities to postal services to taxation, are wide open to future mass-personalisation.
So here’s what got me thinking: might mass-customisation help to deal with the problem of criminality? For centuries, the blunt instrument of choice has been the prison sentence. While it no doubt has its merits in some cases, it fails in terms of recidivism rates and ultimately it has not succeeded in making a meaningful dent into crime rates within society. Yes, there are alternatives such as electronic tagging, suspended sentences, barring orders, fines and community service, but even so, prison still remains the number one deterrent.
There is something very Victorian about the concept of prison – it is where someone goes to “learn a lesson” and “pay back their crime to society” – to reform their evil ways, as it were. It all sounds very good, if only it were true. I am deeply skeptical that meaningful reform is possible for most people in a prison environment. It seems to jar with what we know about human psychology. The motivations that put people in jail are so different in each case. It could be poverty, boredom, accident, self-expression, anger or even cold-blooded sadism. To me, prison seems like a “one size fits all” solution that, while effective in some cases, is absolutely useless for many other situations because it fails to take account of individual motivations and values. I sometimes wonder if, 500 years hence, our descendants will look on modern prisons in the same way our current generation recoils from the brutal ways the authorities dealt with miscreants in the sixteenth century.
Enter the world of personalised and customised sentencing. If we had better information on an individual’s background, genetic, personality and psychological makeup and the means to efficiently design responses to criminal behaviour on a case by case basis, could we come up with more effective solutions, thereby driving crime rates down to nominal levels? The suspicion is that, by gaining a better understanding of what drives individual motivations and how an individual’s behaviour is affected by the environment in which they operate, we might come up with approaches and responses that prevent these behaviours in the future.
Answers that might emerge could include drugs, implants, educational or psychiatric responses, targeted interventions, and in more serious cases, physical exclusion. Maybe it might just be as simple as specifically targeted drugs, who knows?
I wonder though, if the means were there to implement it, would society be willing to support it? Even if customised sentencing showed huge drops in criminality, it would still require a big change in thinking. A very large section of society continues to demand longer and harsher prison sentences often as a reaction to the injustice of the original criminal act. Harsher sentences don’t seem to make society any safer. (If this were the case, surely the USA, with its large prison population, would be the safest country in the world). In a mass-customised world, prisoners would be given punishments matched to their psychological makeup and circumstances that would ensure a) that the perpetrator does not re-offend, and b) that the perpetrator understands and regrets their actions. It may not deal so well with a victim’s or society’s desire for revenge. Customised sentencing might mean that the best response for a murder, in one case, is drug therapy, whereas a vandal might require a long-term barring order or deep psychological treatment for something relatively minor.
So, customised sentencing may be both a panacea and a headache. It could offer a world with much less crime, but there are social and ethical issues that will need to be dealt with.
What do you think? Is this a pipe-dream? What other benefits or problems do you see? I’m interested in your views.
Passive Impressions 
I remember thinking about this as a student, reading Plato’s views on punishment. As a society, we really haven’t got much further than the basic ‘Crime = Punishment’ equation; despite telling ourselves that what we really want is a peaceful, crime-free society rather than simply ‘eye-for-an-eye’ style retaliation.
We have comprehensively proved over the last 2,000 years in a variety of cultures that pretty much any kind of punishment we can come up with does little or nothing to prevent crime.
So, yes, I’d like to see our responses to crime focus more on preventing further crime rather than simply punishing past crimes. Maybe tailor-made solutions using new technologies would help: some kind of electronically created exclusion zone of 100 yards around all children for anyone with a predilection for deviant sexual behaviour with minors, for example.
Only trouble is, I can’t see how we’d figure out who needed to be helped not to commit another crime until AFTER they have committed at least one crime.
Hey Colm, very interesting article. It touches on some questions that are of considerable interest in anarchist political theory. You can immediately see that the issues of crime and punishment are very problematic for anarchism. The whole point of it is to try to do away with authority and the exercise of power by one individual over another, but what do you do about people who transgress against others? There are many answers, too many to go into here, and none entirely satisfactory in my opinion. But, because it’s interesting and relevant, I’ve included at the bottom of this comment a long quote from something I wrote about William Godwin, the first anarchist (writing in 1793). He argued that there were essentially no circumstances in which punishment for a crime was justifiable. I think there are some inconsistencies in his argument, but it’s still instructive.
