In Defense of Flogging (12 page)

Recently I took the train to Singapore, from Thailand south through Malaysia, and I passed something of a landmark to caning. In 1976, at the
border crossing leaving Thailand, Malaysian authorities caught Australian Robert Symes with four pounds of marijuana. Symes later said it was “fine grass” meant for himself and his stoner friends in Bali. But because it was such a large amount, Symes was convicted of drug trafficking. He narrowly escaped the death penalty and received prison plus six lashes. After being released, he described his caning in a magazine interview:

Perhaps the most famous case (at least in America) of modern flogging occurred in Singapore. Michael Fay was convicted in 1994 of spray-painting cars. (Fay admitted to stealing road signs but later claimed his vandalism confession was coerced.) After three months in jail, Fay received—and not by choice—four lashes. Although Fay's Singapore experience was not exceptionally different from what Symes went through in Malaysia, his story attracted massive attention in the United States because he was American, a teenager, and committed what here would barely be punished. After his caning, Fay appeared on
Larry King Live
and described his experience:

Fay's ordeal inspired strong reactions among Americans. In Dayton, Ohio, where Fay's father lived, a newspaper poll found two-to-one support
for his punishment. Although many Americans were shocked at the thought of Fay being whipped, the fact is that he may have gotten off somewhat easy. Others have described far worse.

After his release, Fay returned to America and severely burnt himself while huffing butane. Because his family wasn't poor, he went into rehab. After a low-level drug arrest in 1998, he disappeared from the public's eye. Though he may still have the scars to remind him of his flogging, it seems as though the lash did not set Fay down a better path. But at least, it could be said, he never committed another act of vandalism in Singapore.

At this point the more open-minded reader may like pain as punishment but dislike the symbolism and messiness of flogging. Why not just build some kind of pain machine, push a button, and be done with it? A machine, perhaps much more than a person, could guarantee consistency of pain and also spare a person from having to administer the punishment.

Despite our best attempts—and yes, people have tried—a flogging machine is not a viable possibility. Disciplining machines are too ineffectual,
too impersonal, and simply too bizarre to do the job. Consider this 1898
New York Times
account of an “electric spanking chair” at a girls' school:

Perhaps it wasn't painful enough, or perhaps girls could lift their butts just so, to avoid the paddles. Or perhaps the whole concept was just the silly invention of some perverted man. Regardless, the paper ran no further accounts of this chair.

But based on the description of the Kansas spanking chair, one could assume that punishment machines already exist in the worlds of bondage, S&M, or Russ Meyer films. Though I don't know from personal experience, I've seen some things online. Honestly, conducting any online research on flogging without stumbling across a wide variety of
very adult websites is impossible. And I am naturally curious. But nothing (at least that doesn't require a credit card) matches the severity of the corporal punishment I defend. I propose something far beyond kink. If a flogging machine exists that can consistently and forcefully draw blood and still be less than lethal, I've yet to see it.

Flogging isn't the only way to cause pain. In
Just and Painful
, Graeme Newman's defense of corporal punishment, electric shock is the proposed method. Though Tasers were not around when Newman first wrote this excellent book, such “conducted energy devices” (as Tasers are generically known) could be an ideal way to give somebody an electric jolt. Many police departments use Tasers to gain compliance and subdue suspects. And although electric shock lacks the visual dramatics of flogging, Newman observes some advantages to using electric shock as corporal punishment: The severity of the punishment is easier to quantify, the process is nonscarring, and the administration of punishment is hands-off.

The problem with electric shocks, however, is that they sometimes kill. In the United States, police-administered Taser-like electric shock—and researchers are still catching up with this fact—kills
more than one person per week, and that number is rising in sync with the increasingly widespread use of such devices. Sometimes a weak ticker is all it takes. In the other extreme, botched electrocutions show that people can live through terribly painful shocks. In truth we really don't know exactly how electricity affects the human body and brain, but we do know that lengthy or continued repetition of electric shock—the kind of application needed in a corporal punishment situation—greatly increases the risk of death.

