The Policy Initiative That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I've had this thought from time to time that the United States went astray in its abandonment of corporal punishment in favor of the prison system. The initial idea had something to do with rehabilitation of offenders, but for various reasons (some good, some bad) this goal has been essentially abandonded. This leaves us with a system of punishment that's really no less cruel than simply having the state inflict pain or permanent disfigurement on people. In particular, in practice prison really is a form of corporal punishment in light of the violence that takes place in the American penal system. But unlike in a system where a judge sentences you to X lashes, or to having a hand chopped off or what have you, the violence that will be inflicted upon a convicted felon is only incidentally related to the severity of his offense. Other factors like how "tough" you are and whether or not you can join a prison gang or whatever factor more heavily in the equation. All this seems rather wrong. Corporal punishment would dole out cruelty with greater precision. It would also dole it out at much less cost, which would open up funds for non-punitive crime control measures, including both more and better police, and the sort of social programs (and drug treatment) that liberals rightly maintain could prevent people from turning to crime in the first place.

I bring this all up because Brad Plumer just did a post along these lines (he has "Koranic justice" in mind, I was thinking more of Singapore) with an assist from an old New Republic article. Now all we need to do is find someone at The Nation to get on board and corporal punishment will become the new liberal orthodoxy! Brad brings some additional considerations to the table including the contention that corporal punishment would be a "better deterrent (less abstract than a prison sentence; loss of hand can prevent further crime) and less conducive to recidivism (doesn't corrupt you like prison does)." At least one counterveiling consideration is that prison has an "incapacitation effect" where as long as the offender is behind bars, he's not out on the streets victimizing new people -- or at least he's not victimizing non-felons. You wouldn't really want to convict, say, a rapist, flog him for a little while, and then have him back out on the streets shortly thereafter. I believe Saudi Arabia handles this by doling out copious quantities of capital punishment for major offenders, which is obviously deeply at odds with western norms. Even here in the allegedly execution-happy US of A, the ratio of executions to murders is extremely low. In practice, outside of Texas and Virginia hardly anyone is put to death.

The whole thing, moreover, is extraordinarily distasteful, and I'm certainly disinclined to go around campaigning for corporal punishment. But it does seem to me that the subject could stand some serious scrutiny and analysis, since it's not clear to me that the actually existing prison system (as opposed to some idealized alternative) is more humane in any substantive way. It may just be a huge waste of money compared to direct infliction of physical harm.