Natural Democracy

USING OUR GENES TO REDUCE AND ELIMINATE CRIME   

    This chapter describes the first major test of natural democracy in Vermont.  The leadership of the Department of Corrections and the Agency of Human Services of which it is a part have applied the knowledge of how our genes control us. They have used the three steps described in Chapter 2 as a way to create new forms of governance and changes in the system of justice.
 
REDUCING  CRIME

    What is the potential for natural governance to reduce crime?  Progress toward this goal is developing in stages.  Becoming conscious of how the genes control us first led to an understanding of crime as breaches in reciprocal relationships. With that understanding, we were able to examine crime as a result of people reacting naturally to what they perceived to be breaches in obligations owed to them and to conditions which locked them into continuing breaches in reciprocity.

    Whatever the problem, the appropriate action in most cases is to change the conditions to those that induce reciprocity. Crime has been a problem where the past conditions were leading to consequences of serious concern to all of us. It is still  a problem in America and the world, as the events of September 11, 2001 remind us. Vermont is conducting experiments in applying the newly acquired knowledge of human nature to help solve the crime problem and make the transformations to the conditions that induce the balanced and expanding reciprocity of natural democracy.

LOOKING  FOR ANSWERS

    When I retired from Polaroid and left Lexington to live in Vermont  back in 1985, the information about human nature was burning in my brain.  I roared to the wind, Is this knowledge as earthshaking as it appears to be?  How can I find out?  The answer came back across Willoughby Lake from  Joseph Patrissi, then Commissioner of Corrections in Vermont.  He shouted, You think you've got some answers?  I've got some problems!   We yelled to each other, Let's build a fire under crime.

    We made a deal, and the flames under crime have been growing ever since. The first thing we did was read E. O.. Wilson's  On Human Nature.  We came across the key idea that I had found before in Wilson's writings: "To chart our destiny means that we must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge."  For Joe and me this translated into, "Maybe crime is not entirely the fault of the criminals.  Maybe we're in the mess with crime because we humans are letting our biology control us rather than taking charge and running the show the way we really want?"

    We then said, "Let's try taking control and see what happens."   We asked, "What does taking control mean?"  We knew things weren't going very well under automatic control, and Joe was getting political pressure to change.  The public and the governor were both saying, "We're not going to appropriate any more money to build jails.  Your criminal justice system doesn't seem to be working.  Fix it.  Don't duck by building another prison."

     For a start, Joe and I took stock of the crime situation in Vermont.  It was quite similar to that in most parts of the country.  Despite the fact that crime was decreasing, the public lacked confidence that the criminal justice system would assure its safety.  Prisons were regarded as a heavy tax burden.  Sentencing practices varied and often were not fair or equitable. Offenders saw other offenders get lesser sentences for the same crime they had committed.  The interests of the victims and the community were not being adequately addressed.  The system was focusing almost exclusively on the offenders and the laws that had been broken.  The victims were peripheral.  The Department of Corrections had no time or budget allocation to involve itself with helping to prevent crime in the first place.  The pressure of overcrowding was draining resources and severely limiting the amount of staff time that could go into rehabilitation training.  The no integrated assessment and the strangers rule were controlling behaviors.

INITIAL STEPS

    The opportunity that Joe and I needed in order to try out our understanding of human nature came in 1988.  Unexpectedly, we had our chance to change the conditions to those that would induce reciprocity.  Our ideas gained a strong supporter.  Vermont's Governor Madeleine Kunin decided that building more prisons wasn't the answer to the crime problem.  Crime and prisons were costing the United States over $100 billion a year.  The governor focused on two items:

           Prevention: keeping crime from happening in the first place
           Alternative ways of punishing without adding jail space.

    The present commissioner John Gorczyk tells a story about a man who was walking along the bank of a river when he heard a call for help.  He saw someone waving frantically from the water, and without hesitation, took off his coat and shoes and dove in, swam out to the drowning person, and towed her to shore.  He had no sooner recovered his breath when another call for help came from the water, and he dove back in, swam out, and rescued another person.  Again, no sooner had he swum back to shore, when there was a third call.  He dove in, and while he was swimming out, some other folks came along and gave the rescued people assistance.  He got back with the third victim, and looked out, and sure enough, here was a fourth one calling for help. He sat down on the bank, put his shoes on, stood up and put his coat on.  One of the newcomers said "what are you doing -- there's somebody drowning out there!"  He said, "You go rescue him -- I'm going back upstream to find out who's throwing people into the river!"

    Governor Kunin insisted that we go back up stream.  She realized, as we did, that breaches in reciprocity in children's lives were leading  to crime.  Her list of breaches included child abuse, domestic violence, absent fathers, and mothers on drugs.  Intuitively she was searching for ways to encourage communities to balance reciprocity -- for example, ways of getting deadbeat dads to pay up and do their share of raising their children.  Even if a father did no more than pay child support, that would free the mother to give more love to the child, which would in turn enhance his or her creativity and security, and hence the ability to reciprocate later as a productive member of the community.  This scenario probably sounds obvious, but many people do not understand the connections.