Although perhaps some risk of death is acceptable when police on the street use the Taser as an alternative to lethal force (though many Tasers are used, somewhat worrisomely, in routine and nonthreatening issues of noncompliance), there is no acceptable mortality rate in the administration of nonlethal sentences. Punishment, including corporal punishment, is explicitly
not
a death sentence. Whereas electric shocks sometimes kill without any visible warning, doctors could stop a flogging if a convict shows sign of strain, such as falling unconscious. If the doctor says the offender can't handle the lash, then it's back to jail for the offender. It may seem a bit absurd to have a doctor on hand to
make certain a person is fit enough for a beating, but this is no different from a doctor's presence at a boxing match and is unquestionably a lot less absurd than a physical checkup before an execution.

Even if we could build an effective and nonlethal pain machine, leaving punishment in human hands would still be desirable. Machinelike consistency is not necessarily important. An expert trained in flogging and perhaps the martial arts would be best suited to punish, ensure the safety of the flogged, and stop before causing death. Furthermore, consecutive lashes should not be administered in exactly the same place: The goal is not to dredge a channel through an offender's body (as was depicted in Franz Kafka's short story “In the Penal Colony”). Instead, as is done in flogging cultures, the lashes are spread out across the entire flesh of the behind. This helps lower the risk of infection and keeps the pain from becoming beyond extreme. Nor does it matter if one flogger causes slightly more or less pain than another. Any such differences would pale in comparison with the variances already found at every other level of the American criminal justice system. (Although, because I hate to think of the licensing issues involved in training people
to be official state floggers, I propose we poach expert floggers from Singapore and Malaysia, where it is a skilled and sought-after detail for law enforcement officers.)

There is another somewhat theoretical but perhaps more important argument against machineadministered punishment: Machines are
too
clean, too convenient. They psychologically sanitize what we are doing, allowing us to ignore the moral significance. If we can't face up to our form of punishing others, we shouldn't do it. If we want to punish, let's be honest about what we're doing. To do otherwise debases ourselves and, like prison, makes punishment an unhealthily removed and secretive concept. Consider Stanley Milgram's classic experiment on torture and authoritarian personalities: When ordered to by an authority figure, most people were willing to press a button and give what they believed to be an electric shock to another person. Although people generally have no desire to hurt those who have done nothing wrong, a button is too easy to press, a knob too easy to turn. The essential human element in physically causing pain helps us face and even limit the severity of whatever
punishment we wish to administer. Pressing a button makes it too easy to torture.

Flogging is indeed very harsh, but it's not torture—not unless all corporal punishment is defined as torture. Indeed, to conflate flogging with torture does a grave disservice to the understanding of both. It is not only the physical act that defines torture but also the context, the psychological underpinnings, the lack of consent, and the openended potential. The US government has tortured people with euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques.” This torture is not so much a punishment as a means to an end. This is not flogging.

The distinction between pain as punishment and pain as torture is important. People torture because they're sadistic or want information. We punish because others have done wrong. The torture our government has sanctioned, which I in no way condone, was supposed to achieve a goal. Until that goal was achieved, torture continued. Punishment, however, is finite. It ends. Torture ends only when someone breaks. Punishment, unlike torture, is prescribed in accordance with clear rules of law. The
difference between the goals and methods of punishment and torture is critical. I defend flogging, not torture.

Indeed, if examined closely, prisons much more so than flogging display characteristics of torture. By locking people in cells and denying meaningful human contact, we cause irreparable damage; by holding prisoners in group living quarters, we subject them to the potential of gang violence, assault, and all the other forms of aggression found in prisons; and through parole boards' decisions, we hold the power to continue such punishment for extended periods of time. And for what? What do we gain? Why incapacitate criminals in a nonrehabilitative environment never meant for punishment? This is more torturous than flogging could ever be.

Yes, flogging is nasty, brutish, and (blessedly) short. There's nothing pretty about it. Punishment is not supposed to be pretty. If it were, it wouldn't punish. And if punishment is necessary, we need to be honest about its horrific costs—and flogging is a much more humane (and economic) alternative.

Let me make an analogy about honesty in the infliction of pain. Think of meat. I don't think killing animals is good, but I like to eat meat. So when I
do, I try to remember, even if briefly, that an animal lived and died for my sustenance (and pleasure). It's the least I can do. And although it's a convenience that I need not personally kill everything I eat, if I can't face up to the reality of animal death, then perhaps I shouldn't eat meat. Think of it the next time you go to the grocery store. A lot has happened between a cow's moo and a shrink-wrapped steak.