Arguments for Analysis

JEFF JACOBY

Jeff Jacoby (b. 1959) is a columnist for the Boston Globe, where this essay was originally published on the op-ed page on February 20, 1997.

Bring Back Flogging

Boston’s Puritan forefathers did not indulge miscreants lightly.

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 twenty-five 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.”

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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.

5 We cage criminals at a rate unsurpassed in the free world, yet 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 ten years’ worth of prison meals and lockdowns.

Are we quite certain the Puritans have nothing to teach us about dealing with criminals?

10 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.

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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 Globe reported in 1994 that more than two hundred thousand 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.