Topic: Bring Back Flogging

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Arguments for Analysis Assignment
We have studied examples of analysis, and now you have the opportunity to practice this skill. The process of analysis is much different from a summary/paraphrase

or an extended definition. Practicing analysis is a mental skill. You must keep a mindset of “negative capability,” which requires that you examine an argument while

keeping a neutral mindset. Examine claims carefully and give reasons whether the arguments are reasonable and logical or the arguments are flawed. In analysis of

your target, you should clearly identify the nature and implications of the claims and then show why the argument is solid or flawed.
Read “Bring Back Flogging” and compose a formal investigation of the claims, with your own conclusions. This assignment should be single-spaced block

paragraphs, and the suggested length is about a single page.

Related Topics
• Crime and punishment
Bring back flogging
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 20, 1997

BOSTON’S PURITAN FOREFATHERS did not indulge miscreants lightly.

If this is degrading and inhumane . . .
For selling arms and gunpowder to Indians in 1632, Richard Hopkins was sentenced to be “whipt, & branded with a hott iron on one of his cheekes.” Joseph

Gatchell, convicted of blasphemy in 1684, was ordered “to stand in pillory, have his head and hand put in & have his toung drawne forth out of his mouth, & peirct

through with a hott iron.” When Hannah Newell pleaded guilty to adultery in 1694, the court ordered “fifteen stripes severally to be laid on upon her naked back at

the Common Whipping post.” Her consort, the aptly named Lambert Despair, fared worse: He was sentenced to 25 lashes “and that on the next Thursday

Immediately after Lecture he stand upon the Pillory for … a full hower with Adultery in Capitall letters written upon his brest.”
Corporal punishment for criminals did not vanish with the Puritans — Delaware didn’t get around to repealing it until 1972 — but for all relevant purposes, it has been

out of fashion for at least 150 years. The day is long past when the stocks had an honored place on the Boston Common, or when offenders were publicly flogged.

Now we practice a more enlightened, more humane way of disciplining wrongdoers: We lock them up in cages.
Imprisonment has become our penalty of choice for almost every offense in the criminal code. Commit murder; go to prison. Sell cocaine; go to prison. Kite checks;

go to prison. It is an all-purpose punishment, suitable — or so it would seem — for crimes violent and nonviolent, motivated by hate or by greed, plotted coldly or

committed in a fit of passion. If anything, our preference for incarceration is deepening — behold the slew of mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and

“three-strikes-you’re-out” life terms for recidivists. Some 1.6 million Americans are behind bars today. That represents a 250 percent increase since 1980, and the

number is climbing.
We cage criminals at a rate unsurpassed in the free world, but few of us believe that the criminal justice system is a success. Crime is out of control, despite the

deluded happy talk by some politicians about how “safe” cities have become. For most wrongdoers, the odds of being arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and

incarcerated are reassuringly long. Fifty-eight percent of all murders do not result in a prison term. Likewise 98 percent of all burglaries.
Many states have gone on prison-building sprees, yet the penal system is choked to bursting. To ease the pressure, nearly all convicted felons are released early —

or not locked up at all. “About three of every four convicted criminals,” says John DiIulio, a noted Princeton criminologist, “are on the streets without meaningful

probation or parole supervision.” And while everyone knows that amateur thugs should be deterred before they become career criminals, it is almost unheard-of for

judges to send first- or second-time offenders to prison.
Meanwhile, the price of keeping criminals in cages is appalling — a common estimate is $30,000 per inmate per year. (To be sure, the cost to society of turning many

inmates loose would be even higher.) For tens of thousands of convicts, prison is a graduate school of criminal studies: They emerge more ruthless and savvy than

when they entered. And for many offenders, there is even a certain cachet to doing time — a stint in prison becomes a sign of manhood, a status symbol.
But there would be no cachet in chaining a criminal to an outdoor post and flogging him. If young punks were horsewhipped in public after their first conviction,

fewer of them would harden into lifelong felons. A humiliating and painful paddling can be applied to the rear end of a crook for a lot less than $30,000 — and prove a

lot more educational than 10 years’ worth of prison meals and lockdowns.
Are we quite certain the Puritans have nothing to teach us about dealing with criminals?

. . . why is this any better?
Of course, their crimes are not our crimes: We do not arrest blasphemers or adulterers, and only gun control fanatics would criminalize the sale of weapons to

Indians. (They would criminalize the sale of weapons to anybody.) Nor would the ordeal suffered by poor Joseph Gatchell — the tongue “peirct through” with a hot

poker — be regarded today as anything less than torture.
But what is the objection to corporal punishment that doesn’t maim or mutilate? Instead of a prison term, why not sentence at least some criminals — say, thieves

and drunk drivers — to a public whipping?
“Too degrading,” some will say. “Too brutal.” But where is it written that being whipped is more degrading than being caged? Why is it more brutal to flog a

wrongdoer than to throw him in prison — where the risk of being beaten, raped, or murdered is terrifyingly high?
The Boston Globe reported in 1994 that more than 200,000 prison inmates are raped each year, usually to the indifference of the guards. “The horrors experienced

by many young inmates, particularly those who . . . are convicted of nonviolent offenses,” former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun has written, “border on the

unimaginable.” Are those horrors preferable to the short, sharp shame of corporal punishment?
Perhaps the Puritans were more enlightened than we think, at least on the subject of punishment. Their sanctions were humiliating and painful, but quick and cheap.

Maybe we should readopt a few.

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