Flogging image of the day:
Tag: In Defense of Flogging
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Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea…
Here’s me defending flogging for my favorite TV news show, the NewsHour.
It’s very interesting that the option of flogging over prison currently registers over 70% support in their online poll. This mirrors the earlier newser survey in which 63% percent thought is was “brilliant” and another 13% found it “intriguing” (20% clicked in one of the negative categories).
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“Outraging the Modesty”
From the Singapore Straits Times:
A Briton on a visit here was charged on Friday with outraging the modesty of a 30-year-old woman in a Clarke Quay club.
Austin Charles Arnold Cowburn, 34, is alleged to have grabbed her buttock in the China One pub at 4am on April 3 2011.
AOL Travel adds:
The maximum sentence for the crime is two years in prison coupled with a fine and a lashing across the bare butt with a rattan cane. The penalties can (and likely will) be changed if the judge feels like avoiding an international incident.
The groping occurred at the luxurious China One nightclub where Cowburn, a recruitment specialist currently working in Qatar, proved to not be so great at his job after all.
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A notoriously rule-bound country, Singapore has the tendency to treat its citizens like unruly school kids. To wit, anyone convicted of littering three time is forced to clean the streets while wearing a bib saying: “I am a litterer.”Flogging for a minor offense. How barbaric! How un-American!!! I mean, here, when somebody grabs a girl’s ass at a club, you start a fight and shoot and kill the guy. That’sthe American way. I love civilized progress.
Now excuse me while I go “outrage” my wife’s modesty. Hmmm, that might just be a new catchphrase here at home.
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“Justice? Vengeance? You Need Both”
Thoughtful piece by Thane Rosenbaum in today’s New York Times:
It’s difficult to have honest conversations about revenge. Seeing someone receive his just deserts often feels righteous and richly deserved, and yet society regards vengeance as primitive and barbaric. Governments warn citizens not to take justice into their own hands, insisting that the state alone has the duty and right to punish wrongdoers — pursuant to the social contract.
…statements of unvarnished revenge make many uncomfortable. But how different is revenge from justice, really? Every legal system, however dispassionate and procedural, must still pass the gut test of seeming morally just; and revenge must always be just and proportionate.
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The California Prisoner Hunger Strike…
…enters it’s second week. From the S.F. Weekly:
Activists and inmates say the strike is meant to call attention to inhumane conditions in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU), where dangerous prisoners are lodged in small, windowless cells, often without access to other people or open space for extended periods. Critics of the SHU say that solitary confinement is equivalent to psychological torture, a position that is buttressed by recent scientific research.
Here’s a more current update from The Nation.
Or, as Johann Koehler relates it to In Defense of Flogging in a thoughtful blog post:
The question of whether you’d prefer flogging instead of prison is nowhere near as grotesque as whether you’d prefer to starve yourself to raise awareness than tolerate another day of institutionally sanctioned torture. One is a fanciful thought experiment. It’s fiction. For 400 people, the other is acutely real.
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Flogging in CT
Gregory Hladky of the Hartford Advocate writes one of the better pieces on In Defense of Flogging (not that I like to pick favorites, because like the children I don’t have, I love them all). But this one ismore interesting than many.
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“A bargain like that is a bargain for me!”
The good people at Basic Books have been kind (or clever) enough to put the first part of In Defense of Floggingup on the book’s website…
“Free,” you ask, “why would they do that?” Duh… So you love the start, get the cliffhanging end, and buy the book!
Download the pdf file. Link to it. Email it to friends. Seed illegal downloads with the file. Print out the pages and scatter them from planes on the 4th of July weekend. Staple the pages to trees. Paste them to lampposts. Go guerrilla and project the images onto large urban walls. The possibilities are endless.
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Today on CNN
Me. At 2:45pm Eastern Time. Stream Team with Fredricka Whitfield. A mega 5-minute segment.
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Really?
Generally I support the goals of prison reformers. Prisons are not supposed to be torture chambers that destroy the lives of all who enter. So I support efforts to make them better. But in my book I compare that to asking for comfier seats on the train to Auschwitz. It’s kind of missing the big picture.
But this guy seems truly delusional. From The Week:
Yes, we have a prison problem, but Moskos assumes that prisons are just violent holding cells, a theory that “has been thoroughly discredited.” Unlike the “judicial brutality” he proposes, correctional facilities “expend resources for 24/7 custody, care, rehabilitation and retraining” to help criminals come back to society.
What world is he living in?
Turns out he’s the policy and compliance director for the Minnesota Sex Offender Program.
According to the Star Tribune:
Minnesota has civilly committed 554 men and one woman to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP), designed to treat paroled sex offenders until they are no longer dangerous. … But the system’s spiraling cost and lack of measurable success are causing growing unease. Twenty four offenders have died, but no one has been permanently released.
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Retribution on Bernie Madoff
The New York Timeshas an article about the absurd sentence (150 years) Madoff received. Why is absurd? Not because he doesn’t deserve it. It’s absurd because Madoff was then 71 years old! Seems to me a good defense of flogging:
Judge Chin’s recollections resurrect all the anger, shock and confusion that surrounded Mr. Madoff’s crimes, and provide a rare peek at the excruciating pressure faced by a judge who had to balance the law, the public’s emotions and his own deeply held beliefs while meting out a sentence that was just and satisfied the court’s need to send a message.
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“I’m surprised Chin didn’t suggest stoning in the public square,” [Madoff said].
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Judge Chin noted in the interviews that 20 or 25 years would have effectively been a life sentence for Mr. Madoff, and any additional years would have been purely symbolic. Yet symbolism was important, he said, given the enormity of Mr. Madoff’s crimes.
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But he decided that a term of 150 years would send a loud and decisive message. He felt that Mr. Madoff’s “conduct was so egregious,” he said, “that I should do everything I possibly could to punish him.”
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By the time Judge Chin entered his chambers on the morning of Monday, June 29, he had decided what his draft was missing, he said. In explaining how the 150-year sentence was symbolically important, he had neglected to include a third, crucial reason: retribution.“A defendant should get his just deserts,” Judge Chin remembers thinking.
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Judge Chin read his passage on retribution, which, after the length of the sentence itself, appeared to have the greatest impact. In the headlines and news accounts that followed, the words “extraordinarily evil” seemed to be everywhere.No rehab. No bettering of the soul. Punishment.
In New York, a 150-year sentence would, should Madoff live to be 221-years old, cost me and other good citizens of the Empire State more than $7 million. There has got to be a better way.