    One of Governor Kunin's initiatives was to set up an advisory committee on house arrest as an alternative to prison, confining offenders to their homes rather than jail.  She invited me to serve on her Community Control/House Arrest Advisory Committee  to help address the question, "What types of crime could be punished with house arrest?"

    In examining that question, the committee studied the Willie Horton television commercial used by Republicans that was so influential in the 1988 presidential campaign.  The Democratic candidate, Massachusetts' Governor Michael Dukakis, was accused of being soft on crime.  His administration had allegedly granted Horton a weekend furlough during which he went on a rampage of rape and murder. Our committee analyzed the commercial sponsored by candidate George Bush's people. We looked at the responses to the ad, and the consequences of the responses.

    The commercial evoked anxiety.  Rape and murder have a way of doing that. Horton's fierce, glaring face forced the initial anxiety of the viewers to turn into fear and anger.  The strangers rule was controlling and was being exploited to the hilt and unfairly by the creators of the commercial.  The fear and anger grew with repeated viewings.  The public had no way to relate to Horton.  Nothing about him connected with their lives.  This estrangement was reinforced by knowing that he was an accused rapist and came from the inner city, which for many viewers had negative connotations.  No information was provided for viewers to understand such ameliorating factors as the very low frequency with which inmates breach the trust implicit in a furlough.   Here was the no-integrated-assessment tendency in action.

    The Democratic presidential campaign had no time to communicate these complex factors to the public.  The rationale for furlough can't be explained in thirty-second sound bytes. The commercial was aired late in the campaign, so that there was no time to get the praiseworthy track record of furlough and subsequent rehabilitation across to the public.   In addition, the ad was designed to plant guilt, humiliation and embarrassment in the hearts of those who had approved  the furlough policy -- Governor Dukakis, for one.  Viewers had paid their taxes to support  prisons in the expectation that they would be protected.  Thus reciprocity had been breached.  Emotions ran high.  It was obvious to our Kunin committee that the good intentions of Governor Dukakis and his staff to rehabilitate offenders had backfired.

    Insights from the study of this commercial showed potential pitfalls in the house arrest program.  We saw clearly that if offenders who had committed serious crimes were put on house arrest, and then repeated a violent offense, it would cause considerable embarrassment for the governor, despite a careful design that excluded offenders with any potential for violence.  The committee reviewed with the Department of Corrections its screening process, its policies on granting furloughs, and its use of house arrest.   This process opened our thinking about the public's role in responding to crime -- for example, should the public have a role in granting furloughs?  Remember that Joe Patrissi and I had in mind the insight about each of us moving away from unconscious control of our brains by our genes and replacing auto-piloting with self-piloting.  Maybe the public's lack of involvement in the furlough process was preventing the public's opportunity to make integrated assessments.  If that were the case, it would account for the public's not realizing its responsibility for this particular public policy.   We examined ways to give the public more control over crime.  The public's natural desire for autonomy -- being in control of their own lives -- was being thwarted by the conditions of the system.   We then asked ourselves, how did Willie Horton get into trouble in the first place?  What was the public's role in that?  We were prepared to go pretty deeply into what crime was all about.  We began to realize just how much automatic control by our biology was hurting.  It was killing people.

    We traced many of the causes of crime to features in the social environment which prevent reciprocity from functioning.  As an example, we looked at the intense time demands on families where both parents are working.  Frequently, parents don't have enough time to nurture their children.  Nurturing is the initial part of a reciprocity cycle.  Nurturing can be regarded both as an obligation that accompanies bringing children into the world and as a favor to them which results in returns on that investment.  The favor of nurturing keeps children away from bad habits and inculcates good ones; it positions children to return the favor at a later time in their lives as they become productive citizens. The favor becomes a benefit. That insight led us to a sounder definition of actions the public could take to prevent crime. We asked ourselves, what is keeping the public from taking on more responsibility for causes of crime?  Not only for the causes but also for the punishment?  Why was the public breaching what appeared to be its obligation to take on more responsibility for the causes of crime within our communities?

    The committee returned to human nature.  We put our understanding of it to work.  We realized that the no-integrated-assessment tendency limited the public's vision of effective solutions to crime.  "Out of sight, out of mind."  We thought about ways to compensate for this tendency, ways that would produce the reciprocity that we could see was lacking.  The committee's recommendations to Governor Kunin in December 1988 took into account the responsibility of a well-informed public, particularly parents.  We recommended a public information program to encourage dialogue on the problem of crime in each community's governance process.  We said the job of preventing crime has to be integrated into every aspect of each community's  future, including its education, its social services , and its business development.  It's everybody's job.  We also recommended that the Department of Corrections (DOC) explore more alternatives to incarceration.  Prison didn't seem to be working well.

