In Defense of Flogging

by Peter Moskos

  Perhaps it wasn’t painful enough, or perhaps girls could lift their butts just so, to avoid the paddles. Or perhaps the whole concept was just the silly invention of some perverted man. Regardless, the paper ran no further accounts of this chair.

  But based on the description of the Kansas spanking chair, one could assume that punishment machines already exist in the worlds of bondage, S&M, or Russ Meyer films. Though I don’t know from personal experience, I’ve seen some things online. Honestly, conducting any online research on flogging without stumbling across a wide variety of very adult websites is impossible. And I am naturally curious. But nothing (at least that doesn’t require a credit card) matches the severity of the corporal punishment I defend. I propose something far beyond kink. If a flogging machine exists that can consistently and forcefully draw blood and still be less than lethal, I’ve yet to see it.

  Flogging isn’t the only way to cause pain. In Just and Painful, Graeme Newman’s defense of corporal punishment, electric shock is the proposed method. Though Tasers were not around when Newman first wrote this excellent book, such “conducted energy devices” (as Tasers are generically known) could be an ideal way to give somebody an electric jolt. Many police departments use Tasers to gain compliance and subdue suspects. And although electric shock lacks the visual dramatics of flogging, Newman observes some advantages to using electric shock as corporal punishment: The severity of the punishment is easier to quantify, the process is nonscarring, and the administration of punishment is hands-off.

  The problem with electric shocks, however, is that they sometimes kill. In the United States, police-administered Taser-like electric shock—and researchers are still catching up with this fact—kills more than one person per week, and that number is rising in sync with the increasingly widespread use of such devices. Sometimes a weak ticker is all it takes. In the other extreme, botched electrocutions show that people can live through terribly painful shocks. In truth we really don’t know exactly how electricity affects the human body and brain, but we do know that lengthy or continued repetition of electric shock—the kind of application needed in a corporal punishment situation—greatly increases the risk of death.

  Although perhaps some risk of death is acceptable when police on the street use the Taser as an alternative to lethal force (though many Tasers are used, somewhat worrisomely, in routine and nonthreatening issues of noncompliance), there is no acceptable mortality rate in the administration of nonlethal sentences. Punishment, including corporal punishment, is explicitly not a death sentence. Whereas electric shocks sometimes kill without any visible warning, doctors could stop a flogging if a convict shows sign of strain, such as falling unconscious. If the doctor says the offender can’t handle the lash, then it’s back to jail for the offender. It may seem a bit absurd to have a doctor on hand to make certain a person is fit enough for a beating, but this is no different from a doctor’s presence at a boxing match and is unquestionably a lot less absurd than a physical checkup before an execution.

  Even if we could build an effective and nonlethal pain machine, leaving punishment in human hands would still be desirable. Machinelike consistency is not necessarily important. An expert trained in flogging and perhaps the martial arts would be best suited to punish, ensure the safety of the flogged, and stop before causing death. Furthermore, consecutive lashes should not be administered in exactly the same place: The goal is not to dredge a channel through an offender’s body (as was depicted in Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony”). Instead, as is done in flogging cultures, the lashes are spread out across the entire flesh of the behind. This helps lower the risk of infection and keeps the pain from becoming beyond extreme. Nor does it matter if one flogger causes slightly more or less pain than another. Any such differences would pale in comparison with the variances already found at every other level of the American criminal justice system. (Although, because I hate to think of the licensing issues involved in training people to be official state floggers, I propose we poach expert floggers from Singapore and Malaysia, where it is a skilled and sought-after detail for law enforcement officers.)

  There is another somewhat theoretical but perhaps more important argument against machineadministered punishment: Machines are too clean, too convenient. They psychologically sanitize what we are doing, allowing us to ignore the moral significance. If we can’t face up to our form of punishing others, we shouldn’t do it. If we want to punish, let’s be honest about what we’re doing. To do otherwise debases ourselves and, like prison, makes punishment an unhealthily removed and secretive concept. Consider Stanley Milgram’s classic experiment on torture and authoritarian personalities: When ordered to by an authority figure, most people were willing to press a button and give what they believed to be an electric shock to another person. Although people generally have no desire to hurt those who have done nothing wrong, a button is too easy to press, a knob too easy to turn. The essential human element in physically causing pain helps us face and even limit the severity of whatever punishment we wish to administer. Pressing a button makes it too easy to torture.

  Flogging is indeed very harsh, but it’s not torture—not unless all corporal punishment is defined as torture. Indeed, to conflate flogging with torture does a grave disservice to the understanding of both. It is not only the physical act that defines torture but also the context, the psychological underpinnings, the lack of consent, and the openended potential. The US government has tortured people with euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques.” This torture is not so much a punishment as a means to an end. This is not flogging.

  The distinction between pain as punishment and pain as torture is important. People torture because they’re sadistic or want information. We punish because others have done wrong. The torture our government has sanctioned, which I in no way condone, was supposed to achieve a goal. Until that goal was achieved, torture continued. Punishment, however, is finite. It ends. Torture ends only when someone breaks. Punishment, unlike torture, is prescribed in accordance with clear rules of law. The difference between the goals and methods of punishment and torture is critical. I defend flogging, not torture.