I think you’re right that in 500 years (or hopefully less) people will certainly look back at today’s prisons and see them as barbaric. I mean, one can already look at particular prison systems and point to barbaric featuers of them. The high incidence of rape in the US prison system obviously stands out, but levels of abuse are also pretty high here in the UK too I think.
For a start, we should be clear about what prison is for. You seem to be talking mostly about the idea of prison as rehabilitation. This is interesting because it’s the opposite philosophy of prison as it exists today. What happens when you put minor criminals in prison with serious gangsters – the minor criminals end up committing much more major crimes when they come out. The reasons for prisons today seem to be more about revenge, restraint of dangerous individuals, and providing a disincentive to potential criminals. Other than revenge, these are reasonable if somewhat disproportionate. Take petty thefts for example – these could be reduced to next to nothing if society were more equal. I like to imagine that the reason we’ll see much of prison as barbaric in 500 years time is that we’ll have a more equal society and there will be no reason for people to steal from each other.
Moving on to your suggestions, I’m slightly concerned about some of them. In particular, drugs and implants. I think it’s reasonable that you should lose some of your rights when you commit a crime, but not all of them. I would say that any ‘treatment’ of a criminal that involved psychological modification ought to be both entirely optional and tested to a standard as high or higher than any other such drug (like anti-depressants). The idea of a society that drugs people who don’t follow its rules is very disturbing to me. If the point was rehabilitation, there ought to be both an option to show that you are rehabilitated without drugs, and in any case a maximum sentence.
That said, I am very much in favour of the idea of a system that responds to the individual circumstances of people in it. As you say, there would be huge obstacles to overcome in getting people to agree to it. First of all, it would probably end up being even more costly than the current system (and the current system is already very expensive, to an extent that most people are not aware of, around £30,000/year). Secondly, there is a degree of bloodthirstiness about people (as evidenced by the fact that a majority of people still favour bringing back the death penalty). At least for the moment, anything even vaguely like what you are suggesting is a long way from being a political possibility. The other obstacle is that we are also far from understanding people’s psychologies well enough to provide individual ‘treatments’ for criminal behaviour.
So in conclusion, I don’t think your idea is a pipe dream, but it’s a long way off. That’s no reason not to be thinking about these things though.
Incidentally, the automatically generated links for your article are quite interesting, particularly this one: http://aplefebvre.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/gentle-justice-analysis-of-open-prison-systems-in-finland-a-way-to-the-future/
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Here’s the thing I wrote about Godwin:
Having dealt with law, Godwin attacks the idea of punishment of any form. Given his utilitarian philosophy, he obviously believes that the only reason for punishment would be to increase the common good. So right from the start the idea of punishment as revenge is rejected. He considers three possible reasons for punishment; “restraint, reformation and example” . By restraint he means punishment (which by definition occurs after the commission of some injury) intended to stop the punished from committing another injury in the future. By reformation he means punishment which is intended to make the punished see the error of his ways. To this he replies that “Coercion cannot convince, cannot conciliate, but on the contrary alienates the mind of him against whom it is employed. Coercion has nothing in common with reason, and therefore can have no proper tendency to the cultivation of virtue.”
Since his views on punishment as example (i.e. to show others what will happen if you disobey) are slightly more controversial, I’ll quote them in more detail: “It is employed against a person not now in the commission of offence, and of whom we can only suspect that he ever will offend. It supersedes argument, reason and conviction, and requires us to think such a species of conduct our duty, because such is the good pleasure of our superiors, and because, as we are taught by the example in question, they will make us rue our stubbornness if we think otherwise. In addition to this it is to be remembered that, when I am made to suffer as an example to others, I am myself treated with supercilious neglect, as if I were totally incapable of feeling and morality. If you inflict pain upon me, you are either just or unjust. If you be just, it should seem necessary that there should be something in me that makes me the fit subject of pain, either absolute desert, which is absurd, or mischief I may be expected to perpetrate, or lastly, a tendency in what you do to produce my reformation. If any of these be the reason why the suffering I undergo is just, then example is out of the question: it may be an incidental consequence of the procedure, but it forms no part of its principle. It must surely be a very inartificial and injudicious scheme for guiding the sentiments of mankind, to fix upon an individual as a subject of torture or death, respecting whom this treatment has no direct fitness, merely that we may bid others look on, and derive instruction from his misery.”
