In Defense of Flogging (13 page)

If you are brave, there are ways to confront the true cost of eating meat. You can hunt or, more feasible in the big city, at least see your dinner alive before you eat it. And I'm not just talking about lobster tanks. There are two live-poultry stores near me, and one even has a little “pasture” out back filled with lambs and sometimes the occasional cow. I call it the “petting zoo” because when I'm there that's what I like to do. If I want to roast one of the lambs, I can point to one and have it dragged out of the pen to be killed, skinned, cleaned, and cut. Is it pretty? Well, not really. But at least it's honest. And if you eat meat, this process is inevitable whether you close your eyes to it or not. Muffling the sounds of suffering in the world is one thing—after all, if we didn't, we would all go crazy—but pretending suffering doesn't exist is quite another.

Flogging is refreshingly transparent and honest. What you see is what you get. If you want someone to receive more punishment, you give more lashes. If you want them to receive less punishment, you give fewer. Prison, however, is dishonest punishment. We on the outside have no real idea what goes on inside the concertina wire, but let's not fool ourselves: It's bleak. Prisons and slaughterhouses are two of the very few institutions closed to visitors. Just as we prefer not to know all the details of how meat ends up on our table, we prefer to keep prisoners out of sight and mind. Bad things tend to happen in secret, when the masses of “decent” folks can't or don't want to see what happens to others.

Just as we want to eat meat without thinking of slaughter, we want to punish without thinking of pain. But you cannot have one without the other. There is a very real damage in the way we choose to punish criminals, and we need to face this instead of pretending it doesn't happen. The treatment of living, sentient beings matters. And presumably, I hope, people care more about the treatment of a human than a cow. Indeed, our criminal justice system has become a bit too much like Soylent Green, the basic foodstuff from the 1973 movie set in the
dystopian future of 2022. In
Soylent Green
, it turns out that corporately produced Soylent Green is—spoiler alert—“
made of people!
” So is our system of corrections.

Even as flogging is more open and honest than prison, this may not persuade some critics, so the fact that flogging is cheap—much less expensive than prison—is worth some elaboration. The financial argument is extremely important and also straightforward. Leaving aside everything already mentioned about the horrors of prison, incarceration simply costs too much (especially considering how ineffective it is). Although there is a fixed cost in establishing any system of judicial punishment—the courts, lawyers, jails, appeals, and police officers—compared to a system of incarceration, the actual cost of flogging is miniscule.

Criminal justice—considering how abjectly it fails at the goals we've set out for it—is ludicrously expensive. Take, for example, just two criminal families in Birmingham, England (but the results would likely be similar in the United States). Over three generations of police investigations, lawyers, trials,
and prison for serious crimes, these two families cost taxpayers £37 million (about $59 million). The total cost of the larger gangs of which these two families were a part—and this is a conservative estimate that does not include medical care for victims, minor crimes, or welfare and housing benefits the families claimed—was close to a staggering £190 million ($300 million). This is not money well spent. As one politician put it, “We spend vast sums of money ineffectually managing social failure.”

Prisons are expensive not because they coddle prisoners—quite the opposite; prisons cost so much because we have to keep people alive while holding them against their will. It's not an easy task. Prisoners require human observation and intervention, and it's not a nine-to-five operation; rather, officers have to be present day and night to maintain order and guard the prisoners. To have one guard on duty 24/7 requires
six
employees (taking into account three shifts, weekends, and holidays). Conversely, flogging requires but a trestle on which to flog, a few law enforcement officers, a doctor, and the actual flogger. With the exception of the flogger and the furniture, everything is already in place. Compared to prison, flogging is essentially free.

A quick look at the numbers shows just how much could be saved by abandoning incarceration. Estimates put corrections spending at somewhere between $60 billion and $78 billion per year. Either amount could safely be called “real money.” The actual savings would vary greatly, from a low of $13,000 per prisoner per a year in Louisiana to $70,000 in New York City. Nationwide, on average, it costs $26,000 for each year of incarceration. This means that each additional year of prison costs another $26,000. But an additional lash is free.

If we could drastically reduce incarceration, the greatest question may be what to do with all the money. Might it not be more effective to give the money we currently spend on keeping offenders locked up to help those in need? What we spend on prison could be used to help people and to prevent crime. I have a friend, a former student, who had a rough childhood. He was the first in his family to graduate from college. Nevertheless, he's recently unemployed and trying to support his family on something other than the drug dealing he grew up with. When I told him the financial cost of prison, he said, “
How much
? Man, the government never spent that kind of money on me growing up.
Why not just give me that money and I'll stay straight. I'd stay straight for half that!”

Even if, given our current levels of recidivism, it might be a good investment to give money to people to stay out of crime, politically and also morally, it's a tough sell. More palatable might be to give money to victims of crime. Crime victims suffer trauma, medical bills, and lost wages, but we can't fine the typical criminal because he's broke. I know giving money to crime victims isn't completely realistic; two obvious problems would be desperate people faking crimes and money going to some rather unsavory “victims”—after all, a crime victim is often just a criminal having a bad day. But some of the money saved by flogging should be used to help real victims.

Imagine once again being the victim of a violent mugging. The mugger is convicted and sentenced to five years in prison or ten lashes. He, as expected, chooses the lash. You might feel better knowing the offender will be caned, but that doesn't assuage the financial and emotional costs you've borne. As soon as the mugger consents to be flogged, and here's a new concept, the judge could turn to you to either
accept the criminal's decision or reject it and send him to prison. The victim could receive money if the criminal is flogged. For every two lashes the prisoner receives, thus knocking a year off the sentence, the crime victim could receive $13,000. You, the victim, can choose for the criminal to receive anywhere from zero to ten lashes, with any remaining sentence being served in prison. In essence, the state will split the money saved by not incarcerating. You win, the taxpayer wins, even the criminal wins. Where's the harm? Taking account of victims' concerns as a means of diverting people from jail generally falls under the rubric of “restorative justice,” yet it is unlikely that advocates of restorative justice will support my defense of flogging.

I've already mentioned some of flogging's basic rules throughout the preceding pages: Immediacy, proportionality, transparency, and choice are all critical components in a just system of corporal punishment. And though a philosophical defense of flogging shouldn't get bogged down in nitty-gritty details, I would be remiss not to discuss in greater
detail how, exactly, flogging would work. Here, then, are some basic guidelines for implementing flogging in a civilized and even progressive society:

In large cities one caning trestle should be in the courthouse and another in Central Booking so
that those arrested on misdemeanors could immediately assent to being flogged. After an arrest or conviction, one could accept a flogging plea and go to the caning room. This punishment would not serve as the basis for public gatherings or celebrations. This area would be open to the public but not have unrestricted public access. A nontelevised courtroom setting is an appropriate model. As in a courtroom, proper decorum would be enforced.

The person to be flogged would be inspected by a doctor, tied to a whipping post, and stripped at the butt. The flogger would enter the room, perform a few warm-up snaps of the cane, and then commence. After the proper number of lashes, the offender would again be examined by a doctor, have any wounds tended to, and be sent on his or her way. The punishment would be complete after only a few minutes of brutal pain.

When I defend flogging, and perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, I sometimes get strange looks. Some friends have been known to question my sincerity and others my sanity. Too often, they just don't get it. One colleague begged me to reconsider for the
sake of my professional career (I hope she's wrong). But also worrisome is when people say, “Great idea! Right on!” The need for flogging is not something that should be celebrated. I have no intention or desire to glorify caning. On the contrary, I hope never to see it. And yet I firmly believe flogging is better than what we have, both for society and for those being punished.