Oh, yes, the poor dears were *forced *to hold slaves, to work them and profit off them, with whippings and rapes thrown in. They had no choice. :rolleyes:
What? Where did that come from? This thread is about flogging, not about crime rates versus imprisonment.
That doesn’t explain why they, personally, often kept slaves themselves.
What about the aging population? Don’t young people commit more crime than the elderly?
Would we be flog female convicts as well? If so would they recieve the exact same amount of lashes with the exact same implements used on male convicts? Would the floggers use the exact same amount of force as is used on male convicts? Would we have designated female floggers to flog women, or would they be flogged by men? What if a pregnant convict insisted on being flogged? For what it’s worth in Singapore women are exempt from caning. I don’t know of any country outside the Middle East were women are judicially flogged. Maybe somewhere in Africa?
Those who dislike the idea of punishing criminals, especially poor black criminals, will find reasons to convince themselves that more prison sentences do not lead to less crime. They will not convince most of the voters. We are firmly convinced that punishment works.
Yes, for the same reason that Americans generally don’t care if innocent people, especially black people are convicted; it gives Americans the chance to indulge their bigotry, their self-righteousness, and their bloodlust. It’s not about “working”, it’s about punishment for the sake of punishment. You could come up with hard proof that prison made crime worse and Americans would still support it.
I’m all for punishing criminals, but the severity of the punishment is not a deterrent. The certainty of punishment is a deterrent. Every driver out there does rolling stops at vacant intersections. They look, they yield, well, mostly, and roll through.
In my state the penalty is not less than a $100 fine, not more than a $500 fine, and three points on your license. Get caught four times in three years and you lose your license, but I do it on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times, and why?
Because I don’t get caught. If every time I failed to come to a complete it was a paltry $25 fine with no points, I’d stop doing it the first time. That’s why red light cameras stop red light runners, because they work.
No punishment, regardless how severe, will deter a criminal with good evidence that they will get away with it. In the middle ages pickpockets would work the crowds gathering to watch the hangings of pickpockets.
The fact that you and voters like you are firmly convinced doesn’t impress me. People believe dozens of things that aren’t true. You’re like the old farts mashing firmly on the gas in the mistaken belief that they’re on the brakes, while they race faster and faster down the highway, and all they can think to do is press harder on the accelerator. It’d be funnier if I didn’t have to share the world with people who try something, see it not work, and can think of nothing else but to try it harder.
Still awaiting an explanation of how you can magically guarantee this.
There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of going from either/or to both/and.
At which point all you’ve done is bring back a barbaric punishment on top of our existing system of punishment that we all agree is pretty awful. You’ll have taken the bad thing that so upsets you, and you’ll have made it worse.
It’s not like you have a patent on this idea, and get to control the manner of its use in the real world.
And as others have pointed out, whether or not any escalation ends with flogging, it would surely take place within flogging. Ten lashes not a sufficient deterrent? Then let’s do twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more.
And maybe the escalation would be confined to flogging, and maybe not. That’s not a risk I want to see us take, even if it seems like a pretty low-probability risk. The best way to keep that probability at zero is to not open this door, period.
Doesn’t help your argument any. There is alternative sentencing now, where people can choose (for instance) treatment or “education”, or “adjourned in contemplation of dismissal”, and people pick that over jail time. But those options have not been removed or toughened.
Regards,
Shodan
Hmmph, simplistic solution, proposed by simplistic people to deal with a complex problem that has been with us for thousands of years.
Sure, one idea will change all that, like it hasn’t been tried before, ever.
Intellectualising solutions on the basis of makes you not want to comit crime are utterley irrelevant, because offenders think very differantly to you, they have a differant set of values.
Could it work? with some individuals it would, but not with others, and will make others much worse.There is not ‘one solution’ that will work every time.
So really the debate should centre around what it would mean to us as a society, what we would become? not what it would do to offenders, because it hasn’t worked comprehensively before, and will not work in such a manner in the future.
The most relevant post so far has been the one pointing out the most effective deterrant - the certainty of discovery, improve that and crime will reduce.How would you go about it? tracking devices on every person, cameras on every street corner?triple the resources into law enforcement?DNA sampling of every person alive?