As a further point against punishment as example, he shows that the punishment must be proportional to the “degree of delinquency”, (taking into account the intention of the accused) if it is to have the desired effect. (This is recognised in most forms of law by treating manslaughter more leniently than murder.) But there is no way, in general, of evaluating “the quantity of ill intention conceived by the offender”, so in many (perhaps most) cases the punishment could not be proportional to the “degree of delinquency”. Since a punishment proportional to any other quantity, perhaps the “injury sustained by the community”, cannot fulfil the role of punishment as example there can be no justification for it.
Hi Truce and Dan, I think you both make some very good points. Prison as a place where society enacts it revenge on criminals. That’s probably it really, isn’t it? Yes, the criminal gets punished in prison, but their reaction to it, psychologically, is far, far from what society expects: ie. “oh, they will learn the lesson of their ways”. Yeah, right. People in prison, more than anything else, concentrate their minds fully on survival and adaptation, and less so on contemplating remorse.
Yeah, I guess the expense thing is quite a blocker: what I’m talking about is a world where mass customisation gives providers the opportunities to customise cheaply, so that economically, customisation offers an alternative to prison at a far lower cost than confinement. That I guess, is where drugs and implants come in, and yep: the moral issues involved are big indeed. Think of a government using drugs and implants to control their entire population *shudder*. However, that said, a bad government could (and do) lock up those with whom they disagree in prison…
What delayed me posting this was the view that maybe mass-customisation is in place already within the prison system – community service, electronic tagging, open prisons, suspended sentences – all taking into account the circumstances and record of the accused. Yet prison is still there and our prisons are crammed to the brim when, possibly, in a more enlightened society it would be the option of last resort, and possibly just a specific option for a certain class of offender (or maybe not needed at all).
Anyway, all this is a bit utopian. I no doubt feel that if someone harmed my kids tomorrow that I would be in no mood to talk about being nice to them – quite the contrary. Maybe though we need parallel criminal rehabilitation systems and victim support systems? The question is – how could all this be done cheaply?
Do people really imagine that prison reforms prisoners? I’m pretty out of touch with what people think because I live in a strange environment (almost everyone I know has a PhD or is studying to get one, and most are pretty left wing). Still though, I wouldn’t have guessed that people think that prison is a reforming experience in any but a small number of exceptional cases?
About customisation, it definitely does exist but it’s a very limited form of customisation. It’s more like what in computer interface design they call ‘skinning’, putting a veneer of customisation over a core that is essentially the same. Like having a whole range of different mobile phones with different stylings. It’s like I said, we’re incredibly far from understanding people well enough to meaningfully customise anything. But as you say, customisation does exist and it works by having panels of people evaluate individual cases based, presumably, on loose rules and intuition. And again, as you say, it doesn’t seem to be working that well, but maybe this is because they’re working within a too restrictive framework (but then, if they weren’t what would be the potential for abuse?).
About the ethical issues, it’s true that there is a potential for abuse today. Bad governments do luck people up who disagree with them (for example a black person is much more likely to be put in prison for the same crime as a white person, and black people tend to vote democrat rather than republican). But there’s something decidedly more frightening about drugging people into submission than incarcerating them.
“I no doubt feel that if someone harmed my kids tomorrow that I would be in no mood to talk about being nice to them – quite the contrary.”
I wonder. Not all parents feel vengeful in those circumstances. It’s understandable, but not a universal reaction.
Hi Dan, I think you are right: I’m not sure if most people care if the prisoners are reformed or not. The issue about reform is an issue for society and governments, not for individual citizens who, when it comes down to it, have a “tough love” view of criminals (without much love).
Maybe we are being a bit hard on the present criminal system, community service and the likes have improved things I am sure, but even still, the prisons are overflowing: the system tends to be geared towards addressing the victim than necessarily ensuring that criminals don’t do something like this again. That, incidentally, would not be the way most victims groups look at it – they are likely to say that the system is geared towards the criminal – but whatever the case, the issue of reform gets lost somewhere.
I agree: drugging people might be extreme. However maybe there is a case for voluntary drug usage? If I realised that I was violent when I got drunk, would I be persuaded to take a drug that would eliminate by ability to absorb alcohol? Maybe some / many criminals might be..
At the core, I guess, is that I believe that most human beings are not easily “reformed” despite all the anecdotal stuff about prisoners finding God etc. If you are a frog, you are a frog. If you are a scorpion, you are a scorpion.. Hard, perhaps? Within limits, people can change, but often those limits are narrowly defined.
I would beg to differ on the parental views – the desire to protect children / loved ones is as old as humanity itself. Any system of reform would need to take these strong emotions into account.