By Peter Brooks

You are led into a Spartan and sordid room, the door is shut behind you. The mantra begins: "You have the right to remain silent; anything you say can be used against you in court; you have the right to the presence of an attorney; if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to represent you." The Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona (1966)–recently reaffirmed–found these warnings necessary to assure that a confession by a criminal suspect was made "voluntarily," not "compelled" or "coerced," in violation of the Fifth Amendment guarantee that no one can be forced to bear witness against himself.

Meanwhile, we live in a society where confession has become increasingly common, public, almost banal–where people go on television, on "Oprah" or "Jerry Springer", to confess intimate and shameful things, in a manner that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Confessions are offered daily, from penitent to priest, from child to parent, from patient to therapist, from spouse to spouse, from friend to friend. We expect and even require the confession of guilt, often with the understanding that confessing will mitigate punishment, and will cleanse the soul or psyche of the person of the person who makes it. Confessional statements bear a special stamp of authenticity. After all, who can better bear witness to the inner truth of the human individual than that individual, speaking in the first person?

But our cultural and psychological attitudes toward confession are ambivalent. Confessions can make us uneasy: they offer a spectacle of human abjection, the revelation of sordid secrets we sometimes would rather leave hidden. We’re often not sure what motivates them, what they are attempting to do, how we should react to them. Confession seems to be a form of human speech and behavior that we don’t fully understand: its motives are complex, layered, perhaps even contradictory.

The urge to confess has deep roots in our culture–reaching back at least to the year 1215, when the Roman Catholic Church made it a requirement for the faithful. Confession is bound up with the emergence of the modern sense of the self, the inner life, and the need for introspection to understand and account for it. There can be no confession without psychological inwardness, a conception of the self as a place of depth, with hidden motives and unavowable secrets. Maybe we can also say that there could be no psychological depth, no inwardness, without the imperative of confession. The search to know and to speak the self, its failings and ruses and twists and turns, creates this self.

Perhaps because the confessional tradition has such power–even outside religion–we have a sense that it needs to be fenced round with certain protections: that it not be compelled by physical torture, for instance, or unbearable psychological stress. The Supreme Court has over

the years insisted that confessions acceptable in the courtroom be "voluntary," the product of "a free and rational will." But I think they rarely are that. Confessions made under interrogation arise in a situation of constraint. They are motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, disgrace, contempt, self-loathing, expiation, and the attempt to please the interrogators.

The suspect is locked in the "interview room"–as it is called in most police stations–and often told over hours, days, nights that it is only by confessing that he can be released to ordinary life. It takes a radical effort of the will for the suspect to refuse to talk in this situation–we all tend to believe that silence equals guilt.

His interrogators claim to know he is guilty. They know what happened. They control the interrogation room, spinning out a story which they demand that the suspect confirm. It is actually legal for them to use tricks and lies to entrap the suspect–false results of polygraph tests, false reports of confessions by confederates, false evidence (fingerprints, blood, semen) from the crime scene. Playing on the consoling effects of confession in religion or psychotherapy, they urge that things will be easier for the suspect if he confesses: if he puts the crime behind him, he can get on with his life, be reintegrated with the rest of humankind.

Should we care what goes on in the "interview room"? After all, we want the guilty to confess their crimes, and we assume that their confessions are authentic. Yet there are cases where confessions have proved to be false. The human psyche can be a fragile thing, and subject to certain pressures, it can crack. Suspects sometimes sign on to the story told by their interrogators because they have become disoriented, ceased to have confidence in their own recollections, or reached a state of despair where they will say anything to have the interrogation cease.

The "Miranda warnings" are threshold requirements only; they don’t get to the psychodrama acted out when the suspect waives his rights–as over 80% of suspects do–and enters into a fateful dialogue with his interrogators. To make the noble principle of non-coercion promoted by Miranda truly operative, the law should insist on the presence of a third party–an attorney, a court-appointed magistrate–or else on the continuous, uninterrupted videotaping of the suspect from the moment he is taken into custody. We can now plant video cameras virtually everywhere– and hence create "reality television"–but only two states (Alaska and Minnesota) currently require videotaping of all criminal interrogations.

The danger of the false confession is only the most dramatic instance of the troubling question of confession. The value our culture puts on confessing for purposes of cleansing, consolation, absolution, should make us suspicious of its use for other purposes: purposes that seek punishment rather than absolution, or, even, that claim that absolution and purification must pass through punishment. At issue is the relation of the State’s power to the individual who is under suspicion: how do we want to treat our criminal suspects? Do we care, since the suspects tend to be poor, undereducated, often members of minority groups?

We are faced with a gap between the noble language of the Supreme Court telling us that the suspect’s confession must be voluntary, and the reality of what transpires inside the "interview room."

Peter Brooks is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He is the author of " Troubling Confessions" and "Psychoanalysis and Storytelling."

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