Punishment

I recent­ly read an arti­cle in the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion called “In Defense of Flog­ging” by Peter Moskos, a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York (specif­i­cal­ly at the John Jay Col­lege of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice).

The arti­cle seems to have been writ­ten to gin up inter­est in a book he has com­ing out in June called, well, In Defense of Flog­ging.

With­out fur­ther ado, an excerpt:

For most of the past two cen­turies, at least in so-called civ­i­lized soci­eties, the ide­al of pun­ish­ment has been replaced by the hope of reha­bil­i­ta­tion. The Amer­i­can pen­i­ten­tiary sys­tem was invent­ed to replace pun­ish­ment with “cure.” Pris­ons were built around the noble ideas of reha­bil­i­ta­tion. In soci­ety, at least in lib­er­al soci­ety, we’re sup­posed to be above pun­ish­ment, as if pun­ish­ment were some­how beneath us. The fact that pris­ons proved both inhu­mane and mis­er­ably inef­fec­tive did lit­tle to deter the utopi­an enthu­si­asm of those reform­ers who wished to abol­ish pun­ish­ment.

Incar­cer­a­tion, for adults as well as chil­dren, does lit­tle but make peo­ple more crim­i­nal. Alas, so suc­cess­ful were the “pro­gres­sive” reform­ers of the past two cen­turies that today we don’t have a sys­tem designed for pun­ish­ment. Cer­tain­ly released pris­on­ers need help with life—jobs, hous­ing, health care—but what they don’t need is a failed con­cept of “reha­bil­i­ta­tion.” Pris­ons today have all but aban­doned reha­bil­i­ta­tive ideals—which isn’t such a bad thing if one sees the notion as noth­ing more than pater­nal­is­tic hog­wash. All that is left is pun­ish­ment, and we cer­tain­ly could pun­ish in a way that is much cheap­er, hon­est, and even more humane. We could flog.

Yes. He just argued for flog­ging as a more enlight­ened view than impris­on­ment.

Pause for a moment to let your brain adjust to that.

Trou­bled? Get ready — he’s about to own you.

The open­ing gam­bit of the book is sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple: If you were sen­tenced to five years in prison but had the option of receiv­ing lash­es instead, what would you choose? You would prob­a­bly pick flog­ging. Would­n’t we all?

I pro­pose we give con­victs the choice of the lash at the rate of two lash­es per year of incar­cer­a­tion. One can­not rea­son­ably argue that mere­ly offer­ing this choice is some­how cru­el, espe­cial­ly when the sta­tus quo of incar­cer­a­tion remains an option. Prison means los­ing a part of your life and every­thing you care for. Com­pared with this, flog­ging is just a few very painful strokes on the back­side. And it’s over in a few min­utes. Often, and often very quick­ly, those who said flog­ging is too cru­el to even con­sid­er sud­den­ly say that flog­ging isn’t cru­el enough.

I found the arti­cle fas­ci­nat­ing and have been telling peo­ple about it since I read it. And I’ve asked them if they would per­son­al­ly pre­fer flog­ging to prison. Every­one I have posed the ques­tion to has opt­ed for excru­ci­at­ing phys­i­cal pain.

I’ve long been fas­ci­nat­ed by the dif­fer­ent notions of jus­tice. I remem­ber hear­ing Jim Rai­ley argue quite con­vinc­ing­ly in sem­i­nary that the prop­er Chris­t­ian notion of jus­tice is pri­mar­i­ly ret­ribu­tive (pun­ish­ment-ori­ent­ed) rather than reha­bil­i­ta­tive. Not that Chris­tians are opposed to reha­bil­i­ta­tion — but we ought to think of reha­bil­i­ta­tion as a func­tion of mer­cy and not of jus­tice. Per­haps some­times we should pur­sue mer­cy instead of jus­tice, and oth­er times we should offer mer­cy fol­low­ing jus­tice. But we should­n’t pre­tend that they are iden­ti­cal.

Inci­den­tal­ly, if you con­ceive of jus­tice in pure­ly reha­bil­i­ta­tive terms then you prob­a­bly can’t believe in hell or in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. If, on the oth­er hand, you believe that jus­tice is essen­tial­ly ret­ribu­tive then both are viable intel­lec­tu­al options for you.

Agree with Dr. Moskos or not, you should at least read the whole arti­cle. There’s way more than I’ve quot­ed here. I should also note that he does­n’t seem to be seri­ous­ly argu­ing for flog­ging itself so much as he is argu­ing for fix­ing our bro­ken crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Con­sid­er his con­clu­sion:

…how can offer­ing crim­i­nals the choice of the lash in lieu of incar­cer­a­tion be so bad? If flog­ging were real­ly worse than prison, nobody would choose it. Of course most peo­ple would choose the rat­tan cane over the prison cell. And that’s my point. Faced with the choice between hard time and the lash, the lash is bet­ter. What does that say about prison?

All in all, a phe­nom­e­nal essay.

On a relat­ed note, you should read my thoughts on the per­va­sive insan­i­ty of pro­fes­sors.