In Defense of Flogging (11 page)

Violence may seem an unsavory alternative to prison, but punishment must by definition hurt in some way, be it emotionally, psychologically, monetarily, or physically. Punishment must cause pain. Physical violence has the advantage of being honest, inexpensive, and easy to understand. For many Americans violence is part of life. It is not incomprehensible that when softer cajoling and rational persuasion fail, corporal discipline, or at least the threat of it, is an effective deterrent and can even make a substantial difference on the course of a person's life. For many children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the challenge isn't to follow the social norms of one's peers but to actively resist them. Many of my students tell me they wouldn't be in college if not for corporal punishment. More interesting is that they tell me they're eternally grateful for this discipline. These are college
students making it. Without grandpa's belt, they tell me, or at least the threat of it, they'd be in the streets, in prison, or dead.

I don't mean to defend child abuse or unprovoked violence, but wishing away violence is not the solution. Two dozen nations have even gone so far as to outlaw parental spanking, even in the home, often on the assumption that physical discipline equals or inevitably leads to child abuse. By American standards a ban on spanking is extreme, but whatever standards one uses, this resistance to violence is not entirely logical. Far too many who oppose corporal punishment can be a bit clueless about the fundamental realities in so many people's lives. Our society has a homicide rate three times that found in Western Europe and an imprisonment rate seven times higher. We don't get these disgraceful realities from being pacifist (which is too often a luxury of the well-off). This is a tough country, and sometimes, even if it's not ideal, order is maintained through force, or at least the threat of retaliation. Those with more means may scorn such a violence-dependent life, but those with more means can pay other people, such as police officers, to do their violence for them.

Certainly, for good and bad, violence can have a lasting impact. I still remember when I was in third grade and some kid I didn't even know hit me. For no reason. He just came up and punched me. Bam! As a wronged eight-year-old, my first reaction was to find the nearest adult—who happened to be a worker, not a teacher—and mustered up all the righteous indignation I could. “He hit me!” I said, looking up expectantly while a large woman gazed down with a quizzical look. Her four words still ring in my ears: “Well . . . hit him back!”

Hit him
back
?

The thought of hitting him back had not occurred to me. I was a naive kid and I wasn't raised that way. So I did nothing. I never saw that other kid again. Looking back, I suppose I got punked, but if your upbringing was similar to mine, maybe you don't even know what getting “punked” or being “dissed” means. Or maybe, if you are a bit more street-savvy but more mature, you do know these words but still find the concepts quite laughable. If some stranger bumps into you or steps on your shoes or even straight-up insults you, you might just laugh it off. Why up the ante over a perceived
slight and risk trouble? You have too much to lose. You're above it. You can always walk away.

But what if you get disrespected every time you leave the house? Is it ever okay to hit back? There's a simple rule that many people live by: Those who do wrong deserve to be beat. It may not be the most enlightened strategy, and maybe you disagree, but it is tried and true. And somewhat disturbingly, it probably works better than jail. But outside of selfdefense and limited parental discipline, you're really never legally allowed to hit somebody. Although too much violence is admittedly very bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that a little is a terrible thing.

Violence can be an important tool, especially when used as a last resort. Twenty years after I got hit in third grade, when I was working as a police officer on the rough streets of Baltimore, I didn't have a chip on my shoulder or a grudge to settle. But I knew I couldn't get punked. For a police officer, it isn't safe. An unanswered threat one day is a potential threat every day to come. Passivity invites danger and can get you killed, and so police officers have to adopt a “hit him back” mentality. “Don't fight the police,” a friend's father said. “They're not
in the habit of losing.” Admittedly, I'm not a brawler. Quite the opposite. But still, like all police, I needed to be able to prove my authority. Without an “or else!”—without the threat of force—people won't do what they need to do, even if a police officer is the one doing the telling.

But because police can't use force all the time, they rely on locking people up. Arrests, however, haven't always been the main tool in the law enforcement kit. Like many police, I heard stories from my fellow officers about policing in the “good old days”—which you've always just missed—when some minor offenders would be given a choice between handcuffs or a minor beat-down. Given a choice between a night in jail and going out back and taking a punch or two, most offenders, I was told, stoically (if not happily) chose the more honorable “beat and release” over the indignity of a night in Central Booking.

By the time I hit the streets, the “beat and release,” or crimes “abated by beating,” were already history. Word undoubtedly came down from above that corporal (and illegal) alternatives to incarceration were no longer acceptable. But without a corporal option, there's no middle ground between
letting someone go and locking him up. So instead of hitting back, police arrest. That was fine by me because I wasn't raised to hit back. But now, for something minor, instead of a warning or a crack on the head, a disrespectful kid gets locked up. Instead of a lump and a lesson, the hoodlum has to deal with too-tight handcuffs, a strip search, hunger, boredom, being surrounded by criminals, a temperature in jail that is always too hot or too cold, and an arrest record. Is that progress?

