Bring Back the Lash: Why flogging is more humane than prison.
washingtonmonthly.com
washingtonmonthly.com
Would have? Not really. Vindictive? What exactly do you intend to achieve by putting someone in prison? Revenge?
The fact that these things happen suggests that there is a problem with how prisons are run now. Full CCTV surveillance of prisons (including toilets) should solve the problem of rape. If I were ever in prison, I'm sure I wouldn't mind a camera watch me pinch a loaf, if it meant it's going to keep me safe from assaults. Even now, the offenders could be chemically castrated.
In any case, these problems arise because prisons prefer to treat prisoners as animals, rather than work on rehab.
Yet you suggest, as a solution, to treat them even more so: Subject them to full surveillance like at a zoo, and chemically castrate them.
Do you imagine a scenario where I'd be the only guy getting assaulted? Must be an exceptionally safe prison then! Otherwise, I'm sure I could convince my fellow assault-victim inmates, and we could come up with an amicable solution.
It's easy to pick on my ideas. I have never been in prison. I don't know feasible alternatives. I can't come up with solutions that please everybody. I already told you what I'd prefer if I were there. Why don't you propose your own solutions, instead of just nit-picking mine?
Turing.
> but a few months of the drug, and the offenders might change their mind about whether rape is worth the trouble or not.
Or they may just turn to using bottles or broom handles.
2013.
Modern medicine has progressed quite a bit. And please don't bring up fluoroquinolone when I say just "antibiotics".
> Or they may just turn to using bottles or broom handles.
Thanks. I can come up with maybes by myself.
In other words, our current system uses prison as a means of punishment and vengeance. I'm not saying that's a good thing; I'm just saying that corporal punishment has a very low bar to clear before we can say it's more humane than the awful status quo. (Yes, rape-free prisons would also be an improvement, and probably a more realistically achievable improvement, though I disagree with the methods you suggest.)
You can choose: pay taxes, have a social net to catch people that are left in bad situations and/or have no way to generate income and have relatively low crime rates.
Alternatively, you could solve your unemployment problem partially by criminalizing as much as possible and lock up one part of the population and have another part stand watch over them, maybe you'll even turn a profit.
In the long run only the first is an option, in the short term the second will work but replaces humanity with economic arguments.
Flogging is not an alternative to prison, fewer people in prisons is an alternative.
The entire point is to set flogging up as a demonstration of just how extreme an option prison is (most of us has a visceral reaction to the idea of flogging - a punishment we tend to associate with backwards dictatorships; yet the article writer assumes most of us would choose flogging rather than prison).
The third paragraph explicitly states the purpose is to be provocative.
The last two explicitly points out that if one were to take the suggestion seriously, then it would serve as a stark demonstration of just how insane the current system is:
" The lash, which metes out punishment without falsely promising betterment, is an unequivocal expression of society’s condemnation. For better and for worse, flogging would air the dirty laundry of race and punishment in America in a way that prisons—which, by their very design, are removed from society—can never do. To highlight an injustice is in no way to condone it. Quite the opposite.
Without a radical defense of flogging, changes to our current defective system of justice are hard to imagine. The glacial pace of reform promises only the most minor adjustments to the massive machinery of incarceration. Bringing back the lash is one way to destroy it—if not completely, then at least for the millions of Americans for whom the punishment of prison is far, far worse than the crime they have committed. Yes, flogging may seem brutal and retrograde, but only because we are in mass denial about the greater brutality of our supposedly civilized and progressive prisons. "
Corporeal punishments were not abolished because they are a way to exemplify what is wrong with a society but because they are inhumane. Prison can also be inhumane but you can't successfully attack the prison system by proposing a barbarian alternative, you need to offer a better option and just highlighting what's wrong with imprisonment does not in any way address the underlying issues and those have little to nothing to do with race, even though there definitely is a bias.
Prison is a means of last resort to remove dangerous entities from society for a while and to rehabilitate them, even the most civilized countries have them and for those countries flogging as an alternative is not an option.
