🎧 The capacity to change
Critique the system, not the people
Framer is a newsletter that offers re-frames so that we can imagine other realities.
🎧 Listen to it, this one’s 15 minutes long.
Let's talk about how systems change when roles and rewarded behaviors change.
I first started thinking about role definition in 2018, when I heard Esther Perel give a talk in which she placed relationships in context of this moment in history. She says that because many of us have shifted away from traditional society and religion, we’re in a constant state of negotiation with our partners. Roles are no longer neatly defined, so it’s up to us to constantly communicate about our needs to define the roles on our own terms.
It’s cool that we get to imagine and communicate what we need as individuals instead of slipping into what's been predefined. It’s truly wild that we’re not taught interpersonal communication skills within our educational system, given how important these skills are. I’ve spent so much time and energy learning how to understand and communicate my needs and desires.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about role negotiation beyond a romantic context. As I get older (and feel more like a real adult) I’m more aware of the roles I’m participating in and how that plays into a system bigger than myself.
In search of nuance about roles (that I shockingly have not found on Twitter), I re-read The Forest and the Trees by Allan G. Johnson. I randomly found this book in a hallway at a going-away party and I’m glad I did because it’s the best primer on how social systems work. I would totally make this book required reading in every high school if I had that kind of power.
My biggest takeaway from this book is that if we want to change anything, we need to examine the roles people occupy (rather than going after individuals).
Roles are important because they define our participation in groups, and because we come out of the womb all weak, we are wired to need groups to survive.
A role typically has some well-understood expectations; for one, we roughly know which behaviors will be rewarded. We tend to choose roles that we know we’ll be rewarded for — in his book, Johnson calls this the path of least resistance. And that’s just how humans work: we need and seek acceptance all of the time as a survival mechanism.
Roles are important in understanding our motivations but it’s also crucial to remember that:
˜”*°•.˜”*°• people ≠ systems •°*”˜.•°*”˜
Here’s how Johnson describes it:
“What social life comes down to, then, is a dynamic relationship between social systems and the people who participate in them. Note that people participate in systems without being parts of the systems themselves. In this sense, ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’ are positions in my family, and I, Allan, am a person who actually occupies those positions. It’s a crucial distinction that’s easy to lose sight of. It’s easy to lose sight of because we’re so used to thinking solely in terms of individuals. It’s crucial because it means that people aren’t systems, and systems aren’t people, and if we forget that, we’re likely to focus on the wrong thing in trying to solve our problems.”
A system is made up of a bunch of roles and that system stays alive as long as individuals participate in those roles. So how do we change systems? Change the incentives and rewarded behavior.
To put this theory to the test, I looked at the prison system, which has well-defined roles like inmate, prison guard, and victim. What happens if you change the rewarded behavior for each of these roles?
I was reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman and learned that Norway redefined these roles within their prisons in 1998 and has changed the system for the better. Johnson would give the Nordic politicians a gold star for focusing on roles to get at the root cause of a gnarly issue; the roles create a framework for participation that structures behavior and how people move in sync towards some bigger goal or outcome.
SYSTEM
Norway’s prison system used to look a lot like America’s prison system; the core goal was to punish prisoners. Just like in America, the outcomes weren’t looking too great (i.e. they had high recidivism rates), so Norway’s politicians decided to try something different. They shifted away from retribution and moved towards rehabilitation.
Life in a Norwegian prison mimics normal life on the “outside.” Prisoners focus on building up the skills they need to return to society; this is called the “principle of normality.” There are two famous low-security prisons in Norway called Halden and Bastoy that take this philosophy to the next level. Inmates have private rooms, access to meditation halls, can do things like drive vehicles, and can do fun things like go fishing, play tennis, or ride horses. The prison is run and sustained by the prisoners: they grow and cook the food to feed the population and they build and maintain the infrastructure. The feeling at these prisons is totally different from what we see in the U.S.; American prison officials who visited said that the prison would feel like a 5-star resort to an American inmate.
In Norway, prison guards believe that being in prison is punishment enough. This is in stark contrast with prisons in the U.S., which inflict punishment at every turn. The head of North Dakota’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Leann Bertsch, who visited the Norwegian prisons, reflected: “there’s nothing in court orders that tells prisons to inflict punishment or cause pain, so I don’t know how over time we thought that treating people like animals or less than human was part of our mission.” She basically admits that American prisons have evolved to dehumanize people.
Norway’s taken the opposite route; instead of dehumanizing people, they leave people better than they found them. In 2007, the Norwegian criminal system started helping inmates find jobs and homes before their release. Compare that to American inmates who get one set of clothes and a bus ticket, plus whatever money they have left in their commissary or if they’re lucky, sent by family. Do we really expect someone with limited resources and experience to smoothly transition back into society? How much is it costing us to punish rather than rehabilitate?
ROLES + REWARDED BEHAVIORS
Norwegian prisons feel different than U.S. prisons because the roles are rewarded differently.
Norwegian prison guards employ soft power rather than hard power – and it works.
The “soft” style is called “dynamic security” and it encourages positive interactions rather than coercion; this creates a respectful environment and a safer place to be. In the mornings, Norwegian prison guards greet each inmate with “good morning” to wake them up; Danford, an American prison official who witnessed this ritual said, “It almost reminds you of your mother waking you up as a small child.” The rehabilitative approach is obvious in these actions.
The path of least resistance in a Norwegian prison system is to go to counseling, learn new skills, and be respectful. The system is designed to show inmates what a better life could look like and prepare them to actually have one. It’s easier to evolve and meaningfully participate in society than it is to go back to the same old bullshit.
Not only does this change the game for inmates, but it makes a big difference for prison guards too. Prison guards and correction officers in the U.S. are just as likely to suffer from PTSD as someone who fought in a war because of the violent nature of their jobs. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
I haven’t yet mentioned the role of the victim and what justice means to them. I won’t pretend to understand what this feels like but apparently, a majority of victims would prefer rehabilitation and structural change over retribution. Part of that structural change is a focus on healing. Just like we don’t support healing in the prison population, we don’t support healing for victims, who experience trauma. We would be much better off if we did.
RESULTS
Recidivism rates in Norway are some of the lowest in the world, whereas recidivism rates in America are some of the highest. ~20% of released inmates are arrested within 2 years in Norway, whereas ~70% of released prisoners in the U.S. are arrested again within 3 years.
To put it differently, an American prison official said, “We feel like we’re serving our communities by keeping dangerous individuals enclosed from society, and here, I think they feel like they’re serving their community, by taking those dangerous individuals and changing them for the better ... I’d never really looked at my job as an opportunity to change somebody’s life.” When you help someone change their life for the better, it keeps people out of prison.
Haters will say that Norway isn’t a good analogy because the population is smaller and more homogenous. I’d argue that none of that matters because the roles within the prison system are the same; they’re just rewarded differently. Norway’s prison system used to look just like the one we have in the U.S., yet once they stopped focusing on punishing the individual, and reimagined the roles and purpose of the system, the outcomes changed.
Like Johnson mentioned, when we look beyond the individual, we get better at solving systemic problems. When we see patterns in behavior, it’s a good clue that there’s something to investigate with how roles are being defined and rewarded.
And when we examine that, we’ll realize that the systems we have today can be reimagined and renegotiated to better serve our collective needs.