I believe casdave works in the U.K. prison system in some capacity related to mental health. What’s your experience?
None whatsoever.
But regardless of the appeal to authority and all that, he didn’t actually make an argument.
I work in prisons, and have done so for a considerable time, my role is to attempt to teach skills, work related, and in the course of that, social skills.
I am tempted to say much more, however this is only a message board and my draft post here could have given enough information not to be very sensible.
So what is your practical knowledge of prisons or of offenders then?
The reality from the public perspective, is that cameras in prisons on tv tend to be something of a freak show, and very little true objectivism, and this tends to be the recieved knowledge of the non-offending public.
Your logic, of 20 lashes, applies to your own mores, and your own personal feelings, I can tell you that offenders do not evaluate or think in anything like the way you imagine, they have their own needs and strategies.
20 lashes for someone who has undergone drug detox is a walk in the park, the physical pain is nothing compared to the withdrawal symptoms, and not only that, what on earth do you think the average offender will do? They are certain to obtain drugs to dull the pain, and despite all the security systems we have, drugs continue to make their way into prisons.
I’ll also add here, that when you look at prisoners, their physical well being, they have stab wounds, slashes, road traffic injuries, any amount of damage, still hasn’t stopped then going out for more, and we are well aware that the vast majority of real nasty killers have been seriously abused, so it seems that violence just taught them that pain is normal, and acceptable to inflict on others.
As far as a prisoner is concerned, five minute beating which they can barely feel due to pain killers is a fair trade for time in prison, and at the end of this silly episode, they still will not have any skills to gain employment - so Mr Clever, what the heck do you think is likely to happen as a result of this?
I do not know the release figures for US prisons, but given that in the UK we releases around 80k-90k offenders from prisons each year, and scaling it up to your incarceration, and offending rates, you surely must be releasing around 500k to 700k prisoners per year. These all have to live somewhere, and they need the skills;- cognitive, social and employability or they will just come right back. This demands a significant period of time to obtain such skills in prison.
A jolly quick thrashing and then out on the street is just so silly as to not be worth considering - unless you can definatively prove otherwise, but even if you do, you then have to consider the morality of such state imposed violence.
The idea that offenders will lose their jobs is quite amusing, from UK figures, at least 60% have no employment when they were sentenced to prison, and 76% have no work to return upon release, in other words, only 16% of offenders actually lose their employment through being sentenced to prison.This is probably an overstatement of a few percentage points.
Look, I can pull out figures and cite reputable sources all day, this is part of what I do when trying to obtain funding for skills training, if you want to party in cite city, you truly will come off rather the worse.
A much more practical soution would be to release prisoners into long skills training course, full time and at college, with perhaps licence conditions that mean that if they fail to attend college, or training, they will be returned to prison - this would give them all employment upon release and has a chance of keeping them busy for that crucial early post release period - this would not be cheap, it might even be more expensive, but we have never tried it, it is worth a pilot project but unfortunately it would also require a good deal of legislation to be enacted, and the lawmaking process is not exactly the fastest thing on earth.
Now, if you do want to play, fine by me, get yourself some proper reputable peer reviewed cites that prove the corporal punishment makes a differance to reoffending, you will not find one, but you will find lots that will state the best deterrance for crime is the increased probability of detection.
Using one’s experience as an authority isn’t an appeal to authority.
Also, you’re the one making the proposition. We aren’t obligated to think your idea is any good if you don’t actually offer any good evidence for it. And, in fact, what evidence you have offered is wrong, as I pointed out that a conviction, not jail time, is the thing that tends to ruin people’s lives.
It’s not an appeal to authority. You asked, using those exact words, what authority he had. And the answer is that he has a significant amount of experience with prisons and inmates. It doesn’t mean everything he says is automatically correct, but it does mean he has a lot more firsthand experience than you do.
Okay fair enough, this is a very interesting post. I can see you know what you’re talking about, and why it wouldn’t be much of a deterrent for criminals or drug addicts.
Slight nitpick on the loss of jobs thing though - I wouldn’t say 16% - considering 40% had a job going in, and 24% do coming out, I’d say nearly half of those with jobs lose their employment. Which is a pretty significant number.
I like your probation training idea though.
I’d go for C.P. ASWELL as confinement as a punishment.
Preferably just before they’re released from jail.
It would give them something to think about as they served their sentence and would stick in their minds AFTER they were released.
I would only suggest it for assault, threats, kidnapping, terrorism, other murders and rape.
Basically if the criminal used threats or violence then he’d get C.P.
It wouldn’t do any harm and it might to some good.
Also their victims and their families would probably feel better about it aswell.
How do you know it won’t do harm? All the studies I’ve ever heard of, not to mention common sense says that it’ll make them worse, more violent. You hit people, they tend to lash out. Rebellions are full of people who were beaten and tortured by the people they are rebelling against.
As stated in, I believe, another thread (I lose track sometimes) bullying and violence has rocketed in schools since C.P. has been banned.
So these, hypothetical studies fly in the face of real life; always supposing that they weren’t on an agenda anyway.
I know a lot of violent people, I was brought up in a violent, very deprived area and I.M.E. C.P. didn’t encourage perpetrators to continue with further violence but the complete opposite.
Violent people tend to understand, respect and fear violence upon their own persons.
