In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos

Author:Peter Moskos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 0465021484
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

If prisons are broken, then so, too, is prison reform. With the exception of a few Supreme Court decisions in their favor, prison reformers have an awfully bad track record over the past two hundred years. But the last forty years stand out as particularly dismal: Calls for less incarceration have been met with a skyrocketing prison population. This, however, isn’t surprising, as any reform movement that desires an improved system of evil should be doomed to failure. It’s like asking for comfier seats on the train to Auschwitz: It sort of misses the big picture.

At one time America had punishment other than incarceration. But as we built up our prison system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we simultaneously dismantled our most trusted alternative: the institution of flogging. In 1972 Delaware, the country’s “first state,” became the last to strike corporal punishment from the criminal code. This was twenty years after the state’s last flogging. On June 16, 1952, convicted burglar John Barbieri, aged thirty, was tied to “Red Hannah,” as the whipping post was known, and received twenty lashes on the back with the “cat-o’-nine-tails.” Seeing how every other state had already given up flogging, perhaps Delaware’s stubborn refusal in keeping the lash was due to its proximity to and rivalry with neighboring Pennsylvania, where flogging was first banned and the prison movement began.

In the debate between flogging and prison, both sides saw prison as the “softer” of the two options. The only real question was which one was better. Anti-floggers in the late 1700s saw prison as a modern cure for crime. But the pro-flogging Delaware Gazette saw through this nonsense: “The Penitentiary punishment,” wrote the Gazette in 1852, “scarcely ever reforms the criminal, and we believe that it is much less efficient than our old fashioned mode of whipping and pillory.”

A stated goal of the pro-prison camp was nothing less than the complete elimination of criminal punishment. In its place would be scientific treatment. One anti-flogging academic in 1947 quite typically hoped for an “emphasis upon the understanding of the causes of crime [and] the rehabilitation of the individual. . . . . [Focus] upon the criminal rather than upon the crime, upon the person in a situation rather than upon”—and here’s the kicker—“legal abstractions.” Of course these “legal abstractions” are nothing less than an independent judiciary, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law. But at least this professor was honest, just one in a long line of misguided dreamers seduced by the curative ideals of the penitentiary. It remains important, both logically and morally, to resist the seduction of these utopian dreams.

Prison reform, somewhat like communism, has in its idealism a certain enduring appeal—especially if all you know about communism is The Communist Manifesto and a rousing round of “The Internationale.” In some circles even today, prison reformers’ beliefs, much like those of communism, reflect a dogmatic faith that an ineffectual system can be salvaged to help society improve. This wouldn’t matter so much if these were lofty statements of ideals, like, say, wanting world peace.

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