Ten strokes with a cane will not kill you anymore than getting paddled if you’re a kid.
No. Time spent in prison passes the same whether you’re a sickly weedy type who would snap apart from a light breeze or a hulking giant who has a tolerance for pain that’s through the roof.
Presuming that we are talking about the same kind of cane beatings we see in Singapore, yes people do die from them of heart failure. We’re talking about beating people bloody, inflicting so much pain it can stop their heart; not “paddling” them.
And your arguments are logically contradictory; if it’s no big deal, what makes you think it will discourage anyone from anything? Either it’s brutal enough to terrorize people who’ll take years in prison in stride (in which case it is easily torture); or it’s no big deal in which case it’s pointless; you can’t have it be both at once.
Do elaborate…?
Oh absolutely. It’s not a badge of honour or anything like that.
The starting point for such discussions is surely the purpose of the justice system. If it’s revenge, as DTC seems to suggest, that’s one thing. If it’s to protect the public, or to rehabilitate, or anything else, then I’d suggest brutality isn’t the answer.
Seems to me torture is a barbaric form of punishment, something we should never do in this country.
How can offering a choice of an alternative punishment (however brutal) be torture? The status quo is always an option.
For those who don’t like flogging, how can you tolerate our current prison system? And how can we tolerate 2.3 million prisoners? That is so much less morally defensible than corporal punishment.
And the UN and Amnesty Int’l define all corporal punishment as torture. I respectfully disagree. I talk about this more in “In Defense of Flogging.” (full disclosure: I wrote the article. So please consider buying the book: In Defense of Flogging!)
I think the problem here is that the person making the choice might not be fully informed. And I would also ask whether they are truly “making a choice” when the alternative is life in prison.
Some poster on NRO made the comment a few days ago that they would like to see prisoners be able to chose waterboarding to get a few years off of their sentence. His point seemed to be a combination of endorsement of the article in the OP and an attempt to justify waterboarding as “not torture”.
The problem is that something like waterboarding (or, indeed, caning) don’t seem that bad, especially to a street-hardened criminal. But you can indeed die from caning, and waterboarding is, reportedly, significantly worse than a lay-criminal might imagine.
Agreed. It is completely intolerable. I think you’ll find the majority opinion on this board to be a combination of laxer drug sentences and increased use of probation for non-violent or first-time offenders. And probably a reduction in the use of three-strikes laws.
I will read the article before responding to this, I suppose. 
How about a broadcast (complete with recording for those who can’t or won’t watch the broadcast) of you being flogged and/or waterboarded, and then write your next opinion piece on the subject?
It’s not perfect, but by its nature it represents a more uniform application of justice - a simple deprivation of freedom - than flogging.
How do you answer the allegation that flogging is fundamentally unjust as it can dote out unequal punishments for an equal crime? Two convicts, A and B convicted of crime C. A is a tough guy who can shrug off beatings, B has health issues that mean he risks death if flogged.
Do we deny B’s choice and throw him in prison, while A takes the flogging and is back on the streets? Do we give him the choice and allow him to risk death?
If any option but prison is preferable, why not start lopping limbs off? Cheaper than prison, a heck of a deterrent (first offence, take a few fingers off. Second, you lose a leg below the knee, etc), victims can be satisfied that the wrongdoing has been punished. Once you accept flogging, where does it end?
If flogging is introduced then we’ll have the same problem with PR inflation as we now do with prison terms. Politicians will ask for more and more canings for each offense to show that they are “tough on crime”, and the now-proposed “ten strikes” will soon be a thing of the past. There is no feasible way to limit the punishment at all.
Agreed. What would be enough for a hardcore criminal? Gouging out eyeballs, ripping out fingernails, waterboarding repeatedly? It’s a sick road to take.
I disagree as well. We need to tackle the assumptions underlying this debate. In the US, Canada, western Europe, et al we choose to punish criminals by putting them in jail. In many other places on earth, they punish criminals by inflicting physical pain, and sometimes by methods such as amputation as well. International bodies declare that the physical pain and amputation are human rights abuses, while imprisonment is not. Why is that? Because the international bodies are controlled by the wealthy, western countries. That’s all there is to it. If the international bodies were controlled by Signapore and similar countries, then the definition of human rights would be vastly different.
But is there any objective basis to the way that we currently define human rights? I don’t think there is. Personally, if I were convicted of a crime and offered a choice of having my foot cut off or spending thirty years in a cell with an aggressive weight-lifter named Bubba, I say “Break out the buzz saw and let’s get rolling.” That seems like a no-brainer to me.
Of course I believe that the war on drugs is a waste of time and money and that possession of a small amount of a substance that can’t harm anyone other than possibly the user should not be punished by any method. But I’m talking about more serious crimes like robbery and assault here.
