The Punisher's Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society)

Artists leave us images of themselves in various ways. . . intentional portraiture, hidden symbols, obscured mirror images. This is a fascinating view of judge as artist and as a better-than. American judges are special, perhaps more able to tolerate being punishers by gifts of neuroscience and evolution. Claiming the right to punish based on evolutionary adaptations, this judge puts Preparation H on pangs of conscience that might remind him that the system is broken, that he is desensitized or conditioned more than genetically superior, and that he that he should humble. Neither science nor evolution is as simple as a cursory summary of current neuroscientific theories. Society includes a variety of people and human behaviors. We are no longer on bended knee to the Sun God King of France. The God-Doctor complex is diminishing rapidly. People even vote against the Fear of God tithing schedules to do the Starbucks Rosary of the Latte instead. However, judges hold onto their Divinity wigs. They dress differently. They perpetuate the worst of "us" versus "them" with legal literacies, court superstructures, technicalities, assumptions, They look backwards more than forwards (case law matters more than future societal harms when making decisions). Arguing or correcting a judge is forbidden. Judges demand the respect that was once only the purview of monarchs. In one hundred years, third party punishments without respect to individuality and genetics and least detrimental interventions will show the fashions of this Judge and his world to be primitive and shameful. On page one, he writes, "No doubt there are many examples of both naivete and error." This is correct. Add to that denial. I still give five stars because the book is well-written and informative. Understanding the intentional and unintentional harms that judges do and the internal dialogue used by this judge to justify that harm is enlightening. Negligence by judges is not criminalized; immunity creates an unreconciled debt to society and a disrespect for the numinous. Thank you for allowing me to see one judge's "crazy and evil" paradoxical world of blaming, excluding, excuses, mirroring, capriciousness, and assumptions. His descendants will have a window into the this judge's self-talk more than descendants of English judges who exported people to America and Australia, more than the descendants of judges who denied rights to Jews in Nazi Germany, more than the descendants of Inquisitors, more than descendants of slave galley owners, more than the descendants of many who participate in systems of atrocities. Let us hope this rationalization for the tough-minded temperament that operates without personal accountability for outcomes will be seen for what it is: primitive McDonald's drive-thru judging and the punishing parent-God judge. This self-portrait is a wet, symbolic, and shameful historical death mask that is hardening not only on the author but all of the highly compensated, liability-immune, privileged class of opinionated judges who personally benefit from a broken punishment-minded complex. Your honor, redemption is possible. Give us a new book with a vision for completely scrapping the current model. Propose a system that grows people instead of filling refrigerators with produce no one will eat.

Why do we have this seemingly irrational need for retribution? Why cannot punishment be all about utility? Why do we feel that we should not punish mad or clumsy people who have done us harm? Hoffman conducts a Copernican Revolution in our understanding of blame, punishment and forgiveness when he breaks these concepts free from all vague philosophical and ethical theories and connects them to where they all came from: Evolution.

Very detailed and interesting dive into the process of punishment, from a multi-disciplinary point of view. The cool thing is this author is in the business of state punishment, so he has a front row seat to the process. Heck, he is the process. Very well researched and documented. Worth the read.

I loved the book! Smart, rich, well-wrought. I've been reading philosophy of law and cognitive neuroscience for decades, and nothing before THE PUNISHER'S BRAIN has stitched the two together so engagingly. The future of neurolaw is in Hoffman's capable hands.

A fascinating explanation of crime and punishment in America.

The Punisher’s Brain is a curious book written by an American trial judge and published in 2014 in association with Cambridge University's Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society.Everybody ought to read the chapters on Legal Dissonances and Process Dissonance. But then again you might want to read the preceding chapters as prerequisite to understanding the why and how of the author's prescriptions.The book title accurately describes the book's content. He examines current neuroscience as it apples to brain imaging and mapping; determining which areas "light-up" when we are engaging in thoughts of fairness, blame and punishment. This, coupled with what we know of how the human brain evolved, reveals a parallel course with how our laws have evolved.Since I've studied most of this material in the past, the book becomes of most interest to me when it gets to policy prescriptions and describes where certain laws understandably or mistakenly have been failing us. Sometimes law has not kept up with our current state of evolution, reason and culture. Sometimes we fail because we are are reacting rather than reasoning. We are at our best when we try to get one step ahead of our learning curve so that our best moral intuitions can guide us.BUTI have to throw myself upon the mercy of the court because I have to amend my review. I wrote the first review when I had less than ten pages left. Little did I know the author could confound me about his previous chapters in these last pages.Sometime after an evidently long forgotten chapter about the importance of forgiveness to all human societies as well as the law, our author (the judge) promotes his idea of retributivism in order as to punish the crime rather than the criminal. And what case does he offer up for an example? A young man has shot and killed another. The judge agrees that there was a lot of moral luck (bad luck) involved. He agrees that this young man made a mistake and would likely never make any mistake like this again; this college student was not and likely would never will be be any harm to society. But then again there is the concept of “general deterrence” (to send a message to other people who would never otherwise be of harm to others now or in the future); his retributivist/general deterrence rule seems to overrule other circumstances. All of this after speaking of prisons as not only being bad places for rehabilitation but more likely to do social harm for any who spend any time in them.His simplistic summary is of a book I evidently didn't read.He should end the book by lamenting, "These choices are more complicated than the oversimplified finish I have provided the reader . . . but, regardless; sixteen to forty-eight years in prison! Next up charged with murder: Mother Teresa.” (Yes, in the same summary he speaks of fanciful sentences for Mother Teresa (probation) as opposed to Pol Pot (who gets prison for a traffic ticket.) The gavel sounds.

Morris Hoffman's scholarly but immensely readable account of modern understanding of the basic theories of crime and punishment from ancient tribal groups to the latest discoveries in neurological science is a must read for anyone seriously interested in the how and why of society's reaction to criminal behavior..