Judicial Corporal Punishment

[Túrin Turambar]

Seeing as law-related topics are in the vogue around here, and seeing as I’m starting a series of threads related to crime and punishment around several boards, I thought I’d start a discussion on this.

We’ve all done capital punishment to death, but what about judicial corporal punishment?

For example, in Malaysia and Singapore, certain violent offenders (especially rapists) are caned in addition to being given a prison sentence. Corporal punishment is also practiced in countries under Shai’ra Law, as well as many African countries. It was practiced until fairly recently in South Africa and is still in use in Zimbabwe IIRC.

As I said on TORC:

Personally, I think that it is a better punishment than prison in many ways. For the less serious offender, it knocks months or years off their life and puts them in danger from more hardened criminals. It also puts them in an environment that is unlikely to be beneficial to them. For the serious offender who has already been there and knows the ins and outs of the prison system, it may not be much of a punishment at all. In the first case, a quick caning gets the point across and lets the offender get on with their life, with the scars to remind them to keep within the law. In the second, it provides a stronger deterrent than prison.

A barbaric punishment or a sensible and appropriate one? If you support it, for what crimes should it be applied?

[Lidless]

*notes stiches on Iranian's wrist*

"I see the appeal came through."

I equate corporal punishment with electric shock therapy. Dubious at best. If anything, it makes the offender even more resentful towards authority than a prison term ever would.

[vison]

I don't think I can follow you down this road, Lord_M. I think the Law ought to continue the humanizing trend to less violence in its operation.

As a citizen, I want The State to act as humanely as possible toward me and my fellows. I do not want to fear violence from the police or the courts, among other things.

Those who are hit desire to hit back.

The "punishment" in corporal punishment is "humiliation", not pain.

Not that I'm a big fan of jails, because I'm not.

[Jnyusa]

I think that enforced restitution is best of all. They are doing it in Ohio and I very much approve, even though there are still all kinds of holes in the system.

Jn

[Túrin Turambar]

For those who are interested, here's the article that started off my most recent train of thought on the subject (posted in the Following the News thread at Manwë) -

Crime up after whippings stopped

By Lloyd Jones
June 15, 2006

THE whipping of adults and children with coconut branches as punishment for wrongdoing has ceased in a remote Solomon Islands community following warnings it was illegal.

But crime has gone up again, community leaders say.

At a forum with police and justice officials at Wagina in Choiseul Province yesterday, villagers discussed their traditional Gilbertese whipping practice, how it conflicted with the national law and what alternative punishments could be used.

When the whipping was exposed in the national media in March, Wagina community leader Ata Tabeuta said public drunkenness, sexual abuse and theft had dropped right off since its introduction last year following a surge in law breaking.

Offenders were made to sit in the meeting house in front of 2,000 villagers to undergo their whipping, adults receiving 24 lashes and children half that.

The lashings, carried out by the community's "muscle men", often left people with back and thigh injuries and unable to walk for hours.

The whippings ceased after radio and newspaper reports delivered warnings it constituted assault and was therefore illegal under the law.

Public Solicitor Ken Averre, who attended the forum with Police Commissioner Shane Castles and former governor-general Baddley Devesi, said community leaders reported that crime had gone up since the whipping stopped.

"They felt they were in a difficult position because the whipping was working in terms of keeping a degree of order within the community."

Averre said the community now understood that when there was a conflict between customary practice and the national law, the national law took precedence.

"The risks attendant upon breaking the national law are that the people doing the whipping will end up with criminal charges."

The Wagina community was surprised by the media outcry and the whipping had stopped, Averre said.

"People who were being whipped said, 'well actually, you're not allowed to whip me, I've heard on the radio'."

The forum discussed how the community could mete out justice without overstepping the bounds of the national law.

The police commissioner told of steps being taken to improve policing in the area and said Solomon Islanders had a right to expect the application of natural justice and a fair trial in a properly constituted court.

Many villages in the Solomons are far from police posts but a community court system allows chiefs or elders to decide punishments for minor crimes.

Wagina is a Gilbertese settlement of migrants from the former Gilbert Islands, now part of Kiribati, who were settled in the Solomons by British administrators between 1955 and 1971 to ease overcrowding on their home islands.

link

I also think that this post by portia raised some good points:

I agree, assuming that the beatings do no permanent physical damage, and are public. Wise-ass young criminals who think jail is a rite of passage will think more than twice about a public whipping (especially if they are afraid that their nerve will not hold up). Jail would do them more harm, especially if they are chosen as someone's consort in jail. Whipping would not necessarily cause someone to be unemployable, after a few sick days. It isn't that I like the idea of whipping, but it has its good points in comparison with the alternatives.