  Indeed, if examined closely, prisons much more so than flogging display characteristics of torture. By locking people in cells and denying meaningful human contact, we cause irreparable damage; by holding prisoners in group living quarters, we subject them to the potential of gang violence, assault, and all the other forms of aggression found in prisons; and through parole boards’ decisions, we hold the power to continue such punishment for extended periods of time. And for what? What do we gain? Why incapacitate criminals in a nonrehabilitative environment never meant for punishment? This is more torturous than flogging could ever be.

  Yes, flogging is nasty, brutish, and (blessedly) short. There’s nothing pretty about it. Punishment is not supposed to be pretty. If it were, it wouldn’t punish. And if punishment is necessary, we need to be honest about its horrific costs—and flogging is a much more humane (and economic) alternative.

  Let me make an analogy about honesty in the infliction of pain. Think of meat. I don’t think killing animals is good, but I like to eat meat. So when I do, I try to remember, even if briefly, that an animal lived and died for my sustenance (and pleasure). It’s the least I can do. And although it’s a convenience that I need not personally kill everything I eat, if I can’t face up to the reality of animal death, then perhaps I shouldn’t eat meat. Think of it the next time you go to the grocery store. A lot has happened between a cow’s moo and a shrink-wrapped steak.

  If you are brave, there are ways to confront the true cost of eating meat. You can hunt or, more feasible in the big city, at least see your dinner alive before you eat it. And I’m not just talking about lobster tanks. There are two live-poultry stores near me, and one even has a little “pasture” out back filled with lambs and sometimes the occasional cow. I call it the “petting zoo” because when I’m ther
e that’s what I like to do. If I want to roast one of the lambs, I can point to one and have it dragged out of the pen to be killed, skinned, cleaned, and cut. Is it pretty? Well, not really. But at least it’s honest. And if you eat meat, this process is inevitable whether you close your eyes to it or not. Muffling the sounds of suffering in the world is one thing—after all, if we didn’t, we would all go crazy—but pretending suffering doesn’t exist is quite another.

  Flogging is refreshingly transparent and honest. What you see is what you get. If you want someone to receive more punishment, you give more lashes. If you want them to receive less punishment, you give fewer. Prison, however, is dishonest punishment. We on the outside have no real idea what goes on inside the concertina wire, but let’s not fool ourselves: It’s bleak. Prisons and slaughterhouses are two of the very few institutions closed to visitors. Just as we prefer not to know all the details of how meat ends up on our table, we prefer to keep prisoners out of sight and mind. Bad things tend to happen in secret, when the masses of “decent” folks can’t or don’t want to see what happens to others.

  Just as we want to eat meat without thinking of slaughter, we want to punish without thinking of pain. But you cannot have one without the other. There is a very real damage in the way we choose to punish criminals, and we need to face this instead of pretending it doesn’t happen. The treatment of living, sentient beings matters. And presumably, I hope, people care more about the treatment of a human than a cow. Indeed, our criminal justice system has become a bit too much like Soylent Green, the basic foodstuff from the 1973 movie set in the dystopian future of 2022. In Soylent Green, it turns out that corporately produced Soylent Green is—spoiler alert—“made of people!” So is our system of corrections.

  Even as flogging is more open and honest than prison, this may not persuade some critics, so the fact that flogging is cheap—much less expensive than prison—is worth some elaboration. The financial argument is extremely important and also straightforward. Leaving aside everything already mentioned about the horrors of prison, incarceration simply costs too much (especially considering how ineffective it is). Although there is a fixed cost in establishing any system of judicial punishment—the courts, lawyers, jails, appeals, and police officers—compared to a system of incarceration, the actual cost of flogging is miniscule.

  Criminal justice—considering how abjectly it fails at the goals we’ve set out for it—is ludicrously expensive. Take, for example, just two criminal families in Birmingham, England (but the results would likely be similar in the United States). Over three generations of police investigations, lawyers, trials, and prison for serious crimes, these two families cost taxpayers £37 million (about $59 million). The total cost of the larger gangs of which these two families were a part—and this is a conservative estimate that does not include medical care for victims, minor crimes, or welfare and housing benefits the families claimed—was close to a staggering £190 million ($300 million). This is not money well spent. As one politician put it, “We spend vast sums of money ineffectually managing social failure.”

  Prisons are expensive not because they coddle prisoners—quite the opposite; prisons cost so much because we have to keep people alive while holding them against their will. It’s not an easy task. Prisoners require human observation and intervention, and it’s not a nine-to-five operation; rather, officers have to be present day and night to maintain order and guard the prisoners. To have one guard on duty 24/7 requires six employees (taking into account three shifts, weekends, and holidays). Conversely, flogging requires but a trestle on which to flog, a few law enforcement officers, a doctor, and the actual flogger. With the exception of the flogger and the furniture, everything is already in place. Compared to prison, flogging is essentially free.