The societal wrongs in the USA are not going to be fixed by attacking a symptom, they need to be fixed by addressing root causes:
- poverty
- unemployment
- drug use / abuse & associated laws (treat drug use as a personal healthcare issue rather than a criminal one).
All of these are social issues that either lead to crime or that have been criminalized. Only much later in the chain does the word 'prison' appear and unless you address those root causes the prisons will remain.
Provocative, sure. Practical, no and it isn't going to convince any person that still needs convincing.
What will work to convince people that this is not the way is to show the benefits to society as a whole from walking a different path, as long as those that make the decision are not at risk of suffering the consequences of those decisions that is very much an uphill battle.
Once drug users and unemployed people make it to the ballots and get elected you can expect some change in this respect from experience until then you're going to have to convince the elected officials that they are harming societies interests as a whole, which is a far more powerful argument than any medieval style provocative comparison will be able to do. Short term thinking vs long term thinking. What prisons look like and how they function is secondary to changing society so people do not have a large chance of ending in prison in the first place.
Might I suggest the US stops putting people in prison for possession of drugs for personal use and a lot of other relative minor offenses?
Decriminalizing drugs is a good first step.
Back to the topic at hand. A public lashing is probably a better solution for non-violent crime than prison. Something to think about.
There are primarily two things that contribute to the high incarceration rate in the US:
(1) Incarceration for petty offenses. Heck, pre-trial detention contributes a lot.
(2) Disproportionately long prison sentences.
Corporal punishment isn't a great alternative for either. If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime.
Poverty is also something that society can do something about; if you say that the problem is that America has created a large underclass, then that's the problem you want to solve. Flogging won't reduce the size of that underclass; it can only subdue it.
Note that life in the slums of Victorian London was not any better than for post-Civil War African Americans, for example.
If you control for first-immigration immigrants along with socio-economic disadvantages, most of the difference in crime rates between minorities and the rest of population goes away. That minorities were/are imported and abused plays a role only insofar as existing racism and social stratification perpetuates the disadvantages they suffer.
However, flogging will not eliminate racism or social stratification; if anything, it will do the opposite.
Obviously, the only way to get a message of disapproval into such an obtuse skull is via the nine whipcord communications lines of the Home Office cat-o'-nine-tails through the flesh of his shoulders and nerves up to his selfish, destructive, jungle brain.
Mm, the old anecdote + proof by obviousness. A classic form of scientific study.
I think that was the articles point.
If america was constantly subjecting black people to brutal physical punishment in every public square for no good reason, rather than quietly locking them away, they might have to confront a few truths.
Read the last two paragraphs. It makes exactly that point: The current system is dishonest in that it hides the brutality of the system.
To not hide it, people would have to see it, and the current prison system is brutal enough so that showing it would be enough of a shock; the problem is that it's not being seen enough, and I don't see how that would be any different with flogging.
No, it really isn't. Changing the punishment would be.
I can also give you the view from the ground level: I grew up in Portugal and in the 80s people shooting heroin in the streets was common. Now it's almost unheard of. Addicts are helped, not punished, and it just works.
Decriminalizing drugs means that the very real health problems that drugs cause the users can be addressed as health concerns without the weird job-risking hoops that people jump through.
Of course, the law enforcement complex and the prison industrial complex may not like to see their main reason for existence (and funding) reduced, so they are likely to fight changes to the War on Drugs. And if people are smoking more weed, maybe they're drinking less alcohol, so there are other interested parties who, by the way, have lots of money for marketing and lobbying.
The sad fact is that the USA isn't really seeing the worst of it. I read stories about the cartels in Mexico and just cringe. We are destabilizing our neighbouring nation, our important trading partner and ally over this issue.
Treat it like a disease, you mean.
We need to treat the individuals the same as if they had a problem with alcohol.
We should also plot out drug use on a map, much like the CDC looks at an outbreak of cholera. Look at the factors that may be contributing to increased cases (poverty mainly, but there may be other things), and then start working on those.
