Should we bring back the lash?
It would be a lot less cruel than being raped.
And while we’re at it, I’d have to agree that the stocks had their uses, too.
20 thoughts on “A Solution To The Prison Problem”
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Should we bring back the lash?
It would be a lot less cruel than being raped.
And while we’re at it, I’d have to agree that the stocks had their uses, too.
Comments are closed.
A whole new meaning to the phrase, “stocks and bonds.”
Whatever happened to exile? That was a good one. If someone is to be put away for life, it seems more cost-effective. That’s not even counting the possible deterrence it would have.
Exile is great, until the President’s plane crash lands on Manhattan island…
A few years ago a man in Kentucky was banished by a judge. He’d been stalking some woman and wouldn’t stop, so the judge banished him from ever stepping foot in or driving through Kentucky again. Lawyers got a chuckle out of it, saying its the first time they’ve heard of banishment being handed down in a long, long, long time.
Since the fellow is a sociologist, often a code word for “antisocial,” I doubt the complete sincerity behind his Modest Proposal. But, on the other hand, I think he’s absolutely right.
Murray and Herrnstein in their famous book convincingly demonstrated that a big part of the problem with criminal justice is that criminals are almost always dumber than average, often significantly. And for people with lower intelligence, and almost certainly certain cognitive or emotional defects that make it even harder to foresee the distant consequences of actions and exert the executive function necessary to act on this insight, the system as set up functions terribly. It would work very well for an IQ 120 person of normal temperament caught in its gears, but for an IQ 90 ADD twentysomething male — not at all.
They argued a successful rehabilitative criminal justice system would need to be designed as if for large emotionally-challenged children, not very bright. Immediate and physical punishmentm, followed promptly by an opportunity to earn forgiveness and restoral of status, is a much better idea than long-delayed incarceration followed by decades of random and sometimes subtle discrimination. Not to mention you reduce the problem of prison as a “finishing school” for criminality.
I don’t have a problem with corporal punishment for criminals, I think the move away from it in the West has more to do with self-serving sensibilities of the general population than with such punishments being “barbaric” in any meaningful sense.
I think that’s unfair, Andrew. I believe in the sincerity of those who championed the move from punitive to rehabilitative view of penology. I think it more likely the mistake comes in their assumptions that criminals are just like non-criminals, except for accidents of timing and wealth and rearing. It wasn’t an entirely unreaosnable impulse, coming off of several centuries of noxious social mythology that suggested aristocrats were better than the rest of us by birth.
I think I’ll stick with my comment, corporal punishment is too graphic for the general population, most people have too much empathy for the physical pain imposed and so we ban it. We use incarceration not because it’s an effective method of solving criminals propensity to commit crime – it certainly isn’t, but because it gets them out of circulation for a while, out of sight, out of mind. Your “finishing school” for criminals is a line I often use, prison is a place we send criminals to mix and mingle so that when they come out they’ve learnt how to be more successful as criminals.
I put the whole corrections mess down to it being a political compromise between the two political persuasions, the carrot and the stick are the two tools we have to change behavior, the right doesn’t like criminals being offered the carrot, the left doesn’t like them subjected to the stick, and so we sit on our thumbs doing nothing effective to reform criminals before we return them to their hunting grounds.
Me, I like Heinlein’s solution. Put ’em all on an island (the Aleutians come to mind) and let them run their own society.
That said, after a Federal Court convicted the 3rd Massachusetts House Speaker in a row of felonies, thought could be given to fencing off the MA statehouse and simply declaring it a federal prison.
Flogging? Maybe cut off hands for stealing. No thanks.
We might have more prisoners than China but China also sentences more people to death than us.
One of the reasons we have so many people in prison is because there is a subculture that glorifies the life of a mobster. People choose to live that way because they think it is cool. I don’t know how to change that but more art classes in high school isn’t the answer.
How about if we eliminate stuff like TV and weight facilities from prisons? My bad, cruel and unusual punishment ACLU suits to follow.
Both your and Heinlein’s solution are nonstarters, phil, because both rely on the intelligence of the criminals. You have to be smart enough and forward-thinking enough to imagine, before you steal a car or mug someone, that this might result in (1) no more watching of TV for many years, or (2) banishment to an island where people just like you run things, which, as it turns out, is not fun.
