I'm not sure why public beatings would feel all that more sudden though. If they still only follow the conviction of a crime, they would happen about when the start of a jail sentence would happen.
Unserious proposition: immediate public flogging for anyone strongly suspected of a crime. Then, a trial, and if they are acquitted they get significant compensatory damages
If I were a criminal I'd rather be beaten. Then I could get right back to my gang activities. Hell, a beating was part of my initiation. Beatings mean nothing to me. And when it's over I'll take my revenge without some delay of years. After which my motivation may have dissipated.
Take a look at El Salvador. Imagine giving those 60000 they sent to prison being receiving beatings. They'd be right back in business.
Right, for some really severe crimes where it's important for people to be incapacitated, prison makes sense. But for others like maybe stealing or something, beatings make more sense.
It's not that obvious, people who commit certain crimes typically have a long history of various other crimes, this is especially true in gangs. You can't talk about crime in some abstract x act to y punishment, especially not on utilitarian grounds, rather you would need to look at the psychological profile of criminals.
Relatedly you say you would prefer 50% chance of death to life in prison, but how well do you think this generalizes to the kinds on people in prison. You might be able to infer this from suicide rates etc.
Given the heritability of crime do you not think there is a strong utilitarian case in favour of "cruelty" now with the aim of reducing future crime. Or at the very least something like forcing serial killers to use embryo selection or donor sperm if they want kids etc.
A key thought that comes to my mind is "first offense." I suspect if judicial corporal punishment has any efficacy, it's as a wake-up call to a young man who is just starting to go down a dark path. In which case maybe it's more effective than a prison stint. I'd be willing to support a test at least.
The occasional anecdotal stories I've heard of successful "rehabilitation" of young men seem to take this form -- a wake-up call after his first stint in prison. By the time a young man has been to prison twice, I think it normally means he has chosen that path and will probably stay on it until, best case, he ages out in his 40s or 50s. Along those lines -- people REALLY won't like this one -- corporal punishment might be most efficacious as an alternative to juvenile detention. Maybe that is more likely to nip his criminal life in the bud than to place him around other budding criminals.
Another possible use case of corporal punishment is IN prisons. Maybe it would be better for maintaining order and discipline in prisons if offenders were given lashes instead of, or alongside, punishments like solitary confinement.
This is an excellent exposition on why things cannot be morally valued in absolute terms!
We cannot know how good or bad are prisons or bombings without a clear consequentialist discussion on possible alternatives.
This leads to two important issues: 1) shall ethics be in the hands of philosophers or economists? , 2) have you already read Schelling’s “the strategy of conflict”, and if not, what is more urgent than that?
Peter Moskos compares.prison to flogging and asks, "How many lashes would you take to avoid, say, 5 years of prison? With one lash every 30 seconds, how many minutes of lashing would you take to avoid years in prison, each minute of lashing being a minute of brutal torture?"
Most people, if being rational and thinking about everything they lose (e.g. the irreparable harm to their career and relationships, the loss of years of pleasurable activities. the freedom to direct your own life), would choose hours of torture over years in prison. Yet, if most people (excluding weirdos like Henry David Thoreau) would rationally prefer hours of torture to years in prison, doesn't that just entail that prison is worse than torture?
My assumptions on this were also upended by Peter Moskos — and I recommend his “In Defense of Flogging” (even just the first chapter) to anyone who finishes this post wanting more.
I think you’re undervaluing incapacitation. Start by granting the utilitarian premise that retributive justice is impermissible.
Let X be the amount of corporal-punishment-pain that balances deterrence and harm. If X is instead prison-pain, it has the added advantage of reducing crime through incapacitation. So there exists some prison-pain Y < X that sanctions the same crime amount, but with less pain. I find it very implausible that deterrence per corporal-punishment-pain is so much higher than deterrence per prison-pain so as to negate this advantage.
If the point is that our current X is too high either way, and would be made more visceral via corporal punishment, I disagree. Crime already seems quite high in the US; certainly higher than in other countries.
Also, public floggings and the guillotine are seen as inhumane because they entail people taking pleasure in the administration of retributive justice. But in utilitarianism, retributive justice is immoral. So acknowledging that administering pain to criminals is an unfortunate necessity, that should be done behind closed doors, and not something to be gloried publicly, seems like moral progress. (Also the guillotine, like lynching, is a symbol of mob violence that ignores procedural justice and often executes innocents.)
Administering pain to criminals publicly is much more of a "shame" for the perpetrators and might serve as a better deterrence than many years in prison, since most criminals are short-term thinkers.
It is more retributive, but if it is more effective at preventing crime - and allows one-time criminals to continue their lives without spending years in jail, completely disrupting their lives - than it's better from an utilitarian standpoint.
The purpose of a prison ought to be to protect the public while the criminal is rehabilitated into a safe member of society. Awful things happen in jail, yes; but that is an argument to reform the system, not simply abolish it.
Excellent piece. My suspicion has always been that successful prison rehabilitation, as a concept, is semi-fictional. But I wasn't sure how to square this with the reports of the Nords and their rehabilitative successes. This makes more sense.
