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Harlow
Research
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The
Impact of Harry Harlow’s Research:
While
many experts derided the importance of parental love and affection,
Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital
for normal childhood development. Additional experiments by Harlow
revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to
profound psychological and emotional distress and even death.
Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John
Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how
orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups and child care
providers approached the care of children.
Obviously,
by using above quotation I'm not suggesting that adult prisoners are
in a childhood development state. I'm just not convinced that prison
environments that ignore psychological needs are sanguine for adults.
(WES).
In
a blog some years ago and I set out the equal/special paradox that
lies at the heart of human motivation.** We all need the sense of
essential human equality with others. At the same time, we all want
to feel and be special in some way. This is another way of saying
that we all want to feel significant, needed, and worthy. This drive
results in the equality/special paradox.
Tonight
I attended a support group for those with family in prison. It meets
at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church from 7 PM-8:30 PM. The facilitator
is a Catholic Deacon and he is perfect in the role of group leader. It
is a small group, usually around 12 or less.
Tonight
the irony of incarceration was mentioned. In my view, the object of
incarceration is primarily punishment and a type of retribution and
controlled public revenge. The prisons do a very good job at this.
It is interesting to look at incarceration head to head with the
fundamental drives to feel equal and special and define how these
needs are addressed. If there is to be any hope of reducing
recidivism, these needs and motivations must be met extensively. If
these fundamentals are spurned, there can be little hope that
compassion and the cultivation of a heightened social conscience—to
be helpful (at least not harmful) to self and others—will be
propagated.
Imprisonment
begins with a strip search and issuance of uniform prison garb. A
person is thus stripped of individuality and all positive sense of
specialness. Rather than a recognition of equality, all are subject
24/7 to a sense of subjugation and subordination. The family and
loved ones offer an outlet of significance—at least to those not
effectively alone in the world. However, this outlet is rigidly
regulated in regards to visitation and correspondence. To a
significant degree, the human drive for equality and specialness are
not only unattended to, but deliberately made problematic or
impossible. We intentionally have designed a system to subjugate people
(for the most part not from choice environments to begin with and in
many ways already subjugated) and expect good things to come from
it—as if yet another punishment will surely do the trick at last. It is time to
remove retribution and dehumanization from justice and see what the
disciplines of love can do.
**Blog
treating the equal/special paradox:
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