I vaguely remember reading about this a while ago, and though I tend to read mainly non-fiction, I can’t swear it was in a real/historical context. (BTW, this thread isn’t about ‘substitutes’, paying someone to go to war for you, I’m aware that was not uncommon during the US civil war.)
Is there a place today, or has there ever been a place, where if you were rich enough you could pay someone to serve a prison sentence for you, assuming you could find someone willing to do it? I did some searching and found something in China called ‘Ding zui’, which is essentially paying someone else to serve a prison term for you, but I also read that Ding zui was illegal in China.
So is there any place currently, or in history, where we know it is/was perfectly legal to pay someone to serve a prison term for you?
Not prison terms as far as I’m aware (and imprisonment is a relatively recent form of punishment). But that’s similar to the concept of a whipping boy. It used to be the practice that noble families would employ somebody to take the punishments that a noble child had earned.
Say the Crown Prince threw a inkpot at his tutor. The tutor couldn’t give the Crown Prince thirty whacks with a switch. So they’d send in the whipping boy and he would take the thirty whacks on the Crown Prince’s behalf.
Does this practice still exist anywhere? Can I sign up as the “whipping boy” of some rich kid attending Harvard and get paid a decent salary for racking up plagiarism warnings and failing grades on his behalf?
"Yeah, I attended Harvard. The reason my GPA is 0.7 is I was going through as the “Whipping Boy” of a rich son of a Wall Street broker. He would cheat and I would confess and be given a zero for the assignment. I was using the proceeds to really attend U. Massachusetts Boston and have a 3.6 GPA there.
It brings up an interesting question. In the case of a white-collar type crime where the defendant agrees to turn himself in on a certain date, do they bother to do any type of ID check on whoever shows up to serve the sentence? If he didn’t have it with him, what would they do, send him back home?? I’m honestly wondering what’s to stop this from happening.
I have learned from watching the reality show Jail that part of jail in-processing is getting fingerprinted. So assuming you find someone not in a fingerprint database (IAFIS) I suppose it would be possible.
It seems kind of hard to imagine a government being okay with the practice when the alternative is that they could just fine the person and get to keep the money themselves.
I think your cites don’t quite show what you want. The first starts out with “Imprisonment was seldom used among the Greeks as a legal punishment for offences”, and that fits the general picture of the classical world. The second link is to an archaeological find of a structure of unknown purpose, with one of many suggestions for its purpose being a jail. Even if it were, though, does it indicate imprisonment for punishment?
Yes, they “bother” to check. Normally, it’s just a matter of showing your driver’s license which has your picture.
Remember, you’re still out on bail from your original arrest until the court releases that money and if you don’t show up to jail on time with a proper ID, the court is going to be notified and that bail is going to be forfeit and you might even get charged with violating a court order or some such thing. Trust me, the last thing you want to do is piss off a judge that did you the favor of giving you time to get your affairs in order before reporting to jail. He could have ordered the bailiff to take you away right then and there.
You get notified of when and where to turn yourself in and they also tell you to bring proper ID. People who don’t have a proper ID, don’t get the “turn yourself in” deals.
I stand by what I said. Imprisonment as a form of punishment is a recent thing. Most regimes didn’t see any reason why they should pay for feeding and sheltering the criminals in their society. If you were convicted of a crime, you were fined or enslaved or whipped or exiled or executed.
There were people held in prison but they weren’t convicted criminals. Prisoners were people who were awaiting trial, debtors who were imprisoned until their families paid off their debt, enemy combatants who were held for the duration of a war, and political prisoners that the regime found it inconvenient to kill or exile.
In New York, you’d be fingerprinted when you arrive and the prints would be checked to make sure they match the prints of the person who was arrested and convicted.
You’ll also be fingerprinted again when you leave the prison system to make sure you’re not checking out early. And any prisoner who dies is also fingerprinted.
Actually, the whipping boy method was usually quite effective. Since there were very few children the prince’s age who lived in the castle, the prince and his whipping boy (often a child of high birth) would form a strong emotional bond. Seeing his best friend get punished for something he had done was often sufficient to dissuade the prince from screwing up again.
On the antiquity of imprisonment as a punishment: According to a certain source, considered reliable by some, a certain Joseph, being falsely accused of adultery by a female scorned, was imprisoned by the husband of said female. There, he made the acquaintance of the king’s butler and baker, also imprisoned for pissing off the king in some unspecified way ( Gen. 39:19-20 ; Gen. 40:1-3 ).
Some may doubt the historical accuracy of this, but at the very least it is clear that the writer of this document, at the time he wrote it, understood that imprisonment was used as a punishment.
This is a de facto practice in China among the rich and powerful. They will hire someone to take the fall. Either that person turns themselves in and claims to be, e.g., the driver of the hit and run car, or they will hire a look-alike who will impersonate the rich criminal and serve time in their place.
In The Godfather book, Michael Corleone gets out of the murder rap for killing McCluskey and Sollozzo when the family of a man on death row is paid off for him to confess to their killings. This tale is based on similar incidents that took place in real life.
It is common in organized crime groups for a lesser member to take the fall for the crimes of a higher up for reasons of loyalty, money, or coercion.
It sort-of happens in the corporate world - many regulatory offences committed by a company could theoretically result in prision sentences for those “responsible”, leading to some collusion over who will take “responsibility” for actions that could potentially result in regulatory offences.
Or, as one fellow said to me semi-seriously in the context of a compliance review, “Hi, I’m the new Vice President in charge of Going to Jail”.
Sparingly is not the right word for it. Dig up any references to imprisonment used by society as judicial punishment in Greece or Rome and I’ll gladly explain to you why they are so atypical that they should be seen as nothing more than random noise.
Edit: Maybe make another thread so this one does not get hijacked.
