The question underneath all of this is not whether punitive systems are expensive and ineffective. They are, and the evidence is not difficult to find. The question is why we keep choosing them anyway. The answer is not stupidity. It is neuroscience.
Did the person in the workhouse choose their poverty? Did the refugee choose their country of birth? Did the prisoner choose the neurological wiring, the childhood, the circumstances that produced the act that produced the sentence?
The honest answer, in almost every case, is: not really. Not in any way that makes punishment the appropriate response rather than the satisfying one. The conditions precede the person. The person arrives into circumstances they did not design and cannot fully escape, and we respond to the outcomes of those circumstances with a system whose primary function is to make us feel that something has been done.
Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist and primatologist at Stanford, makes the hard version of this argument in Determined (2023). His position is unambiguous: every behaviour is the product of genetics, neurology, upbringing, stress hormones, and everything that preceded the moment of the act — none of which the person chose. The chain goes back before birth. You cannot find the point at which the person stepped outside that chain and made a free decision. There is no such point.
His most useful illustration is epilepsy. In parts of Europe, men with epilepsy were castrated until the nineteenth century. Their seizures were taken as evidence of moral failure — demonic possession, weak will, sinful nature. We punished them for it. Then we learned what epilepsy actually was, and we stopped. We did not become more lenient. We became more accurate. Sapolsky’s argument is that we are in the equivalent pre-scientific period now, with respect to most of what we send people to prison for. The neurology is not yet legible enough, the cultural acceptance not yet wide enough, to make the shift. But the shift is the same kind of shift.
He is careful about what follows from this. He is not arguing that dangerous people should roam free. A car whose brakes don’t work should be kept off the road. A person with active tuberculosis should be kept away from crowded rooms. A leopard should not be in your house. None of them chose their condition. All of them can legitimately be contained. But when we quarantine someone for a disease they did not choose, the honest framing is that we are taking something from them — their liberty, their time, the life they would have lived — for the protection of others. And the taking requires justification and, in most civilised legal traditions, compensation. You lose your freedom to protect the public. The public owes you something for it.
Follow that logic into the prison. If the person is there because their nature — the neurology, the childhood, the circumstances they did not design — made them dangerous, then the same framing applies. We are taking something. The years. The relationships. The work they would have done, the person they might have become. If it is containment and not punishment, it is a taking that generates a debt. We would owe them: the maintained family contact, the education, the treatment for whatever made them dangerous in the first place, the housing on release — not as rehabilitation dressed up as mercy, but as the terms of the transaction. You gave us safety. We owe you this.
The reason we do not frame it that way is that framing it that way makes it expensive. The language of desert is cheaper. You deserve to be here. We owe you nothing. Percy has always understood that the question of what we owe each other is best avoided by insisting that the people we have locked up deserved what they got. Once you believe that, the debt disappears. The taking becomes a gift.
Sapolsky puts a brain scanner on the feeling itself. In the studies he describes, people are given scenarios of social norm violations and watched while they decide. The determination of guilt — did they do it? — activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: the deliberative, reasoning brain. But the moment the question shifts to punishment — how much should they suffer? — the limbic system takes over: the amygdala, the insula, the emotional and reward circuitry. The more that system fires, the harsher the sentence. The cortex follows and constructs the justification. Righteous punishment activates the dopamine reward pathway the way food does, the way sex does. It is not a metaphor to say that punishing people feels good. It is neurologically accurate. The workhouse was not a policy failure. It was a reward.
Sapolsky’s framework gives us the neuroscience but not quite the politics. If punitive instincts are the product of nature and nurture — if nobody, strictly speaking, could have done otherwise — then what follows? Not indifference to consequences. The system still causes harm; the costs still fall on the wrong people. What follows, perhaps, is a different kind of argument: one that meets people where they are rather than where we’d like them to be. You don’t have to condemn the person to oppose the system they’re sustaining. In practice, that turns out to matter. People who feel met rather than argued at have a habit of opening up.