Back in the day, or so I've been told, police might beat a wife beater. Consider this recollection of a long-retired Atlanta police officer, lamenting the demise of old-school policing:

Alas, not all police are good, and extralegal authority can easily be abused, but that does not negate the potential benefits of legal and consensual corporal punishment.

Now police have no choice but to lock up offenders, especially in cases of domestic assault, where mandatory arrest laws all but cuff the police. Laws such as these, which limit discretion, are a good example of good intentions run amok. If a couple fights, police simply lock up the winner. Any sign of injury means somebody is going to jail. Period. End of story. But of course that never really is the end of the story. Jail never is. Logically, different situations require different responses. This is why we pay and train police officers. When we take away discretion, we make things worse.

Once I responded to a domestic call after a man came home, admitted to catting around, got yelled at, and earned a big fat lip when his wife slugged him. He deserved it, he told me (and he probably did). But while his wife was yelling, neighbors called
the police. Guess what? She went to jail. That's the way it is—mandatory arrest for domestic violence—that's what the law says. In other instances, a girlfriend who had been beaten would point to her kids and beg me not to take away the babies' working father. But I had no choice. If I didn't make an arrest and then something happened, it would be on me. A week later, I'd be back at the same home for another fight, only now he was unemployed, having lost his job from the earlier arrest. Still later, such couples would often show up in court all lovey-dovey to have the charges dropped. These people needed help, but it wasn't going to come from me. Of course police still have some discretion, but when it comes to punishing wrongdoing, the only legal option is to arrest. But arrests don't work. The same people get locked up again and again for the same crime.

When I policed in Baltimore, there were one hundred thousand arrests a year, with twenty thousand of those happening in the district I patrolled. That's a lot of arrests, especially for an area with fewer than forty-five thousand people. In such neighborhoods, police arrest on a massive and almost incomprehensible scale. Who benefits from these arrests except the lawyers, police, and correctional
officers who get paid? Of course there is plenty of serious crime, and sometimes you need to slap on the cuffs. But the bulk of arrests are for minor things—things that people in better neighborhoods usually get away with—drinking, drug possession, disorderly conduct, loitering, and even simple assault.

Maybe the old option of the “beat and release” wasn't so bad. Compared to court, police punishment can be quicker, more proportionate, and even more consistent—the three factors that just happen to meet Beccaria's original concept of deterrence. The bygone system of discretion and giving a choice made sure some minor offenders received a less destructive option than building a rap sheet. “You know,” a friend of mine, a retired ranking African American police officer, said:

So rather than take flogging off the table as punishment, it would be better to wipe incarceration from the debate and then figure out the best way to administer justice.

Just as my friend was familiar with the concept of “beat and release” well before he became a police officer, most of the people I arrested were no strangers to old-fashioned beat-downs. The rules were simple because that way everybody understands. If we don't punish wrongdoers, the worst among us will keep doing wrong. Many didn't seem to mind the basic concept, at least in response to wrongdoing. For a lot of people, violence is nothing more than a fact of life. You get your butt kicked and move on. It happens. The world, or at least their world, was a violent place. People in rough neighborhoods develop attitudes and toughness as
survival mechanisms not because they're bad people but because they don't have other resources on which to rely. Different environments may require different attitudes toward discipline, parenting, and social control—different strokes for different folks, if you will.

Because corporal punishment may often be preferable to arrest, why not offer flogging as a legalized form of the old “beat and release”? In the long run, a criminal conviction is far more damaging than a violent but brief lashing. It might be a crazy world when flogging is a better choice than what we now call “justice,” but over a lifetime, for instance, a typical released inmate will earn 40 percent less than a similar nonincarcerated person. Flogging is brutal—hell, flogging is supposed to be brutal—but brief, intense pain is better than long, drawn-out confinement. Punish and be done with it. Hurt a man physically, but don't, as incarceration does, destroy his life.

Along with a fondness for cricket and warm beer, the British exported the lash throughout their colonial empire (though we've moved on to baseball
and cold beer). Although flogging is no longer on the books in any American state, it is still legal in thirty-three countries. But in nations where flogging is legal, at least if one judges by how often it is administered, only Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei seem to thoroughly enjoy the process.

Both Amnesty International and the UN Human Rights Committee criticize flogging as cruel, degrading, and contrary to human rights law. Indeed, these organizations criticize all forms of corporal punishment. Yet the corporal-punishment holdouts seem to apply flogging with unrepentant zeal. Malaysia flogs perhaps 16,000 people a year. Singapore, with a population one-fifth of Malaysia, canes more than 6,000 a year. Singapore also has a very high incarceration rate of 267 per 100,000. Now, admittedly Singapore is a safe country, but if we're really looking for a role model, perhaps we should look at Japan, a country with low crime, no corporal punishment (though it does have the death penalty), and an incarceration rate one-fourth of Singapore's.