There is perhaps no issue more critical or central to criminal legal reform than how we think about and approach violence. Over half the people in US prisons have been convicted of a violent crime, and many of those convicted of “nonviolent” crimes received prison sentences because of uncharged or unconvicted violent conduct. And as Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins pointed out in their book Reference Zimring and HawkinsCrime Is Not the Problem (1999), the fear of violence, lethal violence in particular, suffuses the decisions made at every level of the criminal legal system.
Yet serious discussions about how to approach and think about violence are still the third rail of criminal legal reform. Reformers remain apprehensive to even raise the issue, while defenders of the status quo are quick to exploit each and every act of violence to push back against change. Thus David Sklansky's new book, A Pattern of Violence, could not be more timely. The book's goal is not to show us how central violence is to criminal legal policy, but rather takes that centrality as a given and then explores how confused, inconsistent, and often simply incorrect the law's, and the public's, views of violence are.
Sklansky highlights three central challenges, each of which is substantial. First, he notes that we struggle to even define what violence is. Not everything that causes physical harm is classified as a “violent” crime (like some misdemeanor assaults), while some crimes that cause no physical harm are still defined as “violent” (like some burglaries). Second, we often waver on its significance. Sometimes that an offense is violent supersedes all other aspects of it, but not always (like when we view killings by children as different than otherwise identical killings by adults). And third, our views on the causes of violence are often too simplistic. We sometimes view violence as a product of a person's environment and circumstances, but too often we oversimplify its causes and see it as something almost entirely essential to that person himself.
Sklansky examines how these challenges play out in six distinct domains: the general criminal code, the regulations around police behavior and police violence, the specifics of rape and domestic violence law, the treatment of violence by and against children, the regulation of violence (especially rape) in prison, and the Supreme Court's focus (or lack thereof) on violence in its jurisprudence about speech and guns.
To me, the book's strongest argument is its repeated emphasis that we adopt an overly “characterological” view of violence: violence, we commonly think, stems from who a person is, rather than the situations they find themselves in. As Sklansky demonstrates clearly, it is a view that justifies some of the harshest and more punitive aspects of our current criminal legal system in all the domains that he considers, even if it runs contrary to much of the evidence about how violence arises. Driving home the errors of this perspective, as well as how it is inescapably tied to racist views on behavior, is a major contribution of this book.
The book also provides important historical accounts about how our sense of violence and its importance have shifted over time. While “violence” is currently the class of offense that attracts the most political attention, it has not always been so: vice, more than violence, was once the sensationalized crime of choice. Our views of rape and domestic violence have also shifted over time. Although the crimes were initially viewed as primarily “sex” crimes, in the 1980s advocates pushed to frame them as more about violence than sex, only to return to centering “sex” in recent years. The same pattern has occurred for violence committed by children, where the relative importance of “youth” over “violence” has waned and then waxed.
Also importantly, Sklansky warns that our still-strong proclivity for classifying more and more behavior as violent is risky. Defining conduct as “violent” brings it attention, but that frame then limits, perhaps problematically, how we think about the causes of and solutions to that behavior. Similarly, at times we risk reducing the word “violence” to mean “behavior we really just don't like,” which similarly constricts our ability to think clearly about different sorts of harms and the different responses they may require.
Sklansky's description of the changing importance we place on the violence of behavior is particularly relevant to our current moment. Too often, changing how we approach “violence” is viewed as some sort of political impossibility. Sklansky's book provides an important reminder that politics are never immutable, even for something as emotional salient right now as violent behavior.
The one issue I had with the book is that I fear it may make our views on violence appear more incoherent than they really are. At times, I felt the book could have been stronger had it been three chapters, not seven: one each for the three ways we misthink violence (its definition, its significance, and its nature), with each chapter relying on examples pulled from the six categories he uses as chapters. There is no doubt that our thinking about violence is often contradictory, but I also had a nagging feeling that there were some more-coherent patterns to how we view violence's definition, significance, and nature that I had a hard time seeing because of how their discussions were broken up across multiple chapters.
Sklansky's book, however, is ultimately less about providing clear answers and more about making sure we appreciate how much conceptual confusion undergirds a term we frequently use with such confidence and little thought—and a term with significant political consequences. Our data and statutes draw seemingly objective lines between “violent” and “nonviolent” behavior; A Pattern of Violence does an excellent job of laying out how tentative, subjective, inconsistent, incoherent—and mutable—those lines really are.
