Criminologist Peter Moskos: Give offenders a choice–prison or FLOGGING; (he's serious)

ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is Peter Moskos, assistant professor of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He also teaches at the City University of New York’s Doctoral Program in Sociology. A former Baltimore, Maryland police officer, he is author of the book, “Cop in the Hood."

Moskos’s new book is entitled, “In Defense of Flogging.”

The Supreme Court has affirmed a federal order telling California to reduce its overflowing prison population, a situation the majority said "falls below the standard of decency." California now has to figure out how to reduce the population by more than 30,000 prisoners. From your point of view, why does the prison system in the U.S. continue to fail?

 Prisons fail because they don’t do what they were designed to do: cure criminals. And as long as we insist on fighting an idiotic “war on drugs,” nothing is going to better.

Penitentiaries were built as houses of “correction” in order to cure the criminally ill just like hospitals healed the physically sick. It didn’t work. Incarceration does little but make people more criminal. People do not get out of prison ready to be more productive members of society.

What do you expect when you take a desperate person, isolate him from normal society, and surround him with a bunch of criminals? Criminals need help, but it’s nothing we’re giving them in prison.

So California now says they’re not going to release prisoners who are a danger to society. But if they’re not a danger to society, why are they behind bars in the first place? If we just want to punish people for breaking the law, there are better—and cheaper—ways to do so.

In your new book, you are proposing that convicted prisoners should be offered a choice between a standard prison sentence and a set number of lashes? Are you serious? Do you think a criminal would choose being whipped?

I’m deadly serious. Given the choice between five years and ten lashes, wouldn’t you choose the lash? What does that say about prison? And if flogging were so bad, where’s the harm in offering it as a choice?

Of course some people are too dangerous to release, but these people are kept behind bars simply because we’re afraid of them. But for most criminals, those we just want to punish, flogging is a more honest. It’s also a lot cheaper. Simply to bring our prison population down to levels we had until the 1970s, we’d have to release 85 percent of our prisoners. How are we going to do that unless we end the war on drugs or have alternative forms of punishment?

Ironically, once people hear my idea, often they say that flogging isn’t harsh enough. It’s good to move beyond the facile position that flogging is too cruel to consider, but if you think flogging isn’t harsh enough—that we need to keep people locked up for years precisely because prison is so unbelievable horrible—then you may be a truly evil person.

How would flogging work—what would the flogging procedure look like?

I propose we flog as they do in Singapore and Malaysia. Basically, they tie a person to a large flogging stand, pull down the pants, protect the vital organs and lash the behind with a rattan cane. A doctor tends to the wounds. It’s a horrible, brutal, and bloody process. But it is over in a few minutes.

What evidence do you have that flogging works? Is it just punishment or does it actually lead people away from committing crimes?

It depends on what you consider success. Judging from levels of recidivism and their cost, we know that prisons don’t “succeed.” In many ways flogging succeeds simply because it’s not prison.

As to deterrence, I have no idea. I’d like to think that flogging deters more than prison, but I think the only real deterrence is the fear of getting caught. Flogging succeeds because it’s pure simple honest unadulterated punishment.

Is flogging not cruel and unusual punishment? It just sounds terrible. Slaves were flogged in this country and why go back to that?

Prison is the real legacy of slavery.

What could be worse than people profiting from literal human bondage? Prisons have become nothing more than a make-work job’s program. We pay poor unemployed white people to guard poor unemployed black people. It’s unconscionable! Our criminal justice system is broken—ineffective, racist, and biased against the poor. To highlight these injustices is in no way to condone it.

It’s hard to argue that being offered a choice of punishment is cruel and unusual. The status quo is always an option. Slaves aren’t given a choice.

As to the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, it’s hard to say. Currently flogging has to be considered constitutional because the Supreme Court has never banned the practice. Corporal punishment was abolished state-by-state, with Delaware, in 1972, being the last state to strike whipping from the criminal code. And it might never be decided by the courts because nobody would be sentenced to flogging. Consent and choice are key.

By any chance, do you personally know what flogging feels like?

No, I don’t. My mom— despite my memories to the contrary—claims never to have even spanked me! I do know there’s a whole bondage and whipping scene out there in the fetish world, but I’m not into that.

But from what I’ve read, what I modestly propose would go far beyond anything that even the most die-hard masochist could possibly enjoy.