Lobbyists for PIC don't even hide it, they directly oppose scaling down the War on Drugs, because it will put an immediate dent in their profits. All political (who's voting for "soft on crimes" candidates these day? Nobody) and economical constraints (PIC) conspire to create this situation.
While I agree that the Drug War should be ended, I think people overstate how much of an impact that would have on our prison population. There are a lot of people in prison on drug charges because drug distribution is a core business of America's gangs. The drug war is at least in part a proxy war on gangs. Legalization would hurt the gangs, but it's not as if all those people would suddenly go straight. There's 1.4 million gang members in the U.S. The gangs would continue to operate, and if drugs were off the table, the gangs would go into some other business and end up in prison for some other reason.
Removing a giant market for gangs wouldn't just send gangs to work in other markets. Many of them would go out of business. This is precisely what we saw during the time of Prohibition--entrepreneurial gangs took advantage of their new market opportunity when alcohol was made illegal. They went out of business, or their power was greatly reduced, when Prohibition ended.
I live in a crime-free, safe neighborhood such that my children can roam freely for miles from my home without worries. My neighbors and I are confident that a truly dangerous criminal will be apprehended and kept out of society if need be. Young people who fool around with illegal drugs will be diverted to drug treatment programs, but are exceedingly unlikely to face prison time here. We apply criminal punishments to dangerous criminals, and try our best to help everyone straighten out their lives after interaction with the criminal justice system. Other states could do the same--the example has been available for study for my entire adulthood.
[1] "Sentencing Reform in Minnesota, Ten Years After" https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?actio...
[2] "Minn. serves as example for drug-sentencing reform" http://www.kare11.com/news/article/1035319/391/Minn-serves-a...
[3] "About the Guidelines" http://mn.gov/sentencing-guidelines/guidelines/about/
Fun fact: I toured the same facility a few weeks before the "grand opening".
Say what you will for the idea that corporal punishment might be effective in reducing crime. One lash for six months? Hell, anyone can take one lash. Some people would gladly commit crimes for this benign sentence.
On the other hand, kids who grow up in a community where going to prison is normal (like the East Baltimore one of the author) are perfectly fine with going to jail. They even expect it. So committing crimes that brings you somewhere you were going to end up anyway, isn't such a big deal.
Actually changing the culture of a place would have a bigger effect on reducing crime than how we punish people for having committed it. The latter really depends on the former.
(Aside: i'm a much bigger fan of self-flagellation for punishment than having someone else do it, as you get the mental terror of having to hurt yourself along with the pain. You can only blame yourself for how you feel vs blaming some masked bogeyman)
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/05/breakthough-in-the...
Alternatives to the War on Drugs - Becker:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/05/alternatives-to-th...
...flogging is just a few very painful strokes on the behind. And it’s over in a few minutes.
But he knows full well that:
Even under controlled conditions, with doctors present ... a full recovery could take weeks or months. In some cases, the scars would remain as permanent reminders of the ordeal.
How can I take this guy seriously?
His idea is that we ourselves tend to have a view of prisons as horrible enough that we might pick a punishment like flogging that to most of us seem barbaric. Yet he expects that many will still believe that flogging is somehow not enough punishment to replace prison, so he points out the seriousness of it.
This also serves to illustrate just how nasty prison is.
It's meant to draw attention to the inhumanity we allow in the prison system, with a half-serious proposal, that, if someone were to take it seriously, in the article writers opinion, would still be more human than what is currently done, and would at the same time be far more honest about how brutal the system is rather than hiding the problem away behind prison walls and so be conducive to further reforms.
(Note also how he proposes it as an alternative to be offered as a choice to prisoners).
1. Retribution.
2. Rehabilitation.
3. Removal.
In particular, he argues that the first purpose can be replaced with corporal punishment for most crimes. The second purpose is still an open question amongst criminologists because it seems some criminal personalities cannot be changed; which leads to the third purpose of removing such people from the general population.
