In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos

John Wayne Gacy, Willie Bosket, Theodore Kaczynski, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—may indeed need to be kept away from us as long as they are alive. We’re afraid of them. These people are not only being punished for what they did; they’re being kept behind bars so they can’t hurt us anymore. For these nasty folk—mind you, they’re few and far between—prisons contain and do so rather well. But prisons and jails are not filled with monsters; rather, they’re filled with a lot of mediocre people—a very few bad ones too—who did something wrong, and often did that something more than once.
    Sometime in the past few decades we seem to have lost the concept of justice in a free society. Now we settle for simple efficiency of process. We tried rehabilitation and ended up with supermax and solitary confinement. Crime, violence, and drug prohibition help explain why so many people are behind bars. But none of this explains why there are so many people behind bars . That fact represents a much deeper problem, one that we have yet to confront. If we can’t guarantee some degree of public safety while providing a minimal level of humanity for those we shackle; if justice isn’t the goal;
if we’re not willing to invest in education, rehabilitation, mental health care, infrastructure, job creation, or troubled neighborhoods, then we have no choice: It’s time to short-circuit the entire criminal justice system by bringing back the lash.

    Although the prison system is unarguably broken, many people have yet to acknowledge that the problem is the system itself and not just the way it’s run. Today’s prison reformers still seem to believe, or at least want to believe, that the problem of prisons rests more in the details of prison administration than the basic tenets of the penitentiary model. To attack prisons in their entirety, reformers would have to abandon the penitentiary’s restorative ideals—something they’re loath to do. Though the idea of rehabilitative prisons may have officially been abandoned with the Supreme Court’s 1989 Mistretta decision, reformers still cling to the concept that prisons can reform. Their reluctance to let go is understandable. Like education, job training, and drug treatment, rehabilitation is tough to be against. What’s the alternative? Still, the premise of rehabilitation is often flawed. How, after all, can one
be “habilitated” in the mainstream values and skills of the educated working class when isolated from them in a “total institution” while surrounded by undereducated criminals with similar antisocial attitudes? Gathering criminals in one place does nothing but teach advanced criminality. If rehabilitation is to ever work, it’s going to happen outside prison walls.
    Without the noble ideal of rehabilitation, prisons only hold and punish. And as a system of punishment, prisons leave much to be desired. Despite the horrid conditions, many people continue to believe that penitentiaries do nothing but coddle criminals. After all, some critics argue, with rent-free recreation and cable TV, prison is a veritable country club! As common as it is misguided, this belief causes the public to demand even more punishment. Elected officials respond by getting “tougher” on crime. But without alternatives, tougher just means more prison.
    No matter how tough we get, because prisons do not punish in a comprehensible manner, incarceration will never satisfy the public’s legitimate desire for punishment. But when incarceration is all we have, the only way to give more punishment is
to pile on the years. Without satisfactory punishment, the public brays for more punishment. And so the cycle continues. Ten years not enough? Give him twenty! Why? Because he deserves it. Consider convicted felons Dudley Kyzer and Darron Anderson. The former received ten thousand years plus two life terms for a