On the individual level, violence is driven by shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet one’s economic needs—factors that are also the core features of imprisonment. This means that the core national violence prevention strategy relies on a tool that has as its basis the central drivers of violence.

I believe when we hurt someone, we incur an obligation. Period. Nothing changes that obligation— not our own history of pain, our unhealed trauma, nothing.

When we talk about people who commit violence as monsters (or “superpredators,” if you prefer), we often viciously deny them the benefits we afford to people we consider fully human, but we also do not hold them to the obligations to which we hold people whose humanity we do not question.

Research unequivocally shows that one of the most surefire predictors of violence is surviving it. Nearly everyone who has committed harm has survived it, and few have received any formal support to heal.

It is my belief that when we hurt people, we owe something, and one of the things we owe is to face what we have done. In that sense, when it comes to demanding that those who have committed wrongdoing pay that debt, there is nowhere softer on crime than prison.

In the aftermath of harm, survivors need to locate responsibility somewhere. When the person responsible for the harm is denying (or just not openly accepting) their role, it can be common for survivors to assign that responsibility to their own actions.

Survivors are often extraordinary at metabolizing just about anything into healing.

Forms of punishment that do not include the human reckoning of accountability and the human grappling of remorse rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation— a threat from outside. One of the effects of accountability is to help foster people’s intrinsic motivation, which manifests in part as remorse.