    We insisted that responsibility for rehabilitation and reparation be shared with each community.  We felt that the department was trying to do too much by itself, not involving the public where the public could help.  Joe Patrissi and his staff were already thinking about this before our committee got into the picture.  But when these ideas bubbled up within the committee, we realized that the social environment needed to allow effective operation of natural reciprocity and other life-enhancing tendencies.  With these tendencies in mind, alternatives to incarceration needed to be designed to provide more opportunities for reciprocal exchange between offenders and the people in each community.  The offenders would do work on community projects.  The community would provide opportunities for the offenders to do so, and would reward the offenders with thanks.  They would return to the community as productive citizens.  Since these exchanges would happen beyond the walls of the prisons, the offenders would be visible to the whole community.  Notice how we were taking the epigenetic rules into account: not only reciprocity, but also the strangers rule and the desire for status.  In addition, the system should be designed to evoke gratitude.

    As I look back on the committee's central recommendation to the governor, it has resulted in the department expanding its use of the more accurate understanding of human nature.  We simply knew that this new perspective was going to be essential.  Back in 1990, we felt there were too many "Band Aids".  We said, "Let's get basic". Everybody wants real and lasting solutions.  We want realistic alternatives to the present waste as offenders do "jail time."  We charged ahead into what has now become an essential part of the journey toward natural governance and democracy.

REVISING  CORRECTIONS  POLICIES  BY  TAKING  CONSCIOUS  CONTROL OF OUR GENES

    The experience of working with the Community Control/House Arrest Advisory Committee brought the commissioner and his staff to ask for further training in taking human nature into account.  I turned to Dr. Richard Williams, a psychologist and manager at Polaroid Corporation, to conduct a series of workshops that included senior staff members of the department and some members of the advisory committee.  Williams had worked with me at Polaroid Corporation in applying the insights about human nature to product design.   He gave the DOC staff a five-day tutorial on the tendencies of human nature and the basic problem of being unconsciously controlled by them.

    The next step for the DOC was to practice this new understanding of human nature by doing what Patrissi called calisthenics -- experiential learning.  Joe, his second in command John Gorczyk and now commissioner, and John Perry, the department's director of planning, pitched in to get hands-on experience.  These people were enduring the same problems as their counterparts in other states: overcrowding, tight budgets, and increased demand in the face of decreasing crime.  They faced a constant demand for instant, easy answers to complex problems ranging from release policies to multimillion-dollar capital investments.  Patrissi, Gorczyk, and Perry are men of the sixties: all three started their careers in the criminal justice system full of idealism; all three had deep convictions about the inadequacies of the system.  They knew it wasn't working and wanted to change it.  They were open to anything that would work.

    I moved from my committee role to directly helping them with the changes.  We said, "This way of thinking is powerful".  We started stretching our imaginations.  We said, "Let's move away from this history of automatic control.  Let's change to more conscious control.  Let's see if we can restructure the department so as to take human nature more fully into account, to Vermont's advantage."  This would be a major transformation.

    About this time, John Gorczyk took over as commissioner of corrections.  Gorczyk challenged us with these insights about the history of causes of correctional problems:

INSIGHTS  FROM  OUR  HISTORY OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

    According to Gorczyk, "crime" represents an individual's taking something of value from another without returning something of equal or greater value.  When a violation of that contract, which has been designated as a "crime", is reported, government is then asked to intervene using the criminal justice system to verify the allegations of the victim and hold the offending party accountable.

    Increasingly over the past decades, the philosophy which drives the methodology for holding the offender accountable has been described as "Just Deserts."  The amount of punishment should be equivalent in value (emotional, material, and quality of life) to the loss experienced by the victim and community in which the crime occurred.  The result is described as having balanced or equalized the relationship and that "Justice" has somehow been achieved.

    The difficulty with this 900+- year-old (since William the Conqueror) colonial, retributive approach to "Justice" is that it uses arithmetic which operates exclusively with negative outcomes.  Reducing the offender to a level of "pain and suffering" equivalent to that of the victim and community may respond to a visceral need for revenge or retaliation, but it fails entirely to respond to the material and quality of life needs of the victim and the community.  The victim of the burglary does not have her sense of safety and security restored.  Instead, the victim is largely ignored by the criminal justice system, except for requirements for further disruption of the victim's life by being a witness for the prosecution.  Then on top of it all, the victim is asked to pay increased taxes to incarcerate the perpetrator of the crime.

    The failure of this process becomes even more apparent when the long-term consequences are considered.  These include the near-total dissatisfaction of the public with the criminal justice system; the crisis of overcrowded prisons; the negative impact of the cost of prison construction on higher education, public schools; all of which reduce the quality of life.

    What makes the social contract work is the addition of value, not the removal of value.  Human beings reciprocate.  If someone does us a favor, we feel a sense of obligation to repay the favor with another. If crime is a violation of this exchange agreement (social contract), then to be effective, the justice system must work to return real value that is visible to the harmed parties, the victim and the community, and the offenders, as happens in the Vermont reparative justice process.

    The history of how societies have changed the social contract over time is revealing. If we had been living in an isolated ninth century Welsh village, the odds would be that if I had stolen from you, I would be outlawed, and driven from the village.  My family would be disgraced, and would have to pay the victim for his losses, and more, to make up for the offense.  So I wouldn't steal from you.  What does this have to do with justice in America?

