by Sally Acharya, American Weekly, Feb. 21, 2006
When Maryann Barakso got a call from the library, she had a moment of anxiety. “My love of books makes me notoriously reluctant to part with them,” she quipped, and she envisioned a mountain of forgotten fines going back, perhaps, to childhood.
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| Julie Mertus (SIS), John Richardson (SIS), Maryann Barakso, and Deirdre Golash were honored at the library. Photo by Jeff Watts |
The call was, indeed, about a book—but the book was Barakso’s. She was among four AU scholars recognized at the 10th anniversary “Celebrating Scholarship” program, which since 1996 has honored 79 faculty members for the books they’ve authored.
The scholars feted last Thursday all focused on ways to engage the larger world, noted acting university librarian Diana Vogelsong. Barakso, School of Public Affairs (SPA), examines the internal government structures, and internal conflicts, that make the National Organization of Women (NOW) both a long-lasting player on the policy scene and, at times, a less than effective advocate.
Julie Mertus, School of International Service (SIS), looked at U.S. foreign policy and human rights.
John Richardson, SIS, found lessons for policymakers and development agencies in Sri Lanka’s civil wars.
And Deirdre Golash, SPA, contended that punishment is not only an ineffective deterrent to crime, but even counterproductive. “Philosophers, when they talk about punishment, tend to assume it’s an effective deterrent, but ask if it’s fine to use people as a means to a social good,” Golash said. “Criminologists assume it’s perfectly fine to use people as a means to the social good, they just want to know if it’s working.”
She takes an entirely different tack in The Case Against Punishment: Retribution, Crime Prevention, and the Law. It’s often said, Golash told her audience, that it’s necessary to punish people in order to satisfy anger. “But it turns out, if you look at the structure of emotions, it’s not really true that anger is this raw thing that’s just out of control and has to be satisfied,” she said.
Anger is based partly “on a judgment that unjustified harm has been done to something you value.” It is also possible to react not in anger, but in sorrow or fear. “This opens the door for asking when anger is the morally best response,” she said. It can be preferable to sorrow if it’s necessary to give us the impetus for change, but the anger of victims or others “doesn’t provide an independent reason for inflicting punishment,” she said.
Mertus, author of Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy, said that one of her motivations was a question from people she studied in Kosovo about why she didn’t also spend time studying the United States. When she took their advice, she confessed that she was, at first, intimidated about talking to people in the State Department and U.S. military.
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