It tends to be the good kids/adults who say how they were beaten within in an inch of their life and then laughed at their punishers, also that it was never a deterrent.
Actually on that score alone they’re telling the truth because they were the people who never got into trouble and as such never got beaten.
That being the case they never experienced the deterrant value of C.P.
Unfortunately for them they did experience the pain of being bullied and beaten up by bullies when C.P. was no longer in force.
Personally I hate bullies but people like yourself with the best, but misguided intentions, tend to perpetrate those things that you are most against.
I agree with this. Rehabilitation should be a goal of the prison system . . . if it’s not a goal we’re achieving (and in many cases, it’s not), then that’s the problem we should be addressing.+
I see no reason to believe that. Like teenage pregnancy, I expect that it’s more a matter that people are now admitting it happens. Nor does it even matter much, since that doesn’t touch on later effects; like the boy beaten by teachers in school growing up to be a man who beats his wife and children because that’s how he’s been taught it’s done.
Wars and torture aren’t “hypothetical”.
Oh, please. You can get beaten or tortured while perfectly innocent, and often will be. Legalize the beating of children in school, and you will naturally attract people who like beating on children and now see a legal means of indulging themselves.
As if bullies are some new invention. And as if having the teachers all be bullies themselves is going to do anything but make bullying worse.
It wasn’t any lack of beating children that caused the bullying I had to deal with; it was the fact that the teachers made it clear they didn’t care or outright approved of it.
There’s something kind of hilarious about this. If you think a terrorist or a murderer did not learn his lesson from decades in jail, what the hell is the point of beating him up on the way out of jail?
On the other hand bullying from teachers and principals toward students is way down. I’m going to guess that’s a wash.
Personally I wouldn’t let out a terrorist or other murderers from jail, and I certaily wouldn’t expect someone like that to have learnt any sort of a lesson anyway.
Secondly,punishing someone for acting violently to a fellow pupil is not bullying.
Retribution for your own anti social behaviour is not bullying.
Tormenting, beating up or otherwise abusing a fellow student whether or not its for reasons of low self esteem, sexual reasons, sadism or because your Mommy didn’t tell you often enough that she loved you is bullying.
Then there’s no point in beating them. Anyway it was your hypothetical. The point applies just as well to people who just finished jail terms for assault or kidnapping.
I was making a more general comment about teachers beating on students, not specifically referring to bullying. Without corporal punishment in schools there’s no physical punishment for bullying, but there’s also no physical punishment for ‘I’m the teacher and you pissed me off.’
Since the four LAPD officers who beat King were acquitted of all state charges, by all appearances it was a court-sanctioned beating.
I honestly cannot see how you balance out the following dichotomy,
Physically assault a person, mainly as an act of revenge, thereby undermining your own moral authority.
Attempt to develop and train skills and desired behaviour patterns in order to effect rehabilitation, from the same authority that had you thrashed.
Being thrashed would probably gain some form of credibility for a prisoner in the eyes of their peers, remember that a prisoner is not at all interested in what the public think of them, they are interested in what other prisoners think of them, and having a large number of whip weals will show everyone that they are ‘hard core’ and not to be trifled with.
Deterrance only works in any form when there is a reasonable certainty of being caught, the death penalty does not affect murder rates much, if at all, and no matter how you think about the pain of physical assault, the deterrant effect is absolutely nil to someone who genuinely believes they will never be caught.
Despite what any other poster here imagines, offenders rarely believe they will be caught for a specific offence, they may accept that somewhere along the line they will be convicted, but that is a remote and unquantifiable risk in their view, even if the actual evidence is that prisoners at in the revolving prison door system.
All some folk here are doing is imagining what would deter them, and what things they would dislike, and transferring this to a completely incompatible outlook.
There may well be cases where a good whipping would actually deter some criminals from some types of offences, however, we are talking of an institutional solution that would have to be applied uniformly, how would you determine which prioners this would be effective, and the remainder for whom it would have no effect, or even make them even ore violent, or cause mental problems etc.
There is no one single simplistic solution to offending, we have had hanging in the UK for trivial offences, and some of the most horrendous violence visited upon miscreants, but yet crime did not dissappear.
As always, be suspicious of simple solutions to complex problems, beware of lazy thinking that imagines hat such simple solutions might exist.
I’d really like to see the citation for that claim. Nothing that I have seen indicates that is has any substance. (Incidents such as Columbine have gone up–although they are still rare, and gun violence has increased, but that appears to be more closely tied to changes in the overall society rather than any change specific to schools.)
[Anecdote Alert!] My kids never experienced anything like the bullying that I witnessed and experienced. Beyond that, the bullies I knew were the ones who were most frequently subjected to paddling. [/Anecdote Alert]
From a less personal perspective, (although still subject to charges of anecdotal evidence), In The Fatal Shore. The epic of Australia’s founding, Robert Hughes noted that those transported actually developed a hierarchy of sorts, based on who had withstood the most lashes. While the lash was eventually abandoned under the protests of “do gooders” who objected to its harshness, they only won out when sufficient numbers of authorities acknowledged that the lash had rather little effect upon actual behavior.
Similarly, when the U.S. Navy finally abandoned the lash, there were cries from old officers that the Navy was doomed, yet both morale and discipline appear to have improved after the lash was retired.