To those who would have doctors check periodically to make sure the subject can continue to be flogged (or would clear them medically in the first place as "able to withstand’ a flogging), do you realize that some people will die after the flogging, and it won’t have been predictable?
Some of those flogged will get infections, and some of them will die. Some will respond to the inflammation induced by the flogging with an overwhelming cascade of systemic inflammation, and they too will die.
So, bad idea (unless you’re okay with a few late deaths, and for non-capital crimes at that).
Except there’s real evidence that imprisonment reduces crime.
Consider John Smith. He’s twenty-five years old. He robs convenience stores. He’s been robbing a convenience store every week for the last five years.
Smith gets arrested, convicted, and sent to prison for two years. Has this reduced the crime rate? Yes - because John Smith won’t be robbing the 104 convenience stores he would otherwise have robbed in the next two years.
It’s pretty obvious that if you lock up people who commit crimes you’re preventing them from committing those crimes while they’re locked up. And that reduces the crime rate.
Only if they are actually guilty. And only if imprisoning them doesn’t create even more criminals; the same goes for torture and executions. Smith isn’t going to be stopped from robbing any stores if the state just arrests the nearest black guy instead of him.
If you want to debate the effectiveness of the police and court system, start a new thread. This thread is about what happens after the arrest and conviction.
You’re arguing here that imprisoning people can encourage other people to commit crimes. A shaky premise on its own but also one that contradicts a post you made earlier where you said that “people who think the government will look the other way are likely to commit crimes”. If people think the government is going to try to avoid imprisoning them, won’t that encourage them to commit more crimes?
I’ll make up a story too. John Smith goes to prison, learns from the experts, becomes a much more effective and motivated thief, and graduates to home invasions. He robs three houses a week for the next forty years, and is never caught again. How has the crime rate been reduced?
If the practice were adopted, it would presumably take a while for the legal challenges to materialize. By that time, the practice might still be cruel, but if it were widely practiced, it wouldn’t be unusual anymore, right? Problem solved.
I kid, but didn’t the SCOTUS make a ruling about torture using that logic, that a practice could be cruel or unusual, but not cruel and unusual?
Actually, in another thread, someone cited a psychologist for a state … North or South Carolina I think … which was under court order to release prisoners due to overcrowding (prolly South Carolina, the place is a cesspool, culturally speaking) and he tested all the criminals slated for release for psychopathology (i.e., were they psychopaths?) and refused to release any that tested positive. The result was a VERY low recidivism rate among the released criminals … less than five person, compare that with ordinary recidivism rates … so there might just be something there.
Hmm, it is not all that hard to identify prisoners who are most unlikely to reoffend. Part of the management of offenders is to carry out risk assessments on this probablility, and there are certain risk factors that flag up.
Heck, I looked uo a couple of prisoners today, you don’t need to be a psychologist to work it out. It is not hard to do this after talking to a prisoner for few seconds, the body language, the attitude and speech all broadcast the message loud and clear.
Most prison staff could spot a reoffender within seconds, it really is not difficult at all.
The harder ones to spot are the ones who might or might not not reoffend, because these often have every intention of not repeating their past, however they may suffer ceertain disadvanteges, such as limited employability, poor literacy, language, or just plain bad luck - and yes bad luck does come into it.
This shows one of my problems with the objections laid out here. Every objection I hear from people here has the problem of already occurring under our present system of incarceration.
To the objection that people could die following a flogging (as opposed to during such) I looked up the number of people who died per year in custody/prison/etc.
State prisons averaged 3091.66 deaths per year from 2001 - 2006 (discounting executions). There’s a variety of causes, illness, AIDS, suicide, homicide, drugs/alcohol, accident, other. But that’s a lot of deaths. The mortality rate (deaths per 100,000) averages 251 during the sample.
For state prisons the statistics are
AVG per year: 3091.66
AVG Mortality (per 100k): 251
For local jails the statistics are
AVG per year: 1168
AVG Mortality (per 100k): 145
As I said, I’m not choosing sides on this one, but I’m not seeing a lot of the arguments placed against it as holding up. For those who argue that it would be a sliding scale into more and greater punishments in what way are we not doing that now with prison terms?
