Five Years, or Five Lashes? - Brainiac

Five Years, or Five Lashes? - Brainiac

"You've committed a crime, and been convicted. The judge offers you a choice: Five years, or five lashes with a rattan cane. Which would you choose? That's the question Peter Moskos asks in In Defense of Flogging. Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer, is now a professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. His book is, as promised, a well-reasoned defense of flogging. It's also an attack upon the penal system. "Faced with the choice between hard time and the lash, the lash is better," he writes. "What does that say about prison?"

Moskos puts today's prisons in historical perspective, starting in the late 18th century, when corporal punishment was the norm. Though criminals were imprisoned, imprisonment was rarely a punishment in itself; instead, you'd be held in jail while awaiting trial, punishment, or execution. Jails were informal and even co-ed. Then, around the turn of the century, religious reformers changed everything, arguing that flogging was inhumane, and that the goal of punishment should be moral rejuvenation. Over the next fifty years, corporal punishment was outlawed, and imprisonment became the justice system's primary tool. Criminals were moved to small, individual cells, in which they could meditate on their crimes and ask God for penance. The new prisons were called, appropriately, "penitentiaries."

Almost immediately, Moskos explains, the penitential system ran aground. Prisoners didn't repent; in fact, the confinement and boredom made them crazy. (Charles Dickens, on tour in America, wrote that the prison cell was deeply inhumane -- it buried criminals alive in a "stone coffin.") To save money, larger prisons were built. Fast forward two hundred years, and you have a system of punishment that is, Moskos argues, vast, inhumane, ineffectual, and incoherent. "I can't think of another institution," he writes, "that has failed as mightily as the prison has.""