Yeah one of the frustrating things about police reform and abolition movements is that they're happy to defer to radical nonexperts like Angela Davis or Ibram X Kendi who aren't engaging with the best empirical evidence surrounding how prisons work, so they'll just spout things like "prisons are for rehabilitation not retribution" without really inquiring into the empirical question of how possible rehabilitation really is, or whether they're leaving out bigger, more relevant and established paradigms in criminology (like minimizing recidivism).
I made this EXACT point recently. if we’re going to do retributive punishments, then corporal punishments are obviously permissible and probably preferable
You might want to bring back Michael Liebowitz on your YT channel, as he knows a thing or two about what you discussed through experience as personal as one can get. I can also suggest the book "Inside the Criminal Mind" by Stanton Sameonow, as he does a good job of discussing what makes criminals tick. I saw the same elements Samenow covers in the young thugs I knew in junior high school in the '60s, so I believe him.
Any discussion of "corporal punishment" reminds me of the notoriety of at least one state's youth detention center, where the guards who worked there amused themselves by abusing the kids, leaving bruises both visible and invisible.
On a positive note, despite your extreme youth, I think it's great that you know of Tom Lehrer.
Yeah, the only people that should be in jail are those that pose a serious risk to society. Basically, repeat violent offenders (counting rape as a violent offense).
For other offenses, community service, fines, or house arrest are good options. Corporeal punishment for a first violent offense might be a good fit.
The difference between corporal and other versions of punishment is one of kind, not level. Spanking a child, for instance, is not inherently worse than yelling at them. Either can be the greater harm, depending on the circumstances.
This is a good starting point on this topic. I would argue that what is more important is not how we punish people, but rather what the criminal justice system is for. For example, are we just punishing people for breaking laws or are we trying to change people's behaviors? Certainly as it stands, the prison environment is such that the best way to survive is to become a worse person in terms of society's norms. Furthermore, in some societies, a person having been convicted of a crime carries with them a kind of scarlet letter that they can never rid themselves of, further reducing incentives to become a better person. Of course, there are those who cannot be changed or reformed. For them, the only options are to remove them from society, usually in the form of locking them away in a cell. What do we do about them?
Holy shit that Snl clip hahahahah
Robin Hanson has also made comparisons between jail and corporal punishment, which is where I first heard the idea. I generally agree with your comments on it. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/all-big-punishment-is-cruelhtml
I'm not sure why public beatings would feel all that more sudden though. If they still only follow the conviction of a crime, they would happen about when the start of a jail sentence would happen.
Unserious proposition: immediate public flogging for anyone strongly suspected of a crime. Then, a trial, and if they are acquitted they get significant compensatory damages
We agree: http://www.olemartinmoen.com/wp-content/uploads/Judicial-Corporal-Punishment.pdf
If I were a criminal I'd rather be beaten. Then I could get right back to my gang activities. Hell, a beating was part of my initiation. Beatings mean nothing to me. And when it's over I'll take my revenge without some delay of years. After which my motivation may have dissipated.
Take a look at El Salvador. Imagine giving those 60000 they sent to prison being receiving beatings. They'd be right back in business.
Right, for some really severe crimes where it's important for people to be incapacitated, prison makes sense. But for others like maybe stealing or something, beatings make more sense.
It's not that obvious, people who commit certain crimes typically have a long history of various other crimes, this is especially true in gangs. You can't talk about crime in some abstract x act to y punishment, especially not on utilitarian grounds, rather you would need to look at the psychological profile of criminals.
Relatedly you say you would prefer 50% chance of death to life in prison, but how well do you think this generalizes to the kinds on people in prison. You might be able to infer this from suicide rates etc.
Given the heritability of crime do you not think there is a strong utilitarian case in favour of "cruelty" now with the aim of reducing future crime. Or at the very least something like forcing serial killers to use embryo selection or donor sperm if they want kids etc.
A key thought that comes to my mind is "first offense." I suspect if judicial corporal punishment has any efficacy, it's as a wake-up call to a young man who is just starting to go down a dark path. In which case maybe it's more effective than a prison stint. I'd be willing to support a test at least.
The occasional anecdotal stories I've heard of successful "rehabilitation" of young men seem to take this form -- a wake-up call after his first stint in prison. By the time a young man has been to prison twice, I think it normally means he has chosen that path and will probably stay on it until, best case, he ages out in his 40s or 50s. Along those lines -- people REALLY won't like this one -- corporal punishment might be most efficacious as an alternative to juvenile detention. Maybe that is more likely to nip his criminal life in the bud than to place him around other budding criminals.
Another possible use case of corporal punishment is IN prisons. Maybe it would be better for maintaining order and discipline in prisons if offenders were given lashes instead of, or alongside, punishments like solitary confinement.
This is an excellent exposition on why things cannot be morally valued in absolute terms!
We cannot know how good or bad are prisons or bombings without a clear consequentialist discussion on possible alternatives.
