I find social science research so rewarding that I am seemingly always in data gathering mode.  This gratifying activity, as with most pleasurable things, has a downside;  in this case, there are times that I feel like a creep and a fraud.  One may query, what can be creepy or fraudulent about info collecting?  The short answer is that whether it is an inmate or a guard that I am speaking with, I can never let the examinee know what my position is, lest it color their position.  Consequently, what seems like a casual conversation to them is really a snoop session.

Yet, karma does well at balancing things out.  This is rural Iowa and oft time, because of my snooping, I am forced to listen to diatribes trumpeting the intellect and perspicacity of Glen Beck over that of President Obama’s, and I have to keep a straight face.  How does one juxtapose a blowhard who barely finished high school and a University of Chicago Constitutional law professor?  As usual, I have divagated.

There are two punishments in our society that much of my post-secondary writings prove me a passionate antagonist of:  capital punishment and corporal punishment.  The creepy  and fraudulent thing that I did yesterday regarding one of these punishments was to—in the words of my southern relatives—throw a rock and hide my hand.  I started a conversation with other inmates about the Adrian Peterson child abuse case, and once it was started, I blended into the scenery to observe and take notes.

This prison has a softball field and a set of bleachers, the bleachers are divided in half with a walkway splitting them; my observations took place on the south end section of the bleachers.  Doing field research on the south end of the bleachers is not inconsequential.  The north end of the bleacher area is unofficially reserved for skinheads, Aryans, a group who calls themselves “the Peckerwoods,” and generally anyone else who considers himself a winner on the sole basis of possessing melanin deficient skin.  The south end is an eclectic mix of everyone: regular white cats, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians.

The seeming consensus among this heterogeneous sampling (I must be in my statistician frame of mind) was that Adrian Peterson was within his parental rights to “whip his son’s ass.”  Further, their parents had beaten their asses, and they in turn had beaten their children’s asses.  For about forty minutes, seventeen inmates—coming and going—took part in the conversation with the only variant being at what age do you cease to spare the rod, but all seventeen agreed that the rod must be levied.

Today I did some inconspicuous follow-up and learned that 10 of the 17 unwitting participants had been convicted of violent offenses.  Two more of the conversation’s participants had initially been charged with violent offenses; however, those charges had been dropped due to plea deals.  Yet another one of the guys told me that he was not comfortable revealing his reason for being here, which usually means that it is a sex offense.

The thesis topic for my master’s degree, and an article that I am preparing to submit for peer-review and possible publication entitled “Hey honey, let’s have a …convict,” examines how corporal punishment and other socialization factors are linked to violent crimes and drug use.  After writing my hypothesis for these endeavors, I took a preliminary look at my data and discovered that 60% of the persons who committed violent crimes had either one or both parents who used corporal punishment.  This suggests that there is a correlation between violent crimes and corporal punishment, but in the language of the statisticians, correlation is not necessarily causal.

Accordingly, as a scientist, I will wait until I finish the analysis of the data to offer a scientific opinion.  However, I will offer up that these preliminary findings are disturbing. It is also interesting that even with such a small sample size—seventeen—the group in the bleachers was still in lockstep with my earlier findings as nearly 60% of them (.588 to be precise) had been convicted of violent offenses and were corporally punished as children.

During one of the follow-up conversations, I spoke with a 51 year old, white inmate who is originally from rural central Missouri, but does not fit in on the north end of the bleachers.  My initial thought was to paraphrase what he offered, but I have subsequently decided to quote him.  He said, “Big Pip [addressing me by one of my nicknames], most folks considered my daddy to be a pretty decent man, and so do I.  He whipped his kids and women, and if they deserve it, I don’t see nothing wrong with it.  And that’s why I think that they shouldnt’ve done that to Adrian Peterson.”  Again, here is an instance where I could not let my true feelings show, I was forced to just listen and learn.

Sociological and statistical training notwithstanding, the empirical evidence and knowledge that I have accrued from nearly 19 years of continuous incarceration has been my best teacher.  That teacher has taught me that not only is the criminal justice system broken, but so too are many of our socialization processes that we label culture.  We are teaching children, at the most impressionable age, that conflict and disobedience is solved by force, which leads to my next seemingly jejune and sophomoric statement: violence begets violence.  Honest assessment will lead some well-meaning parents to the conclusion that they share the blame and shame of their sons’ orange prison suit.