    The rule of law is a record of what has been decided to be wrong, and what has worked in response, at least in Anglo-Saxon culture that is a thousand or so years old.  It is our collective memory of negative reciprocities -- defining the behaviors that don't work and trying to create a response to each one that will deter others form doing the same thing.  By and large, our definition of the behaviors that don't work hasn't changed much; theft is still theft, even though you do it on the internet, and murder is still murder. What we have spent the last thousand years doing is experimenting with punishments.  We keep trying to find out what works.  During the Dark Ages, the Northern European/Scandinavian model of criminal justice focused on the families of the accused and the victim. Crime was seen as harm to the victim, and her family was entitled to compensation for the loss.  The compensation came from the family of the offender.  Thus, the criminal disgraced his own family.  His offense was costly to them.  The elders of the village decided on the compensation.  Justice was focused on the victim and the harm done to reputations.

    Gorczyk went on to tell that the Norman Conquest changed all that.  William the Conqueror was an invader, and like all colonial powers, he was not interested in enhancing the wealth and safety of the Anglo-Saxons.  His interest was in paying off the vassals who had come with him on the invasion, and in shipping as much wealth as he could back home.  He was also in debt.  He had rented all the boats on the coast of Normandy to carry his army across the channel, and he had to pay owners.  He could pay off the vassals with land and booty, but for the ship-owners and for his own treasury, he needed cash in a hurry.  So he implemented the Norman Rule of Law.  This was the southern European form of law that was based on Roman law.  Under this feudal system, a crime against a vassal of the king was a crime against the crown itself, and thus any penalty was owed to the king's treasury.  The restitution of the victim's family was irrelevant.

    It took William about six years to completely replace the justice system in England. Ever since, we have been trying to undo the damage caused by this heritage.  The reparative boards system is another step in that direction.

EXAMINING THE DEPARTMENT'S HISTORY

    Gorczyk's insights precipitated a thorough re-evaluation of the DOC's role in the light of our understanding of human nature.  For about a hundred years, the department had been heavily influenced by the two-part-classification tendency.  People sentenced for crimes were sorted into two categories: those serving time in prison and those on probation out free in the community.  Prison or free.  Incarceration costs about $30,000 per inmate per year; probation costs about $700.  The prevailing public rationale was that people in prison must be dangerous, so it was all right to spend a lot on them because the public needed to be protected.  People in the probation category must not have posed a threat since they were not in prison; so there was no sense spending much money on them.

    How did we arrive at this way of thinking?  How did it get started?  Long ago, when there was close association between people in their communities, deception and crimes were more easily detected.  Punishment was rare, because it was necessary to repair the damage to the community and family, rather than merely punish. When punishment was meted it occurred swiftly and the families of the victims and offenders were involved in the punishment.  As the population grew, the task of controlling crime became much more complex.  Societies moved to incarceration of offenders.  Epigenetic rules such as the tendency toward two-part classification, no integrated assessment, and deception grew to wield a stronger influence.  The strangers tendency came into play.  By hiding offenders from public view, public interest and true assessment of public responsibility disappeared.  The personal obligation to prevent crime and participate in its punishment was swept under the rug or delegated to people in the criminal justice system.  It became a casualty of distortions in reciprocity.  The inmate was viewed as a tax burden. The cost of incarceration was perceived as greater than the benefit to the public.  Reciprocity was being breached because most inmates were not visibly paying back their victims or the public.

    That was the history.  Invisible offenders behind bars, free probationers loose in the community, and nothing in between.   Human nature's tendency toward two-part classification expressed itself here.  It was in control. My question was, should it be controlling? And if not, what other tendency or tendencies do we want to be controlling?  If we consciously take back the control of deviant behavior, what tendency do we want to put in its place?

    This two-part classification of criminals has long been embodied in law and tradition, but the department's experience and similar occurrences all over the United States show that it is not valid.  The department came to realize that in many cases a middle ground was needed between incarceration and probation; human nature, including criminal behavior, does not always organize itself into two neat packages.
 
FINDING A REMEDY

    The DOC set about to remedy this ineffective tradition by developing a new category for offenders that included an intermediate legal status for them, something between probation and prison. The previous two-part classification of offenders into prison and nonprison, safe and dangerous, treatable and incorrigible, lacked a middle ground.  The department moved away from its own parochial views. It shifted to a better understanding of the needs of its constituents and customers.  It examined the purposes of corrections from the perspectives of the public, the government, and the various parts of the criminal justice system.  It recognized that the rationale underlying all these purposes was to rebalance reciprocity, to mend breaches in reciprocity.  With this in mind, the department carefully analyzed reciprocity in the system, taking into account social roles and obligations within the community, including the obligation to the victim of crime, the community's obligation to punish the offender, the offender's obligation to pay back the victim.  And then came the really important insight: the community's obligation to help both the victim and the offender to restore a balance in reciprocity.  Maybe solving society's crime problem starts with digging deep enough into the fundamental characteristics of human nature.  One of the findings from that dig may be that reciprocity may be the key to solving crime.