[axordil]

Won't even go into the morality. In a tiny and insular culture of any sort you can get away with things that larger and less heterogenous populations simply would not tolerate. That, and we had a revolution to get away from that crap.

[Túrin Turambar]

Won't even go into the morality.

Why not?

[Alatar]

The Isle of Man had Birching as a punishment until relatively recently. The guy who used to administer the birchings said that he rarely saw the same backside twice. Put simply, it worked.

[axordil]

LM--
I won't go into the morality because I don't care to get into what cannot help but be the ad hominem argument that follows. I've been drawn down that path before here, and I wasn't very happy with myself afterwards. To be honest, I would happily sacrifice determining whatever Eternal Truth is for being able to talk to my friends.

Alatar, the Isle of Man pretty much defines small and insular, does it not? A culture that operates at what is essentially the tribal level, even if it has larger state institutions in place, can do things to its members that a larger heterogenous society simply cannot. The simple reason is that every time one of "them" does something viewed as heinous to one of "us", the chances that a lot of "us" will use it as an excuse to start something between riots (See: Rodney King and LA) and genocide (See: Rwanda) increases.

[truehobbit]

Corporeal punishment, I think, is a form of punishment that has been tried through milleniums in probably all cultures there have ever been, and has been found to work in none. It might be time to end the experiment.

All corporeal punishment functions through terror. I don't have any numbers, but from what I remember reading, the death penalty, at least, is proven to be ineffectual in deterring people from capital crimes. I wouldn't be surprised if that went for other forms of corporeal punishment, too.

Also, like vison said, the punishment lies in the humiliation, and is only bound to make the sufferer resentful against the law.

On the other hand I could imagine that criminals will want to avoid the punishment more than they'll want to avoid a momentarily less stinging punishment. But that's not the same as fighting crime, is it?

Of course crime rates will go up, as in that Pacific Island, if you just stop punishing the offenders the old way without making an effort to explain to them in any other way why it might be a good idea not to commit the offenses previously punished by whipping.
If terror goes away, but people are not given ethics for behaviour instead - that is, if control of behaviour from outside is not replaced by control of behaviour from inside - chaos ensues.

IMO, corporeal punishment is the response of people/cultures who don't know any better (it's an instinct to lash out when you've been hurt, and it's a primeval urge for revenge that is satisfied in corporeal punishment), or of those who've given up on trying other, more complex means to fight crime.

Assuming that most communities nowadays have left the "don't know any better" stadium, using corporeal punishment mostly seems to me the result of giving up on people's capacity for reason and say that it's no use to try to educate someone not to commit a crime and rather resort to the easy way out, namely to terrorise them into abstaining from crime.

Now, occasionally, watching my fellow man, I'm all for giving up on them, too, but most of the time I think we should keep trying.

It's a fine line, I think. We can't rely on all people understanding that it's wrong to commit a crime and hence abstain from it. But neither can we terrorise everybody into doing what the law expects. Some kind of threat will obviously be necessary to deter the unteachable, but on the other hand I think a governing body must do everything that's possible to respect the reasoning capacities of its people.

[Lidless]

Hmm...if it is public humiliation that is the key rather than the pain itself, why not have some good old-fashioned rotten tomato throwing at someone in the stockades?

I don't think I'd have a problem with that.

[Túrin Turambar]

Also, like vison said, the punishment lies in the humiliation, and is only bound to make the sufferer resentful against the law.

Won’t leaving them to stew in prison have the same effect?

On the other hand I could imagine that criminals will want to avoid the punishment more than they'll want to avoid a momentarily less stinging punishment. But that's not the same as fighting crime, is it?

Why not? Deterring crime = fighting crime.

Of course crime rates will go up, as in that Pacific Island, if you just stop punishing the offenders the old way without making an effort to explain to them in any other way why it might be a good idea not to commit the offenses previously punished by whipping.
If terror goes away, but people are not given ethics for behaviour instead - that is, if control of behaviour from outside is not replaced by control of behaviour from inside - chaos ensues.

IMO, corporeal punishment is the response of people/cultures who don't know any better (it's an instinct to lash out when you've been hurt, and it's a primeval urge for revenge that is satisfied in corporeal punishment), or of those who've given up on trying other, more complex means to fight crime.

Assuming that most communities nowadays have left the "don't know any better" stadium, using corporeal punishment mostly seems to me the result of giving up on people's capacity for reason and say that it's no use to try to educate someone not to commit a crime and rather resort to the easy way out, namely to terrorise them into abstaining from crime.

