In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos Page B

bring to his jail may pale in comparison with the fundamental hardships of most prisoners’ lives.
    Indeed, the political camps for and against Sheriff Joe may be staked out on the wrong side of his policies. The irony about a man who says, “I want to make it so terrible that nobody will want to come back” is that deep down, and without him wanting it, some of his policies might not be bad. Tent cities, even in an Arizona summer, can be preferred to stuffy indoor cells. Inmates dismissed chain gangs (“work crews” is the politically correct term) as publicity stunts, and yet whatever their symbolism, they remain highly desired assignments. And the reason should be obvious: Inmates will welcome anything that provides an emotional and physical release from the monotony of confinement.

    Unfortunately, by attacking the ideas of Joe Arpaio, his more liberal opponents may be hurting the very inmates in whose name they claim to speak. Time and time again we see that inmates don’t want to be locked inside. Any and every alternative to wasting away in a jail should be heralded, no matter who it comes from. Plus, I’m quite fond of some of his ideas, like the one linking TV power to electricity-generating exercise bicycles. If you want to watch the tube, keep pedaling. Why not?
    Not liking Joe Arpaio is one thing. After all, I don’t like Joe Arpaio. I think he’s an egotistical, xenophobic, opportunistic SOB. There are better ways to punish criminals than a “get tough” jail. But until we provide alternatives and acknowledge the necessity of punishment, true reform will be a pipe dream and we’ll be left with Arpaio’s gimmicks. So I raise my middle finger to you, Joe, but urge you to keep the ideas coming.

    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