    Crime is the breakdown in reciprocity by the offender -- for example, stealing money rather than earning it through service.  Murder, rape, and assault are gross distortions, the ultimate destructions of reciprocal relationships, breakdowns in obligation.  Normal reciprocal exchanges create gratitude.  Crime twists this normal gratitude into anger and resentment.

    We took a leap at redefining the central objective of corrections: to mend breaches in reciprocity, and to do this by acting as the public's agent in helping the public and the offenders to do the mending.

    In John Perry's words: "The fundamental disappointment...expressed by the public was rooted in the inability of the criminal justice system to respond to the public's need for safety from predators and to provide a sense of restoration of order and restitution for the wrong done.  In addition, there were needs for an apology to the victims, return of the taken, repair of the broken, and a guarantee as a bond for future behavior."

    The department proceeded to draft and support legislation titled "An Act Relating to Alternatives to Incarceration" (S.300).  Passed and signed by Governor Kunin on June 27, 1990, the legislation provided the opportunity to tailor a sentence to the criminal and the crime.  Prisons were overcrowded with offenders who could have been effectively punished by alternatives less costly and more rehabilitative than incarceration.  Criminals were either in the community on probation or they were gone -- behind bars, and those that returned from prison were many times prevented from making amends because they were labeled dangerous.  "Don't trust them. They have a prison record."

    The legislation was designed to permit and encourage "more direct community involvement in making offenders accountable, getting offenders to contract to acknowledge their crimes, repair damage, return value to the community, take responsibility for personal change, and provide restitution to victims in a manner that is timely and complete."  It called for "community-based rehabilitation programs for offenders who do not pose a substantial risk of harm to the public."

    We took human nature into account in this design, basing everything on the reciprocity principle.  The objective was to reestablish the chain of favors that had been broken by the offender.  We wanted to get the normal cycle of exchanges going again.  Our aim was to have the offender bring himself or herself back into the cycle.

    Getting this legislation passed was a three-month process involving the department's new understanding of human nature.  Passage required cooperation with the prosecutors, the judiciary and court administrator, the parole board, the defense bar, the public defender, the police, the corrections staff, the victims' advocates, the attorney general, the governor's office, the media, and most important, the judiciary committees and the institutions committees of the senate and house.  Before the law could be enacted, its benefits to each of these stakeholders had to be clearly visible.  The  reciprocity principle guided the DOC to assure these groups that the benefits would outweigh any perceived cost.  For example, victims' advocates were assured that paying back the victim would be built into the process.  That assurance is a necessary requirement for the long-term success of reciprocal exchanges.

    Perry said in retrospect: "We began to understand the different needs and expectations of each person and group with a stake in the prosecution of the crime and the differing views  that each had of the offender and of punishment.  Thinking through the human nature tendencies impinging on the operation of the criminal justice system has provided significant insight into shifting our mission, from treating and controlling offenders to serving the needs of the victims and the community for restoration to a previous social order."

    In the transition from automatic control, we took into account that the public lacked confidence in the criminal justice system, mainly because lay people weren't associated closely enough with the system.  The public didn't understand enough of what was going on to take an active part in fixing the system.

    In effect, what the DOC did was to invent a form of natural governance in criminal justice which involved the public.  Its primary tool for doing this was to design into its system features that induced reciprocity and a specific sequence of emotions that detected and punished deception.  The department incorporated sufficient close association between the offender and community representatives.  It was designed for visibility of the offender within the community, another way of meeting the requirement for close association.  It was designed so that the system provided for the offender to make amends by doing favors for past breaches in reciprocity.  The program produced significant benefits for the victim and the public that were within the capacity of the offender.  It was also designed to detect any cheating during the restoration.

THE REPARATIVE SYSTEM

    This form of natural governance is designed to put into practice an understanding of human nature.  The department of corrections has allowed communities throughout the state to set up reparative boards.  These boards are composed of five or six volunteer community members.  They meet with offenders who have been sentenced to appear before them.  They look these offenders in the eye. They confront them with the harm they have done.  The face-to-face confrontation is powerful.  The board members are the community.  They are the neighbors.  They are the public.  In effect, the community is determining punishment, deciding with offenders how they will best atone for what they have done.  The offenders participate in that decision.  By doing so, they come to see the rightness of it.

    The composition of the reparative boards assures involvement of cross-sections of communities.  One typical board consists of the owner of the local grocery store, an insurance broker, a teacher, a college student, a police officer, and a restaurant owner.   The college student has a bachelor's degree in criminal justice, and she is getting her master's degree in behavioral science and social  work.  Each board member received training before hearing cases.

    About sixty of the boards started operating in 1994.  The communities in which they function vary in size between a thousand and thirty-five thousand people, from the very small to the largest.