It's all a bit hypothetical, though. Short of amending the Constitution I think any scheme of corporal punishment would be seen as cruel and unusual. You need to remember that the substitution of prison for all other punishments was to prevent abuses of corporal punishment by vindictive governments. That problem doesn't just go away.
Presumably, as soon as it becomes established, it's no longer unusual; it's the new norm. It wouldn't meet Brennan's four principles on what is "cruel and unusual" and as such wouldn't fall foul of the 8th amendment.
It seems to me that the difficulty would be in going from unusual to usual without in the meantime being shot down by the Supreme Court.
Are there cases where something became usual before it was brought to judicial review?
"Pedophiles, terrorists, serial rapists, and murderers, for example, need to remain behind bars"
It's an easy list to write. It sounds obvious.
Yet murderers as a group is one of the groups least likely to reoffend on release, with reoffending rates in most countries in the low single digits. If you exclude certain groups of murderers (e.g. someone with organised crime / gang backgrounds), the reoffending rate drops close to zero.
Murderers are a great demonstration of how the system is politicised and focused on retribution and vengeance, rather than protection and rehabilitation: You could release almost all of them, and society would be no worse off.
serial rapists and serial murderers is how I read it.
Is there a conspiracy to sell consumer goods on every street corner, and at a profit, too?
Finland has a better system. They actually educate people in the prisons and give them tasks to prepare them for the real world. And it has been amply shown that greater education is correlated with significantly less crime.
The US have some of the worst recidivism rates, which is another reason for those large numbers of prison inhabitants in the US.
A great lesson for the kids: "Hitting people is bad, if you hit people, we'll hit you. Dichotomy? Of course not... we're bigger than you."
I do occasionally steal chips from my eldest when he steals chips from his younger brother so, you're right, I'm a massive hypocrite with no sense of perspective.
It would be ironic if his intention was to point out how awful corporal punishment is, but that's not his point - it's kind of a given that corporal punishment is generally viewed as barbaric (see the opening paragraph). Corporal punishment is just used as an exaggeration to expose the stupidity of the modern penal system ala eating babies in "A Modest Proposal".
It's slightly more subtle than AMP, which is why I inferred you might've missed the point (though I can see that's not the case now, so my apologies) - but for example, if we were talking about AMP and your original comment was:
> Is he being ironic or is he trying to justify eating babies? <sentence about why eating babies is wrong>
you can hopefully see how I might think you were confused a little.
It's exactly that point that made me unsure if this was supposed to be ironic or not. It is not in anyway "a given" that corporal punishment is viewed as barbaric. Most USAians support the death penalty.
The last instance of judicial corporal punishment was in the 50's. It's a given.
> Most USAians support the death penalty.
Maybe you should look up the difference between capital punishment and corporal punishment. They're not the same thing.
Anyway it seems like you've been called out on your reading comprehension and now you're clawing desperately to save face, or you have an axe to grind in general - I don't really care which it is. Either way I'll bow out and let you save face. Read more carefully and/or know the meaning of the words you're typing before you comment next time.
Then put additional time on the sentence which is specifically rehabilitation time - time in which the offender is reintroduced into society, slowly and given more and more freedom.
Make it possible for those who do especially well to be officially designated reformed felons - they get some of their rights back, but they also get to not tick the felony box on job applications.
I don't give a hoot about poverty - if that was an issue 100 years ago almost everybody would have been a criminal - teach 'em personal responsibility and how you can better yourself and the benefits of helping others.
The solution precognised here is still in the same register of reaction vs prevention. Maybe those convicted and send to jail/prison could have had the social/psychological support to prevent their unruly behaviour that got them there in the first place?
Or did someone pointed out the 'unbearable' financial cost of preventive action, without considering the social and psychological impact on individuals and communities alike?
Anyway, how's that technology news?
Sorry, d00d, but our prison system didn't "fail" - it was deliberately sabotaged and bent from a system that tried rehabilitation to a system intended solely for retribution and exploitation of convict labor. Handwaving this away without identifying the forces responsible is sloppy journalism.