Financially and economically supporting a prison system takes resources away from society.Dorian wrote: ↑January 15th, 2019, 2:23 pm Peter Moskos, a sociology professor at CUNY, wrote a book on incarceration in America titled In Defense of Flogging.
Readers are asked the following question: Imagine that you have been convicted of a crime and presented with the choice between serving a 10 years sentence in prison or being tied to a pole and given ten brutal lashes for your crime, which would you choose?
In the author's estimation, virtually everyone would choose the lashes over the prison sentence. I know that I would choose the lashes, and the small sample of acquaintances (n= 10 or so) felt the same way. This leads to two questions about our system of criminal justice:
1) Flogging is generally considered a brutal and inhumane form of punishment, but if people would prefer flogging to prison what does that tell us about how awful the prison system is?
2) Since, if given the option, people would choose to be flogged as an alternative to incarceration, then does it appear one can make a solid moral argument that flogging should be allowed as a form of punishment?
What do you all think?
In early colonial America it was not possible economically. So they flogged.
To enforce the law you must have a system of justice and punishments.
Flogging is as good as any punishment. It inflicts pain and scarring and it is limited in time.
Morally whether flogging is right or wrong depends on your options.
It is more wrong NOT to punish crime (and more stupid) than it is to flog.
So everything is relative in the sense of these value judgments.