    In a typical case in Rutland, the offender had been convicted of drunk driving.  The  board invited his wife and other family members to be present at the hearing.  His wife told the board that her only concern was that the offender do something about his alcohol abuse.  It was hurting the family badly, and endangering the whole community.  In an extended meeting, the board was able to convince the offender to enter a residential treatment program at his own expense.  After going through that program, he appeared before the board again so it could make sure the program had been effective.  It had been, with a lot of family support.

    This case is an example of the reciprocity principle in action.  The community, through the reparative board, does the offender the favor of suggesting that he take the treatment program.  The offender does his family a favor by taking it.  The family does the offender a favor by giving him encouragement and support during the treatment.  The four conditions that induce reciprocity are created -- close association with family members and the community; opportunities for reciprocity. The benefits to the offender, his family, and the community are much greater than the time taken by the board to help. Any cheating would have been detected by the man's family and by monitoring of the board during the treatment.

    In a case before one of the Burlington boards, a bank teller had stolen from his fellow tellers and customers and was convicted on two counts of petty larceny.  The board asked him to pay back all his victims, do sixty-seven hours of community service, tour the local prison, write a "reflection paper," and at his own expense take a course in making decisions.  By thinking in reciprocity terms, the board allowed the mending of the breaches in imaginative ways that would have been impossible if the offender had been incarcerated.  For example, the threat of a subsequent prison term was made by opening up the teller's thinking during a tour of the local jail -- the indirect message was that if you do any more of this, here are the consequences. The specter of these consequences was reinforced by the offender's reflection paper and the course in decision making.  Two hours of the board's time saved every taxpayer in the state the cost of a prison term.

    The boards match the community service to the capabilities of the offender. For example, a civil engineer was asked to do work for the road commissioner in Charlotte, Vermont.  His road design assignment saved the town considerable expense.

          As one board member put it, "Experience with offenders shows that they have to feel something before they recognize it.  For instance, somebody who is an alcoholic has to feel what it's like to be sober before they know the difference.  They have to feel something within themselves that is going to show them the  difference between the negative and the positive.  The same thing works for the community, too.  The community has to feel the beneficial consequences of the offenders doing things out there before it is going to accept the fact that they are out there and not in jail."

    Many offenders feel as if they've never accomplished anything in their lives.  Here's an example of a board giving an offender a chance to accomplish something significant.  In a snowstorm, an elderly woman called a board member and said she couldn't get out her door because the snow was so high.  Offenders on community service went to her home and shoveled her out.  They came back and said, "You should have seen that poor woman!  How would she have gotten out if it hadn't been for us?"   As the board member put it, "It's like all of a sudden their eyes are seeing something besides breaking into these elderly homes and taking what they can and terrorizing the elderly poor.  The offenders shine in that kind of gratitude.  Past feelings of anger fade away.  The elderly don't have to say anything except thank you and that makes these young men feel so good.

    At the very start of the program, many of these elderly were shocked when they saw offenders out in the community. They are criminals!  But they soon forgot about that!  Now they think it's the kids next door and that it's wonderful; neighbor kids who are doing all these chores.  Board members receive many calls saying, "Now don't you send me anybody who is going to take anything in my house."  These board members get another call a short time later telling them, "What a wonderful gentleman you sent down to help us."

    Here's another example of how the reparative board system accomplishes something more than the old system.  A college student in Burlington was convicted of a hate crime of disturbing the peace by telephone.  He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to  reparative probation.  At the board meeting the victim, an African-American activist member of the Alliance Against Racism, played a tape of one of the harassing calls that he had received.  Everyone present was disgusted with the vulgarity expressed on the tape.  The board asked the offender to acknowledge his guilt.  The offender refused, saying that he had not made the calls but only pleaded guilty because his phone had been used for the calls.  The board delayed action on the case until the offender went to the Burlington Police Department and named the friends who had made the calls from his phone.

    Boards take the time to get to the bottom of a case like this.  They fit an appropriate punishment to the offense and the victim's feelings.  Had the college student been sentenced to normal probation, he would quite probably have paid his fine, kept his mouth shut, been kept on probation for a year, and his case closed.  The real culprits would still be unaccountable.  The community outrage would not have had an adequate response.

    An example of how the boards create ways for offenders to feel shame for what they have done wrong is a case in which an offender left the scene of an accident he had caused while under the influence.  The board obtained an agreement from him to serve as a designated driver for eight Saturday nights at a well-known watering hole.  He was asked to explain why he was serving in this capacity while he was there.

    Another example of instilling a discrete amount of guilt is the case of a mother who was convicted of stealing at a grocery store.  Her eight-year-old son was with her.  The board negotiated with her to do community service at her son's school, reminding her that her son was affected by her crime, too.

    When an offender comes initially to a reparative board meeting, the first thing the board usually sees is anger.  He blames everyone except himself.  It's everybody else's fault.  If it weren't for his brother who led him astray, or if it weren't his mother or father who wouldn't give him what he wanted and needed, then it was the lawyer or the judge, or, or. . . He doesn't think anything is fair.  The reasons for this anger can generally be traced by the board to a series of breaches in reciprocity.  The offender may have come from a family that gave him everything but discipline.  He may have received more material things than love, so the source of the anger may be because he was shortchanged on that central emotion.  Board members find themselves needing to deal with this anger, the sputtering and the resentment.  The board's task is to help the offender convert these feelings to remorse and then pride as he works to help the community.