I hate to sound inflammatory, but the impression that I get from this argument is that it’s OK for people in non-western countries to be whipped because ‘they don’t know any better’, but we in the west have learned proper reasoning capabilities and so whipping them isn’t OK.

Even so, I don’t see how fines or prison are necessarily better than caning as far as ‘teaching someone proper ethics from the inside’ goes. Even restitution, as Jnyusa suggests, is still a form of punishment (only a superior one as it benefits the victim). Don’t forget that prison is still often a very brutal form of punishment, only one where the brutality is enforced by the other inmates rather than the state.

Hmm...if it is public humiliation that is the key rather than the pain itself, why not have some good old-fashioned rotten tomato throwing at someone in the stockades?

I don't think I'd have a problem with that.

I don’t really buy into public corporal punishment, but yes, I can see a place for stockading.

[truehobbit]

I hate to sound inflammatory, but the impression that I get from this argument is that it’s OK for people in non-western countries to be whipped because ‘they don’t know any better’, but we in the west have learned proper reasoning capabilities and so whipping them isn’t OK.

(I really think I'm writing Chinese rather than English - how on earth can what I said be read that way? But never mind. )
No, it's certainly not "ok" for them. What I'm saying is that you can't blame the people who administer corporeal punishment when they do it as long as they have never thought about anything else. Like I said, I believe it's a primeval response to act that way. Western civilisation started out that same way.
But once you've given human psychology and the workings of society some thought and have come to the conclusion (not that you'd necessarily have to come to this conclusion, but Western society has, so we can't get back) - the conclusion that people have certain inalienable rights etc, etc, that humiliation is no effective way to make anyone wish to comply with the rules, at that point corporeal punishment becomes a disgrace for the community that practices it.

But I agree that imprisonment is just as problematic, as experience seems to say that it creates more problems than it solves.
Can't comment on "restitution" as I don't know what that entails.

Why not? Deterring crime = fighting crime.

I don't think so.
What's the use of merely keeping people under control by terror, when that means that they only desist from crime for fear of being caught and punished, but will commit whatever atrocity as soon as the controlling organ seems to look away?

Effectively fighting crime means to convince people that committing crimes is not a good idea because crimes hurt others (i.e. people need to learn to project their own feelings to others and to imagine the ill being done to themselves) and that it violates the well-being of society for everybody, including the perpetrator.

I can see a place for stockading

Stockading of course has the same negative results that all public humiliation has, and is in the same league with a public whipping.
The fact that bystanders get to gloat and really administer the punishment themselves is objectionable in the highest degree, IMO.

The idea of having a "state" organisation in the first place was for the people to give up private revenge and hand the responsibility for keeping order over the government.
Having the populace at large administer a punishment is a way of counteracting this, and it's not surprising that it was practiced only in petty offenses: it gives the people a sense of power over someone from their midst in a minor problem, thus making it more palatable to give up power in bigger questions.

[Túrin Turambar]

I’m just bumping this thread to report that I’m going to be writing a thesis on judicial corporal punishment (as well as hard labour, restitution and other alternatives to incarceration). All of your insightful posts have given me a nice start on the first of those topics .

Anyway, I’ve found some interesting news articles from the pre-PC 1950s. Neither the court system nor parents seemed to mess around in those days:

The Advertiser, Adelaide, 7 January 1956

Fathers To Punish Boys

Two 16-year-old youths, who admitted having caused damage estimated at £70 to a car were ordered in the Adelaide Juvenile Court yesterday to undergo "reasonable" punishment, to be administered by their parents in the presence of a detective.

Mr. R.F. Newman, SM, who referred to a "plethora of idiotic conduct" coming before the court, also made what is believed to be the first order of its kind in the Juvenile Court, releasing the names of the defendants for publication.

The order was made on the application of Assistant Police Prosecutor Huffa, who said too many young offenders thought they could hide under the anonymity normally given to defendants under 18.

The youths, Robert Walter Charles Hill, of Burbridge street, Brooklyn Park and Dean Stuart White, of South terrace, Thebarton, admitted two charges of having unlawfully used cars on December 20 in addition to the wilful damage charge.

White also admitted having broken into a shop at Windsor Gardens on December 13 and stolen cigarettes worth £8.12/4 and 3/- in cash.

Report To Court

All the charges were adjourned until next Friday, to enable a report to be made to the court on the punishment which White's father and Hill's stepfather had agreed to administer.

