Less Sparing the Rod
21 Dec 2002
[1042w]
The Lord Chief Justice says we're sending too many people to jail. Well I agree. I don't mind if jail is unpleasant, so long as the unpleasantness serves a purpose. But so far as I can make out jail does the opposite of rehabilitation, by putting young men cheek by jowl with more advanced criminals who can encourage them in their career. On the other hand community service scarcely seems like a deterrent or a punishment, even if it may help some convicts to learn better habits. And it's still quite expensive.
I think it's time we started thinking whether corporal punishment should be back on the menu. I'm talking about hitting convicted criminals with a stick (I spell it out in anglo-saxon rather than sticking to the latin roots so you won't think I'm sugar-coating it, which I'm not.)
Before you send the van for me, let me mention that the sentence of a court needs to do four things: deter, both the criminal being sentenced and everyone else, from doing more crime; rehabilitate the criminal into a more sociable frame of mind; punish the criminal (you may not want to do this one; but perhaps you haven't, as I have not either, been burgled or mugged); cost as little as possible
Maybe you think my last item shouldn't be on the list - but it should. Sending a man to prison costs about as much as employing a nurse. You can't have both.
So how does hitting convicts with a stick add up?
Deterrent: well, it can scarcely be a very much less impressive deterrent than prison. I think it's possible that the kind of stupid person who goes in for casual burglary might be able to imagine being walloped with a stick with a clarity he could not bring to the more distant prospect of imprisonment.
Rehabilitation: obviously not very educational, being beaten with a stick. But at least it doesn't involve sharing a cell for twenty hours a day with an older and more experienced burglar, and living in a community in which respect is gained by being a hard nut. In short, it doesn't make things worse (though I should acknowledge the possibility that it could become for some young men a badge of courage or a rite of initiation, which would be a bad thing; and it may also have what they called at the time of abolition "a coarsening effect"). When all's said and done, the best way to rehabilitate someone is to deter him from doing the crime again; then he has to get a life instead. It's harsh medicine. Maybe it works.
Punishment: oh yes, it's a punishment alright, no doubt about that. Hitting them with sticks sure does express the just disapproval of society. Nobody would think they were being let off lightly.
Cheap: you do the math, as they say. Even if it's no better than prison... even if it's not as good as prison... it's still. Very. Cheap.
Given all these arguments, which to me seem, if not conclusive, then at least compelling, I wonder why we don't at least, as a country, look into the idea a bit. After all, we might find it was a good thing, or we might find it's a bad thing. But I want to suggest that at present we don't know for certain which.
Well, perhaps we don't look into it now because we've been through all the arguments fifty years ago. Maybe abolition was right then, and it's right now. Maybe. But we don't know. In the first place, abolition may have been a bad idea in 1948. I bow to no man in my reverence for Clement Attlee, but this was the government that brought us the Partition of India and the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Perhaps it was, as many people at the time thought, a bad idea to get rid of the birch.
On the other hand, it may have been a good idea at the time, and yet still be worth reconsidering now. The calculations of small criminals are not fully rational. They involve a balance between fear and hope. In 1948 criminals had the idea the state was an all-hanging, all-flogging affair, red in tooth and claw. So the milder punishments still left in the judicial armoury were enough to deter. But now the state looks much less scary, precisely because nobody remembers the days when it sanctioned brutal punishment. In the climate of 1948 you could deter just as well with prison as with the birch; perhaps now you can't.
Another possible reason why we don't look again at corporal punishment is that we are sentimental.
Perhaps we think hitting with sticks is less civilised than locking up. We should not. Locking up in jails is really horrible: it's dehumanising and maddening and cruel. Only, it doesn't horrify us so much because the click of a lock isn't such a shocking personal intimate sound as the impact of a hard object on a human being. And also the key turns in the lock and the door closes and we can't see any more. Jail only raises welts under the skin, where they can't upset our civilised sensibilities: but they are welts.
On the other hand, if we did corporal punishment we would no longer be able to pretend that we weren't being cruel. At present we are being cruel, by putting men in horrible prisons. And we are being cruel because we have made the sensible choice that it's worth tainting the moral character of our society with cruelty if that keeps us from lapsing into barbarism. This is the right choice: at least, if we thought it a mistake, we would be the first country in history to think this.
The only problem is that we want to make this choice, and at the same time pretend that nothing we do in the criminal justice system is cruel. That is a sentimental wish. And sentiment will lead us wrong. Squeamishness about acknowledging we have chosen to be cruel to criminals should not stop us thinking clearly about how to do this in the best and cheapest way.
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Dominic Anderson wrote on 15 Sep 2009
l have to assume that you are someone who has benefitted from beatings, seen the benefit that beating individuals brings, in order for your promotion of what is now widely regarded as a useless form of punishment for those too stupid resentful or deprived to make a success of their criminality, like bankers politicians and gansters.
Yes lets start by beating those who prosecute wars in third world countries and sell complicated financal packages
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