I propose one lash = six months. You can receive as many as you can live through. If the doctor has to call off the flogging (as far as I know, nobody has ever died from a judicial caning in Singapore or Malaysia) before your punishment is complete, you go back to jail. Realistically, the maximum sentence that could be converted to the lash would be about 10 to 15 years.
As to “inflation,” I think it is a much smaller risk with caning because caning is punishment. That is what (much of) the public wants. That is what prisons are not designed to do. And since prison f*cks with the mind more than the body, it’s easy to say, keep the years coming because you don’t see the effects of confinement.
As to consent being under duress, well, yes. But that’s a silly reason not to offer the choice since one outcome is already inevitable. This is not taking volunteers for a medical experiment. These are convicts faced with going into jail or prison. I certainly believe they could choose the preferable option for themselves much better than I could choose what they really want.
Once you accept flogging where does it end? I say it ends with flogging. The better question is once you start with prison, where does it end? Apparently, it ends with the largest system of incarceration the world has ever seen. A system so cruel most people would prefer to be caned. If we need to come up with a perfect system before we do away with prison, we’re doomed.
As the it being cruel and unusual, current, because the court hasn’t banned it, it does not violate the 8th Amendment. And because it would never be sentenced but rather by choice, I don’t think it ever would reach the court.
And I strongly agree the drug war is the root of the problem. But I already wrote a book calling for drug legalization and an end to prohibition… but I bet none of you heard it it.
In Defense of Flogging is meant to be provocative and start discussions (like this one!). So far so good. Prison is not the answer. It’s also horribly horribly expensive. We need alternatives. Do I want to see flogging? No. Do I want to be flogged? Absolutely not (nor do I want to go to prison). Do I think offering the choice of flogging is the morally, politically, economically correct choice. Absolutely.
- Your reassurance that there will be little risk of "punishment inflation totally ignores how politics and punishment are tied together in this country, and thus is totally worthless unless you have an actual proposal to stop such from happening.
- Consent under duress is still consent under duress. This idea that we aren’t going to let criminals choose their own punishment unless it involves our voyeuristic need to see someone getting hit until blood flows appalls me, frankly.
- You say it ends with flogging? Who the hell are you, that you can stop this from escalating?
Then do you accept that this system would lead to unequal punishments for an equal crime? Under this system you can have myriad men convicted of the exact same crime yet receiving different punishments based on what essentially amounts to luck - you can take the flogging, so you get let back on the streets. You can’t take it, off to jail with you. This is not justice - sentences should not be arbitrarily based on a convicts health.
Then there’s the other great advantage prison has - what if you convict the wrong man? At least in prison you can let him out before the sentence is served. If he is flogged, you can’t take back lashes.
But it crosses the threshold - accepting physical pain as a proper sentencing for a crime, rather than loss of liberty, wealth or life (and even in death sentences, certain efforts are made not to put the convict under unnecessary physical duress). Once you accept that, it’s far easier to argue that (since prison doesn’t work) more harsh physical punishments should be dealt out to more serious offenders, and before you know it we have a system of criminal justice resembling that of Anglo-Saxon England.
Oh, I’ve also started a poll on the subject in IMHO to see what the threshold is between flogging/time in prison:
Who says? What guarantees are there that it would remain flogging in lieu of prison, rather than in addition to it?
This is the sort of thinking that too many pundits had about Iraq several years ago, as Atrios repeatedly pointed out: they’d support the invasion because they thought, “if we did it this way, it would work,” but of course it wasn’t being done by them, it was being done by GWB and his crew of ideologues and idiots.
Same here: the states most likely to implement flogging as a punishment are the states that would have the least inclination to use restraint in its application. You, Mr. Moskos, would have no ability to dictate the terms of its use.
Per the above, there’s no guarantee - hell, I doubt there’s even a likelihood - that adding flogging to the mix would reduce the number of people in prison, or otherwise improve the existing system.
Even if it were used only in the way you propose, what would be the effect? Physically strong and tough criminals would have a shortcut back to the street, while other, less tough criminals would continue to be incarcerated.
Brilliant.
Did this article also recently appear in the Washington Monthly or on its website recently? If so, I’ve read about as much of it as I want, thanks.
We’ve debated this before in this thread. So long as we’re talking about criminal acts that don’t suggest the perpetrator is an active menace who needs to be kept away from the public for a time, then I’m all for flogging, or at least giving someone the choice of flogging over imprisonment. I still don’t understand why imprisonment is considered more humane than corporal punishment.
Because, as it has already been repeatedly pointed out, it is an easy out for the person who can take it, and a horrible punishment for those who can’t.