APP Huffa said the youths had taken an unlocked car, owned by Enrico Cosimo Pezzaniti, from Brooklyn Park and driven it to Gawler where they had abandoned it.

They had then taken another unlocked car, owned by Colin Robert Bain, and returned to the city.

Describing the damage to Pezzaniti's car, APP Huffa said the defendants had slashed the seat covers and upholstery and torn off the sun visors with a sheath knife.

They had also damaged the hood lining, the body, two doors, lights and rear vision mirror.
Churchgoer

White's father said his son was a regular churchgoer but had associated with other young people at a milk bar.

The boy's mother had believed for some time that a hiding would do him good.

Mr. K.V. Kerin appeared for Hill, whom [sic], APP Huffa said, had been released on a bond last May, after admitting a shopbreaking charge.


The News, Adelaide, 9 January 1956

Parents cane boys in front of detectives

Two 16-year-old boys were thrashed by their parents in front of a detective this morning for delinquency.

Each received six cuts with a 3-ft. long stick about one and a half inches wide.

The punishment was ordered by Mr. Newman, SM, in Adelaide Juvenile Court on Friday.

The youths had admitted causing £70 damage to a car, and two charges of unlawfully using cars.

The youths were Robert Walter Charles Hill, of Brooklyn Park, and Dean Stuart White, of Thebarton.

Mr. Newman released the defendants' names for publication, making what is believed to be the first order of its kind in the Juvenile Court.

He adjourned all charges until next Friday when a report would be made to the court on today's punishment.

The publication of names was a step in the right direction to stop juvenile delinquency, a police officer said today.

The fact that publication of names would bring discredit on their families would help pull youngsters up, he said.

The thought of physical punishment from their parents would also act as a strong deterrent.


Truth, Adelaide, 14 January 1956

Boy Is Sorry Now

Thrashing By Father After Court Order

(extracts)

A 16-YEARS-OLD delinquent boy who was thrashed by his father this week under a court order told Truth afterwards that he was heartily sorry for his offences.

He said: "It hurt. I got six strokes on the behind with a length of wood two inches wide. Another stroke and I would have fainted. I had to have a compress applied later."

THE boy is Robert Walter Charles Hill of Burbridge Street, Brooklyn Park, who with another 16-years-old, Dean Stuart White, of South Terrace, Thebarton, had admitted in Adelaide Juvenile Court a few days before to unlawfully using cars and causing wilful damage of £70 to a car.

Mr. Newman S.M. then made Juvenile Court history by releasing the names of the boys for publication. He also took the rare step of ordering corporal chastisement by their parents in the presence of a detective.

Mr. Newman ordered this punishment after a plea by Assistant Police Prosecutor G.H. Huffa, who pointed out that it would be a suitable case for the magistrate to exercise the powers he has under section 12 of the Juvenile Courts Act.

"Heartbroken"

Robert Hill's mother told Truth she had seen her son punished.

"It was awful and I am heartbroken but knowing how much it has affected Robert, his stepfather and myself are willing to take it," she said.

"I think that the publicity and means of punishment was a progressive move by the magistrate. Robert will never do wrong again.

"Boys who realise that their offence will bring just as severe punishment to their parents may stop and think before they step out of line."

'Won't Happen Again'

Robert told Truth: "The thrashing meant nothing compared to what I have done to mum and dad. Nothing like it will ever happen again."

The father of Dean Stuart White, the other boy who was ordered a thrashing, told Truth that, as long as justice was applied consistently and the two boys were not just "guinea pigs," he favoured parents administering punishment and the names being released.

"Dean's mother and myself can stand it now because we are sure the punishment has made a lasting impression on our boy," he said.

"Dean told me: 'I am still quite sore.'"

link

Truth, Adelaide, 22 May 1956

Youths whipped

Parents Give Eight Strokes

TWO youths were each given eight strokes of the cane in their homes this week under police supervision.

The caning had been ordered by Mr. Scales S.M. after the youths had pleaded guilty in the Adelaide Juvenile Court last week to irresponsible vandalism with a rifle at a farm near Murray Bridge recently.

The instrument of punishment was a stout four-foot cane borrowed from the Adelaide police barracks, because, according to a police officer, "all schools are closed for the holidays."

Police officer appointed by Mr. Scales to supervise the whippings, C.I.B. veteran Det.-Sgt. Bob Huie, arrived in a police car at 7.20 p.m. outside the western suburbs home of the stepfather of one of the youths, aged 17.

The youth, who has allegedly refused to live with his stepfather since his mother remarried, had arrived alone in a taxi at 7.10 p.m.

