Once upon a time, before the advent of behavioral scientists and social reformers, the doctrine of accountability had few challengers. A person was held responsible for his behavior. Those who failed to meet society’s standards of conduct were expected to suffer prescribed consequences. Those whose level of performance at work or school or elsewhere was adjudged superior had a right to anticipate recognition; those who were inferior had no cause for complaint if they were penalized accordingly.

The gap between the real and the ideal existed here as elsewhere in the machinery of society. Some persons were held more rigorously accountable than others. But the principle itself was not called into question.

The sweeping application of the doctrine of accountability left many innocent victims in its wake. And so social reformers began pressing for limitations on its applicability. The populace of tender age early escaped some accountability; so did those of conspicuously little intellect, and those considered lacking in sanity.

As the influence of the social sciences became more pronounced, the areas of non-accountability were extended. More sectors of life were involved; more categories of people were held to be exempt from responsibility for their actions. The behavioral sciences, stressing the manner in which human behavior is the consequence of the interplay of hereditary and environmental influences, seemed to many to make notions of free will obsolete. Why should persons who are molded by factors over which they have no control suffer for not meeting society’s standards?

In the newer conception of penology, the purpose of sentencing a convicted person was held to be not punishment but reform. The deviant needed treatment of those tendencies that an unkind fate had bestowed upon him. Arbitrary assignments of length of sentence naturally made little sense; as in a hospital, one should be released when cured. The indeterminate sentence met this need.

The myth that penal institutions reform, however, became a difficult one to nurture in the face of countless studies showing lofty rates of recidivism. Being confined with an assortment of law-violators is hardly the sort of experience that would turn one aside from his errant ways. So, since punishment was not the aim, there seemed little point in continuing the incarceration system. An expanded use of probation became one part of the effort to reconcile lingering notions of the need for accountability with the conclusive evidence that imprisonment rarely reforms.

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Broader courtroom interpretations of insanity have also served to reduce the likelihood that offenders will be held accountable for their conduct. In 1966, for example, a United States court of appeals ordered federal judges in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont to use the American Law Institute’s new insanity test. It holds that “a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.” One of the first beneficiaries was a New York City lawyer whose psychiatrist testified that he was “suffering from a psychotic reactive depression” when he reported only $9,000 of his $43,000 income on his tax return.

Early in 1966 two federal courts decided that police must stop arresting drunks who are alcoholics, since chronic alcoholism is a disease. Being drunk in public, it was reasoned, is something over which the alcoholic has no control; therefore arrest is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments.” Further application of that logic, it would seem, would also absolve drunken drivers from responsibility for their actions.

The continuing push to minimize accountability in American life emanates in large measure from those who not unflatteringly regard themselves as liberal humanitarians. Rioters from the ghetto who indiscriminately destroy property of friend and foe alike are excused on the grounds that they have legitimate grievances. Collegiate vandals are similarly condoned as they brazenly violate long-established codes of civilized conduct. Seemingly anyone who feels that “the establishment” is not responding appropriately or rapidly enough to his demands has a blanket authorization from progressive thinkers to ignore the law of the land.

Among the juvenile set, sophisticated young lawbreakers have mastered the appropriate techniques for avoiding accountability. They provide interviewers not only with the sought-after personal data but also with conventional sociological interpretations to account for their misbehavior. Parental neglect may be itemized in meticulous detail for the sympathetic listener; or the tale may be one of how worldly-wise companions used various techniques of enticement to lure the naïve narrator into evil ways. A popular theme for the minority delinquent is that his wrongdoing is a response to humiliating racial rebuffs.

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It is abundantly clear, however, that immunity from accountability is still extended selectively. The student who misbehaves or fails to learn is, in the modern perspective, a victim rather than a perpetrator of evil; not so his teacher, or his parents, or principal, or whoever the culprits are. If the latter functionaries had the will, they could alter the situations that are responsible for student failure. In their case old-fashioned sanctions such as dismissal or demotion or transfer are deemed appropriate.

In like manner the victims of prejudice and discrimination have their misdeeds helpfully excused; those harboring prejudice, on the other hand, are regarded as having deliberately chosen the ways of evil. The latter are not exempt from castigation and possible prosecution simply because their biases were transmitted by parents or peers when they were too young to resist. Laws, it is presumed, can effectively control the behavior of bigots, though they cannot be expected to cause the victims of bigotry to respect the rights of others.

