Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby makes a persuasive case for bringing flogging back into the penal system, even though he makes no mention of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. To support his view he points out that prisons are full to bursting, that the worst part of imprisonment is the brutal treatment inmates inflict on one another, and that the cost — $30,000 per year per inmate – has to be borne by the taxpayer. It is hard to disagree with him. In fact, the case for the re-adoption of flogging is stronger than his column, parts of which work against his argument.
The strengths of his argument lie in his awareness of the public’s discontent with the present system of incarceration. Most Americans are uneasy about the steep rise in the number of men and women locked up and the fact that, beyond those 1.6 million prisoners, there are many more walking the streets without supervision because judges are reluctant to lock up first- or second-time offenders and because over-crowding means most offenders are released early. The rising crime rate concerns everyone but Jacoby makes it clear that the prison system is not a solution to that problem.
Jacoby’s weaknesses show themselves at the start of his editorial. By reminding his readers of the cruelty of punishments in Puritan America he also makes them aware that one alteration in the law often leads to others, and that bringing corporal punishment back could open the door to adding a few refinements, such as piercing a wrongdoer’s tongue with a hot iron. Furthermore, he believes that offenders should be flogged in public in order to humiliate them.
That also undermines his point since few people have any desire to be a witness to physical punishment, nor do many people look back nostalgically to the stocks or public hangings. If the intention is to deprive young offenders of the cachet of doing time, as Jacoby puts it, he should go back fifty or more years to the time when schoolboys were routinely beaten with canes, yet were neither humiliated nor improved by that.
Another weakness is his occasional detour into irrelevance. The fact that 58% of murders and 98% of burglaries do not result in long-term prison sentences is not a fault of the prison system. Also, his insistence on telling his readers his views on gun control not only distracts from his argument but hurts his credibility, at least for those readers who believe guns should be controlled. Nor does Jacoby help his cause by accusing politicians of indulging in “deluded happy talk” about how safe the streets are. Politicians know their constituents prefer to vote for candidates who get things done, like making streets more secure. More to the point, sarcasm does not increase the reader’s trust in Jacoby’s judgment.
In spite of that, the case he makes for flogging is hard to refute. If flogging kept young men and women out of prison and turned them into productive members of society, everyone would benefit. Reducing the prison population might make the system more manageable and humane, while at the same time giving dangerous criminals the length of sentence they deserve. The argument he leaves until last, the fact that some 200,000 men are raped in prison each year, is reason enough to re-think the issue and introduce radical change.
Jacoby may say sarcastically that “we now practice a more enlightened, more humane way of disciplining wrongdoers: We lock them up in cages” but the fact is that we have come a long way since the Puritans applied branding irons to human flesh. The solution may be to revise the present system so that the victim rather than the criminal receives more consideration under the law than the wrongdoer, and gets a say in sentencing the criminal. Quite a few may opt for something more than “the short, sharp shame of corporal punishment.”