THE CRIME OF PUNISHMENT: Effective correction is teaching, not torture. Be the boss who knows the difference.
The Crime of Punishment
Effective correction is teaching, not torture. Be the boss who knows the difference.
By Nick Brunacini
B Shifter Buckslip, March 5, 2024
When we all scream for discipline, we really want punishment. On one level, we believe we can punish our way to perfection. This is not a new concept; it’s been with us since long before a famous group of fanatical discipline advocates wrote the Old Testament.
On a deeper level, I think punishment is somewhat voyeuristic. We feel fortunate it’s not happening to us, like the little pig watching from the safe confines of his brick house as the big, bad wolf consumes his siblings. Human beings have a tendency to turn the severe punishment of others into spectacle and entertainment, as evidenced by public hangings, stonings and floggings.
When a group’s stern punishment advocates deem that one of the members deserves strong retribution for a rule infraction, it can have far-reaching effects on group dynamics. In most cases, these pleas for severe punishment are part of a never-ending string of hysterical rants from the cheap seats. The mojo can run the other way when the outcry for whipping-post-based personnel solutions sets off an organizational stampede akin to screaming “fire!” in a crowded theatre. The desire to see one member of the group caned within an inch of his life can become more infectious than the flu. This is a natural element of the human condition, and when amped to its highest level, it becomes the foundation of all lynch mobs. Burning witches at the stake is always more fun and fulfilling when we do it as a community.
Discipline ought to be corrective, not punitive. When someone makes a mistake, the process should be designed to correct the problem & improve performance.
The challenge of discipline and punishment is ensuring it produces the desired behavior and maintains general order. It doesn’t make any sense to flay the workforce simply for the amusement of the bosses. Many organizations claim to be well disciplined because they are always reprimanding the workers. On the surface, it may appear they are running a tight ship, but does frequent and firm discipline equal high efficiency? How do you evaluate the effectiveness of all this discipline? Even more important, do the rules and regulations fall in line with why the organization exists in the first place? Daddy may claim he only hits mommy because he loves her so much, but does that make it true?
A Reformed Sinner Ain’t No Saint
One of my early customer service role models was one of my former department’s first paramedics. For the sake of decorum, I will refer to him as “Stalin.” When I met this early pioneer, he was a veteran firefighter of eight years, having been a medic for five of them. I was a fairly new firefighter when he explained the basic concept of emergency medicine to me: “Kid, we may be first when seconds count, but that will never change the fact that after midnight, the patient becomes the enemy.”
Stalin was well-known as a competent medic, but his true talents lie in being a spectacular rule-breaker. He had a total disregard for all authority and was always at odds with some medical director, doctor, captain or chief. He also nurtured love-hate relationships with nurses. Stalin was very creative; inventing many phrases and plays on the English language. He was the first person I ever heard use the same profanity as a verb, adjective and noun in the same sentence: “Fuck the fucking fuckers.” Memories of my early relationship with Stalin caused me great confusion when I worked for him 10 years later. I was a new officer and had just taken a spot at a station in Chief Stalin’s district.
My first shift began with Stalin and my battalion chief calling me to their office for a sit-down. The get-together began with the standard “welcome to the battalion” speech and then quickly turned into a scolding built around vague rules and possible punishments for not complying with Stalin’s dictums. I felt like I was trapped in a “Twilight Zone” episode. I thought he was pulling my leg and made the mistake of saying, “Come on, you of all people have got to be kidding.” This brought on a 20-minute lecture about the length of my hair and my indifference toward organizational rituals. (It’s weird when one considers that the most enthusiastic advocates of the temperance movement are often reformed sinners and ex-drunks.) My dressing-down ended with Stalin making a sweeping gesture at a shelf full of volumes, SOPs, rules and regulations behind his desk. “Someone took the time to write all these rules,” he said. “I think it is your duty to follow them and my duty to enforce them.”
Over the course of our meeting, he ate an entire box of Ritz crackers, smearing each one with mounds of peanut butter and jelly. During the 60-minute meeting, he consumed enough calories to turn a bathtub full of water into steam. For the next five years, Stalin was the head honcho of my battalion. He focused on uniforms, paperwork and the nebulous concept of maintaining good order. Stalin never seemed too concerned with actual job performance; in fact, the employees he held up as examples of top-flight firefighters and officers had the shiniest shoes, shortest hair, kissed the most ass and had the most citizen complaints. Many of them had also taken flooding their hose beds to a professional level. During that time, the saddest I ever saw him was after the Berlin Wall fell. “Those Communists had a knack for running a country,” he said.
Positive Environmental Pressure Prompts Behavioral Change
I am not advocating complete anarchy. We get paid to do a job and need to maintain a workforce that can deliver service when the lights come on. Our rules should be simple and straightforward, and you shouldn’t need teams of personnel Nazis, union reps, lawyers, arbitrators and judges to figure them out. They should also be designed around the service we provide. Because we routinely deliver service in and around hazard zones, our safety rules are just that—rules (as opposed to suggestions).
These safety rules must be crafted around the stuff that can injure and kill us, things like riding and driving, using the proper protective gear and operating as part of a company. Real-deal discipline revolves around never wandering off an attack line when operating inside a burning building.
