Curing prison overcrowding with corporal punishment
Overcrowding in prisons and jails causes numerous problems. Overcrowding is emblematic of an extremely expensive network of prisons and jails operated by our city, county, state, and federal governments. Overcrowding caused us to build more and more prisons and jails…and then a large number of prisoners were found to occupy the new facilities, which eventually filled up as well. As a percentage of our population, the US incarcerates more prisoners than any other nation in the world. An underlying problem is that jail and prison do not rehabilitate, but are simply an expensive way to make bad people worse. As a society, we have long accepted the finding that “nothing works” to rehabilitate criminals once they are sent to the cesspools of prison or jail. As a hidden punishment, prison also does not seem to be a sufficient deterrent to crime. Law-abiding people fear jail and prison, but criminals don’t seem to think they’ll get caught, focus on their immediate passions and desires, enjoy the thrill of crime, and don’t fear prison as much.
When the United States Constitution was written, very few people were sent to prison. In earlier centuries, there were more corporal and capital punishments and more transportation of criminals to the Thirteen Colonies, penal colonies, Siberia, Devil’s Island, Australia, and the like. Less developed nations no longer like receiving criminals from other parts of the world. Capital punishment in the 21st century costs a few million dollars per execution, so if we want to save money, that’s probably not the way to do it. That leaves the old-fashioned and inexpensive method of judicial corporal punishment. The good thing about judicial corporal punishment is that it has been effective wherever it has been tried. For example, corporal punishment was used in every slave society in history, showing that it does indeed keep people in line. In fact, slaves were considered safe in prewar times, contrary to what African Americans are perceived to be today. Slavery is not legal now, but prison is referred to by many as “New Age slavery,” and the similarities are numerous.
Those who have been subjected to corporal punishment in the past have sworn by its effectiveness when administered fairly. Tea Slavic narratives collected by the Federal Writer’s Project from 1936 to 1938 prove this. While parental corporal punishment is more likely to be abusive than judicial corporal punishment, many successful people say it played a significant role in their upbringing. The beauty of corporal punishment is that it does not have to be used very often or at all if it is administered in public.
One or two public floggings are usually enough. General George Washington used the whip to keep his mainly white troops at bay from 1776 until the victory at Yorktown. He is the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, so judges focused on the Founders’ original intent are not likely to find it “cruel and unusual.” Thomas Jefferson wrote judicial corporal punishment into legislation. What is cruel is solitary confinement, prison rape and violence, the destruction of marriages, families and communities, prison gangs and the other social and psychological costs of incarceration. What is stupid and backward is the amount of money law-abiding people have to pay each year to keep prisoners on what amounts to full-time welfare: about $25,000 per prisoner per 2,300,000 prisoners. When the number of workers shrinks relative to the number of retirees, it’s insane to incarcerate a couple million able-bodied people and keep them inactive most of the time.
Most of those who consider judicial corporal punishment to be “backwards” have not spent much time reflecting on the horrors of prison, the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, the weakness of the American economy, or the enormous public debt that we accumulated during the previous decades. Indeed, judicial corporal punishment rehabilitates more offenders than prison.
In the HOLY BIBLE it says: If the guilty deserves to be flogged, the judge will make him lie down and will flog him in his presence with the number of lashes that his crime deserves, but he should not give him more than forty lashes. . If he is flogged more than that, your brother will be degraded in your eyes. DEUTERONOMY 25:2-3. The Bible requires that corporal punishment be administered in front of a judge, which is a wise requirement to discourage abusive use outside of judicial scrutiny. Jesus made a whip and used it to drive people and cattle: So he made a whip out of cords, and drove everyone out of the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the changers’ coins and overturned their tables. JOHN 2:15. Jesus said that he came to proclaim liberty to prisoners.
Human societies sometimes deceive themselves. One such delusion held that criminals would improve as people if we put them in cages.