This leads to two important issues: 1) shall ethics be in the hands of philosophers or economists? , 2) have you already read Schelling’s “the strategy of conflict”, and if not, what is more urgent than that?
Peter Moskos compares.prison to flogging and asks, "How many lashes would you take to avoid, say, 5 years of prison? With one lash every 30 seconds, how many minutes of lashing would you take to avoid years in prison, each minute of lashing being a minute of brutal torture?"
Most people, if being rational and thinking about everything they lose (e.g. the irreparable harm to their career and relationships, the loss of years of pleasurable activities. the freedom to direct your own life), would choose hours of torture over years in prison. Yet, if most people (excluding weirdos like Henry David Thoreau) would rationally prefer hours of torture to years in prison, doesn't that just entail that prison is worse than torture?
My assumptions on this were also upended by Peter Moskos — and I recommend his “In Defense of Flogging” (even just the first chapter) to anyone who finishes this post wanting more.
I think you’re undervaluing incapacitation. Start by granting the utilitarian premise that retributive justice is impermissible.
Let X be the amount of corporal-punishment-pain that balances deterrence and harm. If X is instead prison-pain, it has the added advantage of reducing crime through incapacitation. So there exists some prison-pain Y < X that sanctions the same crime amount, but with less pain. I find it very implausible that deterrence per corporal-punishment-pain is so much higher than deterrence per prison-pain so as to negate this advantage.
If the point is that our current X is too high either way, and would be made more visceral via corporal punishment, I disagree. Crime already seems quite high in the US; certainly higher than in other countries.
Also, public floggings and the guillotine are seen as inhumane because they entail people taking pleasure in the administration of retributive justice. But in utilitarianism, retributive justice is immoral. So acknowledging that administering pain to criminals is an unfortunate necessity, that should be done behind closed doors, and not something to be gloried publicly, seems like moral progress. (Also the guillotine, like lynching, is a symbol of mob violence that ignores procedural justice and often executes innocents.)
Administering pain to criminals publicly is much more of a "shame" for the perpetrators and might serve as a better deterrence than many years in prison, since most criminals are short-term thinkers.
It is more retributive, but if it is more effective at preventing crime - and allows one-time criminals to continue their lives without spending years in jail, completely disrupting their lives - than it's better from an utilitarian standpoint.
The purpose of a prison ought to be to protect the public while the criminal is rehabilitated into a safe member of society. Awful things happen in jail, yes; but that is an argument to reform the system, not simply abolish it.
This was a good article and SSC subreddit discussion on recidivism and rehabilitation https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1d7vtvx/the_myth_of_the_nordic_rehabilitative_paradise/
Excellent piece. My suspicion has always been that successful prison rehabilitation, as a concept, is semi-fictional. But I wasn't sure how to square this with the reports of the Nords and their rehabilitative successes. This makes more sense.
Yeah one of the frustrating things about police reform and abolition movements is that they're happy to defer to radical nonexperts like Angela Davis or Ibram X Kendi who aren't engaging with the best empirical evidence surrounding how prisons work, so they'll just spout things like "prisons are for rehabilitation not retribution" without really inquiring into the empirical question of how possible rehabilitation really is, or whether they're leaving out bigger, more relevant and established paradigms in criminology (like minimizing recidivism).
I made this EXACT point recently. if we’re going to do retributive punishments, then corporal punishments are obviously permissible and probably preferable
something something michel foucault
You might want to bring back Michael Liebowitz on your YT channel, as he knows a thing or two about what you discussed through experience as personal as one can get. I can also suggest the book "Inside the Criminal Mind" by Stanton Sameonow, as he does a good job of discussing what makes criminals tick. I saw the same elements Samenow covers in the young thugs I knew in junior high school in the '60s, so I believe him.
Any discussion of "corporal punishment" reminds me of the notoriety of at least one state's youth detention center, where the guards who worked there amused themselves by abusing the kids, leaving bruises both visible and invisible.
On a positive note, despite your extreme youth, I think it's great that you know of Tom Lehrer.
Yeah, the only people that should be in jail are those that pose a serious risk to society. Basically, repeat violent offenders (counting rape as a violent offense).
For other offenses, community service, fines, or house arrest are good options. Corporeal punishment for a first violent offense might be a good fit.
The difference between corporal and other versions of punishment is one of kind, not level. Spanking a child, for instance, is not inherently worse than yelling at them. Either can be the greater harm, depending on the circumstances.
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/to-grok-justice
This is a good starting point on this topic. I would argue that what is more important is not how we punish people, but rather what the criminal justice system is for. For example, are we just punishing people for breaking laws or are we trying to change people's behaviors? Certainly as it stands, the prison environment is such that the best way to survive is to become a worse person in terms of society's norms. Furthermore, in some societies, a person having been convicted of a crime carries with them a kind of scarlet letter that they can never rid themselves of, further reducing incentives to become a better person. Of course, there are those who cannot be changed or reformed. For them, the only options are to remove them from society, usually in the form of locking them away in a cell. What do we do about them?