  A quick look at the numbers shows just how much could be saved by abandoning incarceration. Estimates put corrections spending at somewhere between $60 billion and $78 billion per year. Either amount could safely be called “real money.” The actual savings would vary greatly, from a low of $13,000 per prisoner per a year in Louisiana to $70,000 in New York City. Nationwide, on average, it costs $26,000 for each year of incarceration. This means that each additional year of prison costs another $26,000. But an additional lash is free.

  If we could drastically reduce incarceration, the greatest question may be what to do with all the money. Might it not be more effective to give the money we currently spend on keeping offenders locked up to help those in need? What we spend on prison could be used to help people and to prevent crime. I have a friend, a former student, who had a rough childhood. He was the first in his family to graduate from college. Nevertheless, he’s recently unemployed and trying to support his family on something other than the drug dealing he grew up with. When I told him the financial cost of prison, he said, “How much? Man, the government never spent that kind of money on me growing up. Why not just give me that money and I’ll stay straight. I’d stay straight for half that!”

  Even if, given our current levels of recidivism, it might be a good investment to give money to people to stay out of crime, politically and also morally, it’s a tough sell. More palatable might be to give money to victims of crime. Crime victims suffer trauma, medical bills, and lost wages, but we can’t fine the typical criminal because he’s broke. I know giving money to crime victims isn’t completely realistic; two obvious problems would be desperate people faking crimes and money going to some rather unsavory “victims”—after all, a crime victim is often just a criminal having a bad day. But some of the money saved by flogging should be used to help real victims.

  Imagine once again being the victim of a violent mugging. The mugger is convicted and sentenced to five years in prison or ten lashes. He, as expected, chooses the lash. You might feel better knowing the offender will be caned, but that doesn’t assuage the financial and emotional costs you’ve borne. As soon as the mugger consents to be flogged, and here’s a new concept, the judge could turn to you to either accept the criminal’s decision or reject it and send him to prison. The victim could receive money if the criminal is flogged. For every two lashes the prisoner receives, thus knocking a year off the sentence, the crime victim could receive $13,000. You, the victim, can choose for the criminal to receive anywhere from zero to ten lashes, with any remaining sentence being served in prison. In essence, the state will split the money saved by not incarcerating. You win, the taxpayer wins, even the criminal wins. Where’s the harm? Taking account of victims’ concerns as a means of diverting people from jail generally falls under the rubric of “restorative justice,” yet it is unlikely that advocates of restorative justice will support my defense of flogging.

  I’ve already mentioned some of flogging’s basic rules throughout the preceding pages: Immediacy, proportionality, transparency, and choice are all critical components in a just system of corporal punishment. And though a philosophical defense of flogging shouldn’t get bogged down in nitty-gritty details, I would be remiss not to discuss in greater detail how, exactly, flogging would work. Here, then, are some basic guidelines for implementing flogging in a civilized and even progressive society:• Flogging can only be done with the consent of the flogged. The status quo of incarceration is always an option.

  • Immediately upon arrest, suspects should be classified as to whether they’re imminent and grave dangers to society. Some offenders do need to be incarcerated and kept away from society. But for the vast majority of criminal suspects, flogging would be a viable option.

  • Misdemeanants could opt, as a plea bargain, to be flogged immediately and released, before any court decision.

  • Just as today (but this would be much quicker), prosecutors would offer felons a plea deal based on the severity of their crime.

  • Incarceration should be converted to lashes using a formula of two lashes per year. For shorter sentences, one stroke could be the acceptable minimum punishment for a misdemeanor and two for a felony. For the safety
of the flogged, thirty strokes would be the prescribed maximum, though this number could vary depending on the advice of a doctor.

  • Flogging is an alternative to incarceration, not an addition to it. The purpose of flogging is to punish and be done with it.

  • The cane itself, as used in Singapore, is a rattan piece approximately four feet long and half an inch thick. Before use, the cane is soaked in water to add weight and flexibility and is treated with antiseptic.

  • Only a person trained in the use of the lash can administer the caning, and it must be done on a person’s behind. A doctor must be present. Any scars left from the lash should not be immediately visible to others. Just as punishments should not be a permanent source of shame, they should also, one would hope, not be a lasting source of pride.

  • Floggings should take place in one session and be administered as soon as possible after the consent of the flogged. The punished should be released immediately after the punishment and any needed medical care.

  In large cities one caning trestle should be in the courthouse and another in Central Booking so that those arrested on misdemeanors could immediately assent to being flogged. After an arrest or conviction, one could accept a flogging plea and go to the caning room. This punishment would not serve as the basis for public gatherings or celebrations. This area would be open to the public but not have unrestricted public access. A nontelevised courtroom setting is an appropriate model. As in a courtroom, proper decorum would be enforced.

  The person to be flogged would be inspected by a doctor, tied to a whipping post, and stripped at the butt. The flogger would enter the room, perform a few warm-up snaps of the cane, and then commence. After the proper number of lashes, the offender would again be examined by a doctor, have any wounds tended to, and be sent on his or her way. The punishment would be complete after only a few minutes of brutal pain.