The most honest answer I’ve seen, and the one that holds the most water (and honesty, IMHO) is Evil Captor’s post that said:
That boils down to ‘it feels wrong to me’ and that’s an honest answer. Attempts to otherwise rationalize our existing system as somehow ‘right’ don’t seem to work for me. Add in the existing COST of our prison system and in these times it becomes something to look for alternatives.
According to that just the states are spending $51B per year (2008) managing their corrections systems. Over a billion dollars per state per year. In my opinion, without a significant upturn in state tax revenues that won’t be sustainable.
For those who advocate privatization of the prison systems, however, we run into something else that makes me, at least, uneasy. It encourages, through lobbying dollars, the ‘hard line’ on many crimes that fills our prisons to overcrowding. Essentially, we are seeing political contributions leading to an increased number of our fellow citizens being incarcerated for others financial gain. That, to me, is beyond bad policy and straight into acts against the general welfare.
This is not an issue with an easy answer. But the fact is that offering the option to prisoners (male and female as someone mentioned above) offers at least a partial solution to several issues concerning our penal system.
It would reduce crowding in prisons.
It would reduce the cost of prisons
It would reduce the power of the lobbying groups.
It would (likely) reduce deaths in related to our penal system.
It would place those currently imprisoned back into the productive community.
Again, not taking sides, but I’m not hearing any essential arguments against, here.
I feel much the same as Jonathan Chance. While it’s easy to argue that flogging is cruel, it’s much harder to make the case that it is more cruel than imprisonment. Perhaps that would not be the case if the prison system was better conceived and administered, but as it actually exists (especially in the U.S.) imprisonment is just a horrible outcome. In the IMHO poll the vast majority of respondents would prefer lashes to any meaningful prison sentence. If that’s a more or less representative sample, then it would seem that prison for most people is far crueler than flogging, for how are we to define, measure, or compare cruelties expect by looking at people’s preferences?
The slippery slope arguments in this thread are not entirely out of line, but do seem premature and somewhat arbitrary – *everything *the state does or might do could be taken too far turned into an evil.
My main objection to the practice would be that I’m not wild about the potential effect on the culture. Maybe it wouldn’t meaningfully change societal attitudes, but, in general, if you don’t want a violent culture then you shouldn’t instigate violence.
Spousal abuse? Tax evasion? Driving while black? Any number of reasons unrelated to their robbery expertise.
As to the thread - if any of you are OK with living in a violent society, that’s your prerogative. Some of us think the usefulness of society is the chance to make better people. Ones who aren’t slaves to their animal nature. YMMV.
My main objection is that if flogging is introduced as a punishment, it’s likely to become a both/and rather than an either/or situation.
That is not happening now, because we currently employ a bright line against state-administered corporal punishment.
A second objection I have is that you’d be changing the composition of those offenders who were released quickly. You’d be immediately releasing a much greater proportion of your most physically tough criminals back into society than we’re doing now.
No doubt your typical state prison or municipal jail is a much less healthy environment than the outside, but has this been controlled for the nature of the prison population? People who live a life of crime are generally not the best at taking good care of themselves even when they’re out on the street, and have a greater likelihood than most of us to meet early and unhappy ends even when free.
I wouldn’t expect there to be no difference once social and demographic factors are controlled for, but I bet the difference would shrink considerably.
Now, you’re constrained to one dimension of punishment: time. You can have life without parole, but you can’t have life without parole plus 100 lashes, nor can you add floggings along the way for bad behavior while incarcerated.
Finally, the cost/benefit ratio as I see it: the cost is that we’d be reintroducing punishments that we’d left behind because we’d come to regard them as barbaric, and potentially opening the door to even more barbaric punishments. The benefit, as best as I can tell, is dubious and hypothetical. Once flogging becomes a both/and (something I regard as nearly inevitable once reintroduced), you don’t even get the cost savings of reduced prison population.
As I understand it, according to studies physical punishment from spanking on up to torture tends to be good at forcing short term obedience, but in the long term produces more defiance of authority and aggressive behavior than non-violent methods of coercion.
