Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
In this controversial and compassionate book, the distinguished psychiatrist James Gilligan proposes a radically new way of thinking about violence and how 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 by 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 in constraint for their punishment and for society's revenge. The twentieth century was steeped in violence. If we attempt 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.
About the Author
James Gilligan has been clinical supervisor and consultant in forensic psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital of the Harvard Medical School since 1995. He directed mental health programs for the Massachusetts prison system for ten years, and served as Director of the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and of the Center for the Study of Violence in teaching hospitals of the Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes.
Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow),James Gilligan,Thames & Hudson,0500282781,American,Criminology,Current Affairs,Political Freedom & Security - Law Enforcement,Politics/International Relations,Sociology,Treatment Of Offenders,Violence (Sociological Aspects),Violence in Society
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