A friend of mine — call her Daisy — wants to take me to see the immigrant communities she works among, to show me things she assumes I haven’t seen. The assumption is that my position must come from inexperience: that if you want to extend to others the freedoms you yourself enjoy, you probably haven’t been exposed to enough. It doesn’t occur to her that I might have seen plenty and still arrived where I am. She is punishing herself, as it happens — keeping at arm’s length the people most likely to understand her, in order to correct an innocence I don’t have.
I should be honest about my own position. I am prejudiced against prejudiced people. I find the dopamine hit of contempt for the intolerant as reliable as anyone else finds the hit of contempt for the foreigner. What I am trying to reach for — and not always managing — is something different: not the correction of people whose nature and nurture made them who they are, but the simple acknowledgement that they are they and I am I. The system still has to change. That’s a different argument from telling them they’re wrong.
That feeling is Percy’s most reliable instrument. He did not invent it. It is as old as the species. But he has learned to tune it, to aim it, to institutionalise it, to charge it to the public account, and to make sure the costs land on people who are not in the room when the decisions are made — the prisoner who cannot vote, the poor person who cannot lobby, the refugee on the barge in Portland Harbour who has not yet learned enough English to explain what they left behind.
There is a policeman in the first Die Hard film called Al Powell. He is a desk sergeant, sidelined to a patrol car, because he once shot a child by mistake — mistook a threat that wasn’t there for one that was. He hasn’t fired his weapon since. He spends the film as Bruce Willis’s only contact with the outside world, a voice on a radio, unable to act, managing his trauma by pretending it isn’t there. And then at the very end, when the last villain is about to kill the hero, Powell draws his weapon and shoots him. Clean. First shot since the child. He saves the day.
The film presents this as redemption. As healing. As the wound finally closing. And I understand why it feels that way — I have sat in cinemas and felt it myself. The relief when the bad guy goes down. The satisfaction when the score is settled. Gary Cooper in the street, John Wayne on the ridge, Bruce Willis in the elevator shaft — I have wanted them to win. I have wanted, through them, to win myself. The school bully who made my life a misery. The boss who didn’t listen. The person who got away with something they shouldn’t have. I have outsourced my desire for vengeance to an actor on a screen and felt, briefly, that the world was just.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord — meaning: don’t you do it, I’ll handle it. We couldn’t wait. We built an entire industrial entertainment complex to handle it for us instead, film after film, the villain dispatched, the score settled, the wound closed. Two hours in the dark and the bully is dead and we walk out into the car park feeling that something has been put right.
But the child Al Powell shot is still dead. The bullet at the end of the film doesn’t change that. What changes is how Powell feels. The film offers the feeling as the resolution — the right killing at the right moment resolving the moral damage done by the wrong killing. That trauma can be cured by doing the thing again, correctly this time. It is a deeply attractive idea. It is also, on any honest examination, nonsense.
I should say: I prefer a film that makes me cry. The weeping film is the one that asks you to feel someone else’s pain. The revenge film is the one that asks you to feel your own satisfaction. One of those is empathy. The other is the dopamine hit dressed up as justice — the same hit that built the workhouse, filled the prison, moored the barge in Portland Harbour, and sent the bill to the wrong address. Percy has always known that the hit is enough. You don’t need to solve the problem. You just need people to feel that something has been done.
The bayonet has a worker at either end. The person being punished is impoverished, imprisoned, detained on a barge. But the person cheering the punishment is also paying for it — in taxes that fund the workhouse, the prison, the Bibby Stockholm, the deportation flights that mostly don’t happen. And in the society they end up living in: atomised, fearful, stripped of the bus and the square and the fish van, bowling alone in a country that chose to spend its money on punishment rather than on the things that would have made punishment less necessary. The stupid policy feels good to the people who support it. It also hurts them. They just don’t see the connection, because Percy made sure the cost lands in a different budget from the feeling.
We are living in the house that punishment built. We paid for every brick of it. And the bill, as always, has been sent to the wrong address.