The youth, big shouldered and tall for his age, entered the home unsmiling and spoke briefly to his weeping mother and his stocky stepfather.

When Det. Huie told the youth to bend over a bed, the youth's mother ran sobbing from the room.

Closely watched by the detective, the stepfather raised the cane then brought it down with a crack that could be heard in the street.

The youth winced with pain, but made no sound as the cane lashed across his buttocks eight times with a one second interval between each blow.

After the thrashing Det. Huie examined the youth for injuries.

Later, in conversation with Det. Huie, the youth assured the detective that he would "never do anything to lead him into the same position again."

At 8.p.m. Det. Huie left for the home of the second youth, aged 15, where he arrived with his cane at 8.10.

"Hasn't Eaten"

Earlier the boy's mother told Truth: "He hasn't eaten a thing all day thinking of what is to come."

This youth, smaller and slighter than his companion, received his punishment bending over a lounge in a home in the shadow of a huge industrial undertaking.

As in the first case this boy's mother also refused to witness the thrashing and left the room.

After the boy had been caned by his father, who, Det. Huie said, "knew his job," he then told the detective: "This is the first and last time this will ever happen to me."

Det. Huie later told Truth: "It will hurt these boys to sit down for a time, but I am really confident they will not come before the courts again."

Mr. Scales was furnished with a report by Det. Huie on the whippings.

FOOTNOTE: Two quiet and restrained youths appeared before Mr. Scales the following morning with their hair well brushed and their ties as straight as the narrow path.

After he had listened to Det. Huie's report of the thrashing in chambers, Mr. Scales emerged to tell the youths, one of whom was accompanied by his mother and the other by both parents, that as far as he was concerned he was satisfied with the police officer's report.

"It seems to me you have learned your lesson," added Mr. Scales, to which both youths replied in unison: "Yes, sir!"

The magistrate then dismissed the case against both boys.

link

[vison]

If being struck and humiliated was a good thing, the prisons would contain no one who had been beaten as a kid.

Sorry, Lord_M, still not going down this road with you.

[Primula Baggins]

I have to say I see a strong positive, not negative, correlation between who got thwacked regularly as a child and who caused trouble as an adolescent, among my own peers and among my children's peers.

You can't let your children run wild and expect to smack them into being model citizens after they've already gotten into trouble. You have to pay attention before any trouble begins: know them, know their friends, know where they go and what they do, let them prove that you can trust them. Expect much of them. Let them see your hopes for them.

That's a lot more time consuming, but has the benefit of actually working much of the time.

In the "good old days" when children were regularly whacked with sharp objects, they also had present and attentive parents and communities that expected much from them. My guess is that it wasn't really the sharp objects that helped those children grow up into decent citizens.

[solicitr]

I think a governing body must do everything that's possible to respect the reasoning capacities of its people.

And what does it then do with the remaining 23 hrs 59 minutes of the day?

What's the use of merely keeping people under control by terror, when that means that they only desist from crime for fear of being caught and punished, but will commit whatever atrocity as soon as the controlling organ seems to look away?

Effectively fighting crime means to convince people that committing crimes is not a good idea because crimes hurt others (i.e. people need to learn to project their own feelings to others and to imagine the ill being done to themselves)

You must live on a much nicer planet than Earth, Holby.

I have spent years of my life dealing with criminals, and I assure you that that trying to convince most of them of anything of the sort would be rather like the Parson of Oakley trying to dissuade Chrysophylax.

I can't (quite) agree with Lord M's proposition, but the idea that anything other than the fear of superior force will contain these brutes is, well, a fantasy.

[Primula Baggins]

I suspect Holby, like me, is thinking preventively. You can't turn a sociopath back into a social human being by any means I know. The trick is finding a way to stop making new sociopaths, and that's what both he and I were posting about.

[solicitr]

The trick is finding a way to stop making new sociopaths

Somthing humanity has been notably unsuccessful at for the last, oh, ten thousand years. Preaching the Golden Rule for two of those millenia hasn't helped much either.

I'm afraid that sociopaths or even petty criminals, like earthquakes and tsunamis, are an ineluctable fact. The temptations and rewards of crime are too great. I happen to favor long prison terms, not because they either deter or rehabilitate, but because they serve as a quarantine. (I also bitterly oppose restoring voting rights to felons- why should those who hold society's laws in contempt be permitted to make them? But I'm afraid that the temptation to create tens of thousands of new Democratic voters is far to great.)

[Alatar]

It must be a horrible world you live in Soli. How can you stand to get up in the morning?