Melvin Tumin offers a conventional attack on the doctrine of accountability, as it has been used in the classroom, in an article entitled “Pass What? Fail What?” (NJEA Review, October, 1968):

Subjects or experiences or materials aren’t to be passed or failed. They are to be experienced, felt, sensed, and reacted to, assuming they are worthwhile in the first place. We pay tax money to provide education for all children for twelve or thirteen years. Our obligation, clearly then, is to provide as much chance for development as we can in these twelve or thirteen years. Whatever is achieved is achieved.… Clearly these terms [passing and failing] have relevance only to the impact of the educational process and its agents. They pass or fail; not the children.

While in the Tumin scheme of things our children are to be absolved from responsibility for meeting any performance criteria, it is clear that teachers are not. At some point in life one is expected to transfer from a world in which good and poor performances are regarded as equally meritorious to one in which a person is held strictly accountable for his competence.

Critics like Tumin never explain when or how the transition is to occur. Should passing and failing notions be eliminated from the college scene, as well as the years of compulsory education? One wonders whether Tumin’s graduate students at Princeton, where he is professor of sociology and anthropology, are assured that subjects are not to be passed or failed but merely “experienced, felt, sensed, and reacted to.”

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If it is inhumane to hold children accountable for the quality of work they do in school, it would seem even more so to catapult them suddenly from a world in which the quality of work done is regarded as inconsequential to one in which advancement, prestige, and recognition are heavily dependent upon one’s performance. As conditions now stand, any children who attend schools where Tumin’s non-competitive, non-evaluative philosophy prevails are destined to run head on into some solidly pass-or-fail entrance tests if they seek to enter a “selective” university such as Princeton. And the occupational realm in an industrial society is clearly one in which “doing one’s best” is not a useful defense against charges of incompetence.

Ruth Benedict has pointed out how cultural discontinuities have served to create problems for a person in American society as he moves from one age category to the next. For example, the young boy is trained to be submissive to his parents; as an adult he is expected to overcome the effects of the early conditioning and become independent and self-sufficient. If the desires of those educational reformers who seek to absolve school children from any accountability for the quality of their work are realized, the greatest discontinuity of all will come into being. The transition from the sheltered world of the classroom, where judgments aren’t made, to the occupational world, where they are constantly made, should generate great trauma.

Inhospitable though the economic realm has been to notions of non-accountability, the sense of obligation in our kind of society to provide some sort of basic sustenance for all lessens the sensitivity of the least rewarded segments of our working force to job demands. Dismissal from poorly paid jobs offering no intrinsic satisfactions and no future is not much of a threat when welfare benefits offering comparable income are available. New York City provides an illustration: more than 900,000 are supported by public welfare while job vacancies exist at the minimum-wage level. A much greater reduction in vocational accountability at the lower-income levels can be anticipated if one of the guaranteed-income schemes becomes a reality.

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The American Insurance Association, representing 168 insurance companies, has proposed that the present system of liability insurance be abandoned. In its place a “no-fault” procedure would be inaugurated. The automobile owner’s insurance company would be responsible for paying all economic losses and medical expenses sustained by its policyholders, regardless of who was at fault in the accident. The driver whose recklessness has been responsible for a crash would thus be assured the same compensation for damages as his innocent victims. Should this plan be accepted, driver accountability would join the other vanishing forms.

Religion is perhaps the realm where one would least expect to find accountability diminishing. The modern message from the pulpit, however, finds little place for exposition of the consequences of sin. As early as the 1920s the Lynds discovered that hellfire and damnation were disappearing as topics of sermons in the churches of Middletown. The advent of the new theologies has demolished for large sections of organized religion what survived of the old beliefs concerning man’s accountability to God.

Those segments of our population who were nurtured in a milieu of accountability are included to experience a great sense of malaise at its disappearance. The nation seems awry without the familiar scheme of rewards and punishments that have come to be regarded as the essence of justice. Certainly a portion of the support given Governor George Wallace in his presidential campaign stemmed from the disgruntlement of those who feel threatened by the demise of accountability.

The data from cultural anthropology suggest that the carrot and the stick have always been regarded as societal essentials. They have been used, more or less predictably, to encourage desired behavior and to discourage the disapproved. In contemporary America we are testing how far a society can move in the direction of abolishing accountability and still remain economically and socially viable.

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