The following videos and transcripts are part of an exclusive interview series with Dr. James Gilligan and Dr. Lisa Firestone. Dr. James Gilligan is a renowned violence expert, and has contributed years of research to the treatment of some of California’s most violent prisoners. Additionally, he served as an expert witness in the litigation that was subject of the Supreme Court decision in Plata V. Brown.
The human soul, the human psyche, needs love in order to survive, just as specifically as the body needs oxygen in order to survive. And for people who haven’t been starved for love, that may not be the first thing they would think of. I mean, we kind of take it for granted that we get love from a lot of people. But if you have lived in an environment where you were starved for that, you’re talking about a whole different range of experience. Just like with somebody who’s starved for oxygen, I mean, most of the time we don’t even think about the air we breathe, it’s just the air we breathe. But when somebody’s oxygen supply is cut off, you realize it’s life threatening in a very short time. Well, it’s the same with the prisoners. They were like people whose oxygen supply had been cut off, but it was their love supply. And I realized that without love, the soul cannot survive; it dies. And that’s what these men were telling me, that their souls had died. That’s why they were capable of killing other people.
Dr. James Gilligan on How Prison Worsens Violence
Most prisons do more to stimulate violence and crime than they do to prevent it. Prisons have often been called “schools for crime,” I’d call them graduate schools for crime. People often have to become violent in order to survive in them. Or, even if they’re not attacked by others, they are subjected to conditions of degradation and humiliation and intimidation and threats that I think might drive the most saintliest of people, you know, to become violent in response.
I treated the violent prisoners in the prisons as my teachers and I was their student in my effort to learn what caused them to become violent. And they would teach me. I just had to listen to them. I had to pay attention. If we don’t take that attitude of wanting to learn from them, then we lose a golden opportunity to learn how to solve what I think is arguably the most serious public health problem our society, in fact, our species, faces. I mean, if you think about it, the human propensity to commit just unlimited degrees of violence is the most direct threat to the continued survival of our species.
The main social and economic causes of violence – and I’ll add political causes – are those that divide the population into the superior and the inferior, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor. The more highly unequal a society is, the higher its rates of violence. For example, the most powerful predictor of homicide rates throughout the world – and this has been repeated in dozens of studies – is the size of the gap between the rich and the poor. The greater the degree of economic inequality in a society, the higher the murder rate, the lower the inequality, the lower the murder rate. For example, in the world today, the countries with the lowest rates of economic inequality, or, in other words, the highest rates of equality, are the countries of Western Europe, Japan and the other English speaking democracies – Canada, New Zealand, Australia. They have the lowest rates of inequality and they have murder rates that are, in most years, well in Western Europe and Japan are roughly one-tenth of ours.