          Several members of the DOC are playing new roles as staff  to the reparative boards.  They follow up on the contracts that have been negotiated by the board with the offender.   Some staff members have become supervisors who take the offender work crews out into the community.  These supervisors are great mentors; while they are taking their "kids" to the workplace, they talk about school if the offenders have dropped out.  If the offenders don't have jobs, the supervisors will ride by a place where there may be an opening and say, "Why don't you run in there?  I'll wait for you.  You get an application and I'll help you fill it out."

    An encouraging trend toward a more integrated assessment, looking at how everything ties together, is reported by board member Maggie Hawksworth.  She says that the board she serves on has broadened the scope of its deliberations to include assessments of education opportunities that reduce the likelihood of reoffense.  Here's an example: several offenders appearing before her board were school dropouts because they weren't learning and had no interest in doing so.  In her words, they were square pegs in round holes.  Maggie is now working with the teachers at the local high school to build more relevance into the courses: creating bridges between the school and the industries in the area that are bringing local company people into the classrooms to dialogue with the students.  What's important to learn and why?  How does it get used?  How does learning it increase the opportunities to get a high-paying job?  This is also another illustration of the reciprocity epigenetic rule in action.  By coming to the teachers with real-life opportunities to increase the motivation for young people to stay in school, a favor to the students and teachers, Maggie increased the capabilities of the square-peg students to reciprocate as productive members of the workforce -- return of the favor, with higher benefits to the community than the cost of bringing more relevance to the curriculum.  The important new message is not about bringing business people into the classrooms; a lot of that was happening already. Rather, the message is that tying the criminal justice system more fully into the community through the reparative board process is causing a significant increase in the bridging between business and education.

    Crime makes eye-catching headlines.  One of the side effects is that the DOC is an easy target for criticism by the media when prisoners are released before their full sentence has been served.  Here's a case where the no integrated assessment epigenetic rule was showing up again.  When some of us called the local newspaper to task for not realizing why this early release was justified, the press dug deeper, with our help.  What the reporter found was that this early-release policy made sense in light of the need of the offender for careful reintegration and support.  Given the overcrowding in the prisons, it was more sensible to use the limited space for violent offenders who had just committed a crime.  The reporter subsequently educated the public about this policy.

    So far, this reparative process has reduced the number of low-risk offenders who would have been placed on probation with its risk of going to jail. One of the obvious benefits is the financial saving to the public. Even more important, in many cases the offenders come out of the reparation experience with changed attitudes.  They really understand the unfairness of their wrongdoing and feel good about what they've done to repair the damage.  Their lives change.  They become productive citizens.  As one member of a local fire department put it, "Boy, these offenders have done our department more good -- in their service work of repairing the firehouse -- than they've ever done harm."  The offenders hear that and they love it.  Their status goes up.  Shame, remorse, and guilt are converted into respect and pride. It is another step toward making natural governance a reality.

RESULTS AND BENEFITS FROM THE REPARATIVE SYSTEM

    Fortunately, this Vermont-grown reparative process is spreading throughout the United States and beyond.  The results: tax saving, community involvement, and citizen satisfaction. The price tag for community members is that they may find themselves participating as reparative board members at some point.

    People who apply the understanding of human nature in this particular area of natural governance often see the experience from their own unique perspective.

    Commissioner John Gorczyk makes the argument that the implicit "social contract" that binds us all together in a civilized world is explicitly violated whenever a crime is committed.  He equates this contract with the reciprocity epigenetic rule.  He understands that reciprocity works best when the exchange of favors is frequent and visible. Consequently, he sees failure to reciprocate as a breach of the implicit social contract.  If it involves deception or cheating, the crime can be the violation of a formal or informal exchange relationship.  Violent crime can be seen as using coercion rather than participating in an exchange.  The "crime" represents an individual's taking something of value from another without returning something of equal or greater value.

    As Gorczyk sees the basic problem with addressing crime in the United States, the second half of the reciprocity cycle is missing.  Bringing the offender to a level of pain and suffering equivalent to that experienced by the victim and community may answer to a visceral need for revenge or retaliation, but it fails entirely to respond to the material needs and quality of life of the victim and the community.  As the examples in this chapter have illustrated, he has incorporated the second half of the reciprocity cycle.  You've seen how the reparative boards insist on integrated assessment by getting at the real "whys" of the crime, and what needs to be done to bring about a fully just solution.  They get the offender to stop self-deception.  They break through the anxiety of the strangers rule by developing a rapport with the offender.

    The thinking processes required for using their deeper understanding of human nature work well for Gorczyk, Perry, Patrissi and me as reported in Chapter 2.   But we acknowledge that other people should apply their unique understanding in whatever ways work best for them.  The name of the game, as we see it, is to determine which epigenetic rule tendencies are generating the problem and which tendencies can create a different outcome.

