No problem. I’ll just fight them off with my dragons and legions of militant unicorns, since we’re living in your fantasy world.
Inhumane:
Adj. 1. inhumane - lacking and reflecting lack of pity or compassion.
Yeah, so? Your point? You think we should pity these people. Fuck that. You break into someone’s house, you get the gallows. Simple. Effective. What’s the problem?
No. No, they aren’t. Evil politicians derive their power from the consent of the governed. Criminals do the exact opposite. Seriously, if some guy broke into my house and robbed me, and I shot and killed him, who would miss him? Would you? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Good riddance. The world is better without them.
I have never, and will never, understand the mind set that says we need to be humane to people that have no desire to live in polite society. You steal? Mug? Kill? Rape? You get whipped mercilessly. It’s no less than they deserve.
And what part of his drunken driving, speeding, evading arrest and positive blood test for drugs and alcohol indicating his valid charge of DUI would have NOT been grounds for caning if that was the sentence of the court?
Did you even READ what I said about a legitimate sentence being carried out, not a random street beating? This is assuming it was the accepted sentence for DUI - so any random white yellow or brown human would get the same caning. :rolleyes:
You are just being evasive; you are trying to pretend that you can brutalize and kill people without consequences.
You end up killing people who aren’t guilty. You encourage violence by legitimizing it. You destroy what’s left of the moral authority of the state. And it’s not “effective” either.
And if you whip people, what makes you think YOU deserve compassion? Perhaps, just perhaps we might try being better than the criminals we like to sneer at.
What makes you think anyone will care? Beating is beating.
Roughly ten percent of U.S. prisoners are serving life sentences. Except for them and the relatively few (by percentage) on death row, most prisoners are going to be released back into society.
Is it really a good idea to deliberately abuse these people and then expect them to function properly alongside you, your family and everyone else?
And that’s just deliberate corporal punishment we’re discussing. The things that happen in prison without deliberation are arguably as bad, or worse. What we have right now isn’t good rehabilitation or good punishment.
In the novel Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is at one point punished for a minor infraction by confiscation of his books. He remarks to Clarice Starling that a civilized society would either kill him or let him have his books.
The problem is that it’s idiotic, barbaric, and ineffective. (For starters, if you make robbery punishable by death, you’re actively encouraging robbers to kill people. It won’t add anything to their sentence and they’d be that much more motivated to avoid being identified.) Anyway I was using inhumane in the sense of “unkind or [for emphasis] cruel.” Pity was not what I had in mind. Even if I don’t pity people who commit a crime I can see that it is not a virtue to inflict pain upon them for no reason. Or for no reason other than satisfying some vague and brutal sense of vengeance. What does that accomplish exactly? Your rationale for it appears to be ‘they deserve it and we don’t have to treat them better.’ But none of which justifies what you’re proposing. It’s not needed for society’s safety.
Sounds great as long as you’re the one who decides what everybody deserves.
Slaves were locked up in prison? I had no idea. I thought they were put to work. In any case, do you really not understand why whipping black men would not raise some uncomfortable images in people’s minds? This isn’t my primary argument against corporal punishment, mind you. But I thought the contention that people would’ve been okay with Rodney King being sentenced to flogging is just ludicrous.
See my earlier post in this thread. Maybe maximum security prison is comparable, but I doubt a stretch in the county lockup is the same as being whipped.
You know what imprisonment is, right? It’s where they confine you to a place that you’re not permitted to leave. The slaves didn’t live in suburban condos when they weren’t working.
And the Rodney King comparison doesn’t fly either. Any corporal punishment regime in the US would still have to comport with the Constitution, which would include all the due process requirements. Cops beating the crap out of someone with batons prior to an arrest isn’t corporal punishment.
And prisoners don’t do a lot of work, so there’s another difference. But you’re evading my question. Are you able to see why it would raise echoes of slavery if convicts were whipped?
I’m not the one who made it, so that’s not my problem.
Then go ahead and make up one that does. Good luck getting around the cruel and unusual punishment clause. At the moment the Supreme Court says the death penalty is cruel and unusual in all cases except treason and murder, and I think they’re wrong about that. If you have a line of reasoning by which the death penalty for theft would not be cruel, or where whipping would not be cruel.
It clearly doesn’t. Imprisonment is vaguely similar if you consider only the fact that someone is being confined and leave all the details out. Imprisonment is well accepted as a punishment for robbing and raping and murdering and similar things. There’s not much debate about that on a societal level. Flogging is associated with slavery and perhaps the 18th century British Navy.
And as a judicial punishment in Europe and in colonial America…and as a military punishment…and as part of prison discipline…and as part of school discipline…
No, you are missing the point that no one will care. Rather the opposite; it was the acquittal of those officers - in essence, giving official sanction to what they did - that triggered the riots. What you seem unwilling to grasp is that there are a great many people for whom the law has no moral authority in their eyes; they regard it as an instrument of oppression and nothing more. This will only make that worse. NO threat, no punishment is going to convince people to refrain from violating the law if they don’t believe that breaking the law makes any difference as to whether or not they will be punished.
While there is a point to be had in all that, your conflating police brutality and court ordered punishment after a trial is extremely counter productive.
Joe Arpaio is just as much of a scumbag as his worst prisoners. He is a sadist who enjoys abusing people. His guards broke the neck of a man who had been arrested for trespass and pot possession. The man was paraplegic, and they broke his neck and made him a quadriplegic. They have beaten at least two inmates to death. Oh, and he doesn’t save money, he costs the taxpayer millions in lawsuits from his victims. He hasn’t reduced recidivism, and he neglects his actual duties to investigate crimes and make arrests.That man is your hero?
Yes, hundreds of years ago it was a common punishment. It isn’t common now. That ought to be plain to see since this is a thread about bringing it back. Prison is widely accepted now. Corporal punishment is not. Not in the West, anyway. It’s not a common judicial punishment. It’s not common in schools. It’s been on the outs for decades.