On the non-hazard-zone front, our rules and regulations must reinforce getting along with one another and taking care of the customer. When we join a fire department, we become a member of the organization. The organization must create an atmosphere that causes us, the employees, to treat one another as well as it expects them to treat the customer. It doesn’t make very much sense for the managers and bosses to club the employees at regular intervals and package it up as some kind of leadership program designed to instill efficiency. Most people who get clubbed are looking for some kind of payback as opposed to going out and being nice to their diverse and unwashed customer base.
Discipline ought to be corrective, not punitive. When someone makes a mistake, the process should be designed to correct the problem and improve performance. A lot of discipline happens because the person who owns the power to wield it decides they aren’t doing their job unless they are dishing out harsh punishment.
Every (Punitive) Action Has an Equal & Opposite Reaction
I learned one of the most profound lessons of my life when I got caught up in this dysfunctional side of discipline. It all started one day at my mom and dad’s house. I was sitting in their living room, waiting on my brother, when I innocently picked up a well-worn paperback book, “Dare to Discipline,” sitting on the table next to me.
I leafed through the pages and quickly determined that it was the work of someone who enjoyed spanking children. While I read about how sparing the rod spoils the children, my sister and one of her associates came into the room. The associate was a longtime family friend. She walked over and asked for her book, which I was only too happy to be rid of.
My Little Precious wore a look of total surprise for a full count of three before she told me never to do that again, punctuated her statement with a punch to my groin & asked, “How do you like it?”
The two of them explained to me the deep mammalian need our children (or was it cubs?) have for a clearly defined parent-child relationship. The cornerstone of this parent-child bond is frequent discipline meted out by the parents. Apparently, this leads to well-defined social order within the tribe and an abundance of family harmony. I replied that my sister and her friend had all the mothering skills and nurturing ability of swimming pool chemicals and left. Only later would I find out that these two harpies had planted a diseased seed in my brain that I would soon have to reap.
Two months later, I was at home with my 2-year-old daughter. We were cleaning her room when we got into some kind of disagreement. We argued for a few minutes, and I attempted to end it with the standard parental statement, “Because I am the parent.” She wasn’t having any of it when I flashbacked to my “Dare to Discipline” class. I then set about establishing a strong parent-child relationship and gave my Little Princess an affectionate swat on her behind. This was the first time I had ever ventured into defining the familial relationship with loving violence, so I really couldn’t have known what was to follow. My Little Precious wore a look of total surprise for a full count of three before she told me never to do that again, punctuated her statement with a punch to my groin and asked, “How do you like it?” This caused me a certain amount of discomfort, colored with a small measure of rage, leading to a slightly firmer whack and a reaffirmation that little girls were not ever to punch daddy in his balls.
If my first loving, bonding whack caused my Little Angel to turn into a self-determined woman, my second spanky-spanky turned her into Satan. Her eyes rolled back in her pretty little head, and the scream that blew past her raspberry lips broke the windows in her Barbie playhouse. Her arms looked like airplane propellers as she struck me with great velocity and frequency. I took the only action available to me: I ran away and locked myself in my bedroom. As I stood behind the locked door she was attempting to beat her way through, I cursed myself for listening to my sister and her Jezebel companion.
My baby’s incoherent wolf howls slowly turned into understandable English as she screamed, “Open this door and let me in!” Taking a page from the Catholics (who are much better at manipulating people’s behavior than my sister and her she-beast friend), I shrieked back, “You can’t come in until you settle down, apologize for hurting daddy and give me $100.” When my daughter’s rage slowly settled to low-level crying, I opened the door and let her in. We both begged one another’s forgiveness for the foolish incident and celebrated with martinis and milkshakes. Some good came out of the episode because for the next few years whenever my daughter started to get out of sorts I would threaten her with, “Behave yourself or daddy will lock himself in his room.”
In the end, I feel that punishment and violence generally just beget more punishment and violence. There are some organizational exceptions to this rule, but I have gone on long enough and will save the last word for a young firefighter who felt there wasn’t enough punishment being administered to the members of our laid-back fire department. One day, he was lamenting before a group of us that one of his colleagues had gotten away with a minor rule infraction with only a brief lecture. I don’t recall the specific transgression, only that it wasn’t that big a deal and telling the person not to do it again seemed to be the appropriate course of action. After listening to this young firefighter for what felt like a lifetime, I finally interrupted and asked him, “Why do you even care about this petty bullshit?” His reply cut to the heart of the matter, “I did almost the same exact thing a year ago and ended up being reprimanded, and a letter of counseling went into my file.” I asked him what kind of moron would go out of their way to bust a guy’s balls over such a trivial thing. I wasn’t surprised when he told me, “Chief Stalin.”
Nick Brunacini joined the Phoenix Fire Department (PFD) in 1980. He served seven years as a firefighter on different engine companies before promoting to captain and working nine years on a ladder company. Nick served as a battalion chief for five years before promoting to shift commander in 2001. He then spent the following five years developing and teaching the Blue Card curriculum at the PFD’s Command Training Center. His last assignment with the PFD was South Shift commander. Nick retired from the PFD in 2009 after spending the first 26 years of his fire-department career as a B-shifter and the last three on C Shift. Nick is the author of “B-Shifter—A Firefighter’s Memoir.”He also co-wrote “Command Safety.” Today he is the publisher of the B Shifter hazard zone periodical and a Blue Card instructor.