Crime and Punishment

The U.S. Constitution guarantees American citizens Protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The question then becomes “What is cruel and unusual punishment?”

The courts have increasingly ruled that physical punishment is cruel and unusual until now it is difficult to execute even the most deranged criminals like people who rape babies and mass murderers.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about capital punishment, it’s actually about corporal punishment.

Sending convicted criminals to a holding facility where they will be rehabilitated and retrained to become functional, contributing members of society is a wonderful idea, and it needed to be tried. We would have been remiss in our duties as a conscientious people not to. But the experiment has failed. All it has given us is a massive drain on the taxpayer and a facility where hardened criminals can become better criminals while getting stronger and more confident on the side. I don’t know about the rest of you, but the idea of a training ground for strong, confident, highly skilled felons is a frightening thought for me, and I fail to see how that rehabilitates people.

The prisoners become more hardened criminals in prison because they need to just to survive. A serial shoplifter is sent to prison for two years. He/she spends that entire time fighting some of the meanest, most violent people in America just to survive. After two years this shoplifter graduates from prison and becomes a mugger. Eventually a mugging goes bad and someone gets hurt, maybe even killed. All this at a cost of over $35,000 per criminal per year. Boy is that ever money well spent! NOT!

See the problem lies in the fact that prisons themselves are cruel. We take people with problems and put them in a place where they get victimized on a daily basis. How can this possibly happen you ask? How can it not? If you send a few thousand people to a special colony just for deranged and dangerous people it won’t take long for even the kindest and gentlest of souls to become deranged and dangerous. Sure there a few success stories, but these are fewer than the failures.

So what alternatives do we have? Corporal punishment of course!

I’m not talking about torture, or keelhauling, or crazy punishments like that. Such things are just sick and are rightly condemned by all people of good conscience. However, giving a thief twenty lashes with a bullwhip, or whacking the feet of a vandal ten or twelve times with hollow piece of bamboo is hardly torture, and many people convicted of such crimes would actually prefer this to being sent to prison.

But let’s have the punishment fit the crime. Kill murderers, castrate or kill rapists, seize a thief’s property, beat a wife beater, and so on. Not only are these punishments cheaper than long prison terms, they are quicker, easy to carry out, and have a long history of deterring people from performing such crimes. At the very least these people won’t become a tax burden for a few years then get out and become a worse menace to society than ever before, only to go back to prison and become a tax burden again.

I hope I have established that corporal punishment is no more cruel than prison is. I hope also that it is obvious that the cost of corporal punishment is far lower than prison as well. The question to deal with then is “Is corporal punishment unusual?”

Let’s define unusual as something that is rare, unheard of even on a global scale and throughout history. First, history reads like one long execution list when it comes to violent criminals, and like a heck of a beating for lesser criminals. Even prison was usually a death sentence by starvation and disease. Therefore, in a historical sense, corporal punishment is not unusual in the least, even in America. The modern world then becomes the next standard to look to for what is unusual. Okay, so many European countries and the US don’t use corporal or capitol punishment. Pretty much the rest of the world does though, with a few exceptions here and there. By that standard corporal punishment is quite normal even in today’s world. Therefore, corporal punishment is not unusual in the least.

So if corporal punishment is not really cruel and unusual why don’t we use it? Mostly because the courts are still convinced that prisons are actually more humane and productive than corporal punishment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I propose an experiment. Let’s give convicted criminals a choice at sentencing. They can either take a severe form of corporal punishment, lashing, caning, and the like, or the normal prison sentence for their crimes. Those who choose prison will have the option of taking the full corporal punishment in exchange for an immediate release. Rapists and murderers just need to be executed. Let’s see what the criminals choose, and let’s see if crime goes up, down, or stays the same. Then let’s look at the costs involved and see if it doesn’t save the taxpayers their valuable money. If criminals are choosing the corporal punishments, crime doesn’t go up, and costs do go down, then we can eliminate prison and jail sentences for many crimes in America and replace them with various forms of beatings, fines, and community service. Some crimes are so severe that they may require several beatings with time to heal in between in combination with fines and service. Let’s let the criminals decide. They are the ones who get the punishments after all.