But if you were that smart and forward-thinking, the existing penalties would be more than enough to prevent doing the crime. It’s not iike would-be criminals are uninformed of the possibility of being sent to prison. They just don’t, in the moment, think about that. It’s too far away, and too shrouded with strange mystifying (to them) uncertainties about probation, trials, plea bargains, what prison is atually like, the weird cachet it has for young men of sad background, et cetera.
Now if you knew that if someone sees you steal that unlocked bike you’re eyeing, maybe photographs you with a cell phone, and the cops come to your house this afternoon before you’ve had a chance to sell it, or worse find you still riding it home, then tomorrow morning at 6 AM you’ll be in front of a judge with 5 minutes to explain yourself, and, if that doesn’t work, by noon you’ll be tied to a post in front of your house and getting the worst beating of your life, just barely short of permanent injury — that might actually work. That’s close enough and nasty enough to factor into the thinking of someone not very bright.
wodun, you think locking a man in a cage like an animal is more respectful of his dignity than beating him? Or is just that the former doesn’t impact your eyeballs? Eat meat, but avert your eyes from the butcher’s business?
I know (from unfortunate personal experience) that fully half (in Virginia, at least) of incarcerations at the local level are failure to pay some kind of debt. Here, at least, we lock up people who owe money so that they then owe more money. Makes sense to me.
FWIW, most of the remainder are non-violent simple possession charges and/or property crimes. The next largest group after that is borderline mental cases – fine if they take their pills, but…
The true number of violent offenders is a rather small percentage of those actually locked up. We could solve most of our prison overcrowding problems by simply being rather picky about that.
Disclaimer: By the above standards, I deserved to be there.
I’m all for flogging or caning. Even better if I get to be the one who whips the SOB who got probation after burglarizing my home. In fact, I’d even give the little weasel the option of being put into a cage match with me so that I could use my bare hands on him.
OTOH, if I were on other end … I’d choose a lash for month of my sentence rather than waste those months in prison. So I’d have to explain the scars …
@ philw1776
“How about if we eliminate stuff like TV…”
Wait a minute. TV can be mind-numbing, cheap docile entertainment for kids, why stop now? No premium channels, just broadcast and maybe basic cable. I’d *rather* have em’ sucked into soap operas, y’ know?
OTOH, if I were on other end … I’d choose a lash for month of my sentence rather than waste those months in prison. So I’d have to explain the scars …
If offered the choice of 12 lashes or a year in prison, I’d definitely take the licks. The wounds will heal but you can’t get a year of your life back.
G, I’m with you on some of the absurd drug crimes, although I have to reserve some judgment, because stuff like crack and meth really does destroy lives and taking a complete hands-off well it’s your life f*** it up if you want to is unrealistic, in the same way we can’t necessarily allow the neighbors to experiment with building bombs in their backyards. And let’s not forget loads of these are juveniles.
But property crime — I don’t consider that a minor issue at all. If you steal my stuff, you are stealing the hours of my life that I had to work to pay for it. I’ll have to spend those hours again, and the hours of my life are the most precious thing I have. You might as well be locking me in a cage. That’s not a trivial offense, at all.
G, I’m with you on some of the absurd drug crimes, although I have to reserve some judgment, because stuff like crack and meth really does destroy lives and taking a complete hands-off well it’s your life f*** it up if you want to is unrealistic,
One of my nieces has royally messed up her life with drug addiction. She turns 40 this year so she isn’t a kid any more. If that were the extent of the damage, then it’d just be a sad piece of life. However, she had (and continues to have) kids. Her drug addiction has wreaked holy havoc on those kids’ lives. I’m not saying that my niece deserves to be in jail for doing drugs. But drug addiction affects far more than just the addict. The so-called “War on Drugs” has failed miserably but full legalization isn’t without its problems.
Crack is an artifact of the illegality of cocaine. I strongly suspect that the meth market is too.
I am one of the “legalise everything” brigade – simply because such a policy would put the pushers out of business overnight, and I have no problem with people with inadequate self-control being allowed to kill themselves in whichever way they choose. And many, many fewer decent people would be caught in the crossfire.
I have a very small amount of personal experience with hard drugs, in particular heroin. Over here in the UK, heroin is used medicinally, and about 14 years ago (at one of the worst points of my life, a few hours after a heart attack) I was injected (against my specific wishes) with a fairly large dose of the stuff. After all this time I still remember my state of mind. “OK, so I might be dead within an hour. Who gives a f**k?” And I can easily imagine why some people in really bad situations might not be able to resist that pull.
But a majority of people in situations that bad have put themselves there. Why should the rest of us suffer?