    Each of the methods Gorczyk, Perry, Patrissi and I use in applying epigenetic rules answer two primary questions: What is going on, and why?  What could go on, and why?  The innovative answers they get come from digging deeper into human nature and the biology behind it.  All of us gain confidence from this digging, assurance that we are on the right track.  It feels right both for the organization and for personal reasons.  What had appeared strange to them when they were first introduced to these concepts has become familiar, logical, and personally helpful.

    This kind of questioning has lead Gorczyk and Perry to take a second look at the whole governance process.  They realize that these insights about human nature disclose significant opportunities for change in the relationships between government, community, family, and individuals.  In their words: "For sixty years or more, government programs have increasingly bypassed the community and the family to deliver services directly to individuals.  While this was done for seemingly good and cogent reason the process had the unintended consequence of disenfranchising both the traditional community governance role in mediating behavior and the family's authority.  It is time to return power to the community and responsibility to the family, with government providing the resources and support."   They say, "we know that the village model works -- small groups, female nurturing model, cognitive self-change in heterogeneous grouping, face-to-face problem-solving, acknowledgment of responsibility, making amends, repairing the damage, reconciliation and forgiveness. We are designed to forgive and reconcile when it is in our interest.  We forgive those whom we judge to be of value to us and those who recognize us as valuable to them, and from whom we and they expect future interaction."

    From their position in the middle of the pain caused by crime, Gorczyk, Perry, and others are crying out for changes.   They are turning to these insights about human nature as one would reach for a life preserver in a storm-tossed ocean -- the ocean of ignorance about what makes us who we are.  They feel the tug at the other end of the rope -- deeper understanding of self and the world.

CONCLUSIONS

    What have we accomplished?  Vermont has set up a system for giving the public much more of a say in criminal justice.  It's working.  What are the implications?  As John Gorczyk points out, this view of the justice system may appear radical, and it is.  For a long time we have increasingly centralized the administration of justice,  focusing the state's increasingly limited resources on only the most serious offenses.  The result has been that the quality of life disputes have been ignored, the confidence of the public in the justice system have been eroded to abysmal levels, and the anger at the failure of government to deliver the desired outcomes has resulted in increased punishment of  the only scapegoats we had.  Changing this model is a big job.  It gives an opportunity for citizens to take a more active role in providing safety and justice in their own neighborhoods than they have had in many decades.  It also requires the current justice system to let go of old ways, and devolve power, authority, and  responsibility to the community. Gorczyk believes it can be done beyond Vermont.  If we are going to be serious about public safety nationally, we need to get serious about community.  We all need  to -- the criminal justice system cannot do it alone.

    Fortunately, market research by the DOC shows that the public wants to be involved in criminal justice.  People want safety from violent predators, accountability for the violations of law, repair of the damage done and treatment to assure safe release -- with strong community participation in the process by which all this happens.

    In its most recent thinking, the DOC has gone beyond reparative justice.  John Gorczyk and his staff are now thinking of themselves as the "Department of Cooperation".   Chapters 5 and 6 will reveal more about how this change is taking shape as they build on their understanding of human nature.
 
BEYOND CRIME

    This chapter has shown how to meet the prerequisite conditions for inducing balanced and expanding reciprocity. It has demonstrated a process for detecting breaches in reciprocity and healing them.  The next chapters will test ways of governing that provide the other three conditions necessary for inducing reciprocity that are at the core of natural democracy: close proximity between people, frequent opportunities for exchange of favors, and the value of the favor to the recipient being greater than the cost to the giver of the favor.

    Governance by control of our genes is shaping up.  Evolution has given us the capability.  Now we are finding how to use it.

    There appear to be grounds for optimism in what's been learned about criminal justice.  Suppose I take the most upbeat view that I can imagine.  Suppose I assume we're not stuck with all the chaos and destruction that have been going on in the world for so many years.  We can take charge.  There is no genetic destiny holding this chaos in place.  We know the defining core of our existence.  It is the set of epigenetic rules and emotions built by many years of biological trial and error.  At any point in our lives, we can now set up systems that bring out our natural tendencies to cooperate and reciprocate.  We can imagine extending this process into our personal lives, helping our children to get the most out of life, and beyond that, making governance work for us to get wherever we want to go.

    We are making progress in proving that human nature tells us much that might help us choose a meaning for our lives.  Maybe Homo Sapiens can settle down and be happy before we wreck the planet?  How do I know it will work beyond the criminal area?  Up ahead lies new territory.

    The value of the discoveries that are being made in these tests is that they seem to give us predictive power that humanity has never had before.  We can imagine a change we want to make.  We can imagine a future we want to have.  We can get inside people's minds -- our own included -- to understand how people would respond to that change and that future.  We can set up systems for relating to each other so that breaches in reciprocity don't occur; and if they do occur, they can be healed effectively.  We can build into these systems the conditions for inducing reciprocity.  We can build natural democracy with its governance of human nature.