James Gilligan

Drawing on firsthand experience as a prison psychiatrist, his own family history, and literature, Gilligan unveils the motives of men who commit horrifying crimes, men who will not only kill others but destroy themselves rather than suffer a loss of self-respect. With devastating clarity, Gilligan traces the role that shame plays in the etiology of murder and explains why our present penal system only exacerbates it. Brilliantly argued, harrowing in its portraits of the walking dead, Violence should be read by anyone concerned with this national epidemic and its widespread consequences.

"In this book, the American psychiatrist James Gilligan proposes a radically new way of thinking about violence and how best to prevent it. Violence is most often addressed in moral and legal terms: 'How evil is this action, and how much punishment does it deserve?' Unfortunately, this way of thinking - the basis for our legal and political institutions - does nothing to shed light on the causes of violence." "Violent criminals have been Gilligan's teachers and he has been their student. Prisons are microcosms of the societies in which they exist, and examining them in detail, we can learn about society as a whole. Gilligan suggests treating violence as a public health problem. He advocates initiating radical social and economic change to attack the root causes of violence, focusing on those at increased risk of becoming violent, and dealing with those who are already violent as if they were in quarantine, rather than simply incarcerating them for reasons of punishment and revenge." "The twentieth century was steeped in violence. If we try to understand the violence of individuals, we may come to prevent the collective violence that threatens our future far more than all the individual crimes put together."--Jacket.