In Defense of Flogging Read Online Free

violated laws were generally subject to pain, exile, shame, or death. Whipping, fines, and the stocks were common criminal punishments in British colonies. Though people could receive the death penalty for many minor crimes, including such vague offenses as “malicious mischief,” people, or at least the intellectual elite, considered flogging barbaric and primitive. Despite the harshness of the justice system, none of these punishments seemed to work: They didn’t deter crime.
    It isn’t difficult to imagine the history of our present prison system—throwing criminals into cages for substantial portions of their adult lives—as a process of steady evolution away from corporal punishment. Perhaps first one person was kept in a cage instead of being flogged or put in the stockades, and then another person was thrown in too. But perhaps the cage was kind of small, so the guards built another cage. And then the authorities would have built big walls and more cages. One could imagine this transition toward the modern prison, but that’s not how it happened.
    Before we had prisons, harsh confinement was used alongside corporal punishment. But such incarceration generally had another purpose, such as
holding a person until trial, or until a debt was paid. Confinement was a means to an end: People weren’t sentenced to confinement; they were held until something else could happen. And jails of the day were different—often communal affairs in which men and women mingled, sometimes with the lubrication of free-flowing liquor. Friends and family could visit, too, and often needed to because they might be the sole providers of a prisoner’s necessities, food included. Jail wasn’t meant to be long-term or especially sustainable, so inmates without money or friends could—and sometimes did—die from illness or the elements.
    Political prisoners and prisoners of war were often locked up to keep them out of commission. This is similar in practice to a modern prison, but generally the actual numbers involved were quite small. One exception, however, was during the American Revolution. One historian estimates that some 17,500 American soldiers and sailors—more than double the number killed in actual battle—died of disease and starvation aboard British prison ships docked in New York City.
    Even our own George Washington sent a few prisoners to a horribly bizarre jail. Months after taking
control of the Continental Army, the general and future president packed off a few “flagrant and atrocious villains” to a Connecticut dungeon fashioned from an abandoned copper mine. The convicts arrived with a letter from Washington stating rather tersely that the men had been tried and found guilty by a court martial (the letter did not specify the actual crime). General Washington informed the jail keepers that they would “be pleased” to secure the prisoners in their jail or anywhere else “so that they cannot possibly make their escape.” As for payment, Washington asked for credit. In these cases there was no pretense of punishment (which could easily have been meted out in other manners) nor any desire to “cure” the criminal; prisoners were simply left to rot.
    Given the gruesome history of confinement, in the late 1700s the concept of a penitentiary was truly radical and cutting-edge. The study of criminals was a growing academic field, one that reflected new notions about medicine and science emerging at the time. People believed, somewhat naively, that no healthy man would choose a life of crime. And if new medicines could cure physical ailments, well
then why not cure criminal ailments as well? Just as doctors in hospitals were healing the physically sick, could not trained prison professionals cure criminal illness? And just as today we would never consider beating Satan out of a schizophrenic, reformers of that era hoped that corporal