Prisons are full of folk who never imagined they would be caught, despite having plenty of personal evidence to the contrary.What happens is that the crime detection rate is such that they do commit many offences, and get away with it most of the time, but eventually their luck runs out.
There are hundreds of things that have an effect on the crime rates (in both directions). If tough punishment was enough to offset them, there would have been exactly zero crimes in the Middle Ages, back when they cut off your ears for stealing a loaf of bread or broke people on the wheel for catching a rabbit in The Lord’s Forest.
Whether punishment actually has an effect on crime & criminals is in fact pretty debatable, but one thing for certain: it doesn’t “just work”.
There’s also the problem of trust in the system. People who think that they’re probably going to be punished sooner or later because of their race/class/etc regardless of whether or not they commit crimes are obviously more likely to commit crimes under the theory that they have nothing to lose. Just as people who think the government will look the other way are likely to commit crimes, because they think no one who matters will care.
So people who are oppressed will commit more crimes than average and people who are privileged will also commit more crimes than average? Doesn’t it make it hard to figure out what the average is if everyone is committing more crimes than average?
Not “average”. They are logically going to commit more crimes if they believe there’s little connection between crime and punishment than they would if they believed there was such a connection.
I sure would like it if our penal system made me feel like I, as a member of law-abiding society, were a better person than the criminals. Flogging will hinder and not help with that.
In my stupid younger days, I spent a few days in jail. It sucks really bad. I would gladly take a flogging and then put a few days of recovery on the credit card at a local resort.
I am not against flogging on its face. But, I don’t think that it would be any more or less effective because of all of the reasons given upthread. Some would be deterred and some wouldn’t. There would evolve a new slang word for getting whipped, it would be said in rap songs, and compared with the whip that the masters gave to slaves in the old days. Some would wear it as a badge of honor.
Others would be deterred because of the pain. Just like how some people right now are deterred by the prospect of jail and a criminal record and others are not. No change.
What makes you think it would be just a few days? And what makes you think that you’d enjoy being at a resort if you were in serious pain? That strikes me as a waste of money, paying for a resort when you are in no condition to enjoy it.
Please see the link in post #25 and maybe you’ll reevaluate that thought.
That’s your personal logic, not that of the offender, and this is one obstacle to effective thinking on this topic.
You may think that certain things result as night follows day, this is just not the case with offenders.
Some criminals and some crimes are affected by intuitively logical policies, however the only real measurment has to be empirical, so what I would like to see are some cites with data.
Much crime does not take place with forethought, indeed the majority probably does not, much of it takes place under the influences of various substances, and a high percentage of offenders have mental and social disorders, along with very poor thought processes. Add to this high emotions and suddenly the calm detached view of the offenders’ reaction to deterrance starts to break down.
We have executed folk on the flimsiest of evidence in the most brutal ways, and it has not resolved crime, nor will it ever, deterrance through punishment does not work universally.
The question becomes, ‘Is it cost effective’, is one means of dealing with crime and criminals a better use of resources than another?The only truly effective way of preventing any form of reoffending is death, which might be somewhat controversial, especially for petty crimes such as speeding, or using a mobile phone whilst driving, but, execution as practised in the US is incredibly expensive and long winded.
The next most effective way of preventing reoffending is never to release offenders, this too could be expensive.
You’ll notice that I used the words reoffending, rather than prevention, because it is impossible to identify with any reliability the future first time offender, there are conditions which are more likely to give rise to certain types of offending, and perhaps this is where resources should be properly directed.
There is no magic answer, and the OP is falling into some wishful dreaming that there might be.Solutions are difficult, intractable, at best only partially successful.
To circle back around to the OP, we could let the convict choose between execution and life without parole. (My criticism of the OP, that there’d be nothing stopping it from being both/and rather than either/or, would clearly not apply here!) And since it would be their choice, we wouldn’t have to go through the legal rigmarole involved in executing someone. We could even let convicts opt for assisted suicide at any time during their incarceration. It would be wonderfully cost-effective, and it would be the prisoner’s choice - best of all worlds!