When jails are over crowded and people are getting off virtually scott free or at worst, with a slap on the wrist for lesser crimes, but crimes which none the less have had serious implications for the victims involved, why is there so much opposition to bringing back some form of corporal punishment?
Corporal punishment would free up jail space for more serious offenses as well as create a disincentive to the continuation of socially unacceptable behaviors.
I'm not talking here of the hideously barbaric rotan such as is used mercilessly in parts of Asia, but perhaps a broad strap designed to cause pain without harmful and lasting effects.
I'll put my hand up. I'm all for it. Is there anyone else who would agree with me. Perhaps there are some amongst you who can provide a logical explanation which will change my view without all the unnecessary emotional rubbish we usually witness in such debates.

Aime, one concern I would have is that once you go down that track it is but a very short step to the use of torture. It's probably not a big step to a whole lot of places as a society many don't want to be.

I suspect that for many people facing legal sanction a flogging may be a better outcome than a stay in prison (with it's dangers, impact on families etc) but I worry about the impact on society itself if we went down that track. How long before we would have a reality TV show featuring the flogging of the week? That would be good for ratings in some circles.

Whilst it might solve some problems my gut feel is that it would create a whole lot more.

R0bert

I'm all for the stocks to be reintroduced in Martin Place for elected public officials caught lying. And a plentiful supply of over-ripe tomatoes. This or transportation out of Australia.

Well RObert, I would hope corporal punishment would be carried out only under very strict conditions including a private area (although I feel some deserve a public flogging) and not until a mental health assessment was first done.
It a bit like euthanasia. People are concerned that it will lead to others being "put down" such as the profoundly mentally ill, those with ABI etc, but surely strict legislation would prevent that.
I used to hate getting the strap at school. The old nun's were pretty good in the wrist and I hated them for it, but these days, I look back and think what a great deterrent it was, even though I remember being in the firing line when innocent on a couple of occasions. Perhaps if corporal was re-introduced to schools under certain conditions, it might put an end to a lot of the bullying we seem to hear so much about today.

Aime, "Perhaps if corporal was re-introduced to schools under certain conditions, it might put an end to a lot of the bullying we seem to hear so much about today."

I copped the cane myself a couple of times supposedly for bullying and each time it was case of a teacher arriving while I was defending myself against a bully. The fact that I was tall for my age and fairly gentle of nature marked me as a target for short bully's who seemed to gain some cred from hitting the big guy and by teachers who assumed that any big kid fighting a smaller one must be a bully.

I'd agree that there are times where the deterant value would be good, I'm also of the view that schools seemed to have had a lot of trouble administering corporal punishment fairly when it was available. From what I've seen and heard it often became an outlet for adults who were bullies themselves, who got off on hitting kids.

Bullying at school is a serious problem but from my perspective it gets much worse when the bully is an adult. I don't see in practical terms how you keep that out of the equation.

Then again the idea of stocks and rotton tomatoes for pollies who tell lies has a certain appeal.

R0bert

I have always endorsed corporal punishment. I suffered it at school when most boys were beaten for some infraction or other. It was strictly controlled but dispensed regularly. I know of no one who ever suffered long term, but it sure kept us in line and taught us a great many things such as personal responsibility, reliability, ethics, honesty and all those other things that hopefully make us good citizens I think it should be brought back for certain social crimes as it would be cheap and a great deterrent. I do not believe the sociologists that say it is barbaric and promotes similar developments in the people so punished.

RObert, I am genuinely sorry that you were treated that way and concede that proof of guilt or innocence is very difficult to establish and yet society as a whole has become too soft on socially unacceptable behaviors. I firmly believe that behavior, both good and bad, stems from learned behavior firstly in the home environment and later, in the class room. I've heard of teachers leaving the profession because they cannot form a respectful relationship between themselves and their students and while many might say "that's their problem, or they must be bad teachers" I don't think it's all the teachers fault. There are now no discipline factors in force strong enough to deter unruly class-room behaviors.
I don't pretend to have all the answers. Maybe it's a matter of private schools doing better at attracting a more studious class of children. Perhaps more money should be given to elevate the standards of public schools, but in the real World, we need positive disincentives to curb elevating anti-social behavior.

Aime, in the school situations more money for resourcing behavioural facilities can make a major difference.

Currently in Qld state schools the resources to run a bahaviour room (Responsible Thinking Classroom, Behaviour Adjustment Room etc) come out of the general pool so teachers who support having one are faced with larger class sizes as a consequence.

Many kids have not been taught the skills and strategies needed to manage their behaviours, the teachers who run behaviour rooms work with them to give them strategies to do things differently.

R0bert

RObert,
I agree with you and to elaborate a little on the subject of scholistic corporal punishment, statistics show that between 1965 and 1978 during the days when the cane or a home made bat ruled the classroom, most students left school after their 2nd year of high school, this was also the time when teachers were known to be picking on the smaller and weakest in the class, they would be caned for the slightest wrong doing and got to the point where the class actually looked forward to that particular lesson to see who would be wacked next. Glad those days are over for some of us!
Spanky

It seems to me that many expect the schools to do what many parents refuse to do (discipline their own children). It is easy to pick kids who receive corporal punishment (not abuse). Generally they are a lot more respectful, happier and secure than those who have been brought up without any useful punishment. I think it is the spoilt parents that really need the strap for deliberately ignoring commonsense and bowing to the hopelessly flawed social engineers who try and blurr proper disciple with abuse.

runner, you speak of the strap? Where I come from,bats and canes and rubber hoses were the in thing in my "normal" school, corporal punishment back in the 70's was indeed bordering on abuse and in some cicumstances lead to child abuse by the teachers, I'm talking about taking the child outside behind the sports toilets and beating the living daylights out of him (and sometimes, her!) Corporal punishment in the instance of adults who commit petty crimes is in itself a waste but the ones who commit haenous crimes, they are the ones who deserve to be hung drawn and quartered, like child abusers, rapists and murderers, murderers who commit the deed out of spite or negligence. Where does one actually draw the line? Most people commit bad crimes due to their upbringing, so it's not entirely their fault.
Spanky

Corporal punishment is barbaric and degrading and causes alienation and resentment, and strangely enough harsher penalties do not deter crime.
NSW has a harsher penalty regime than Victoria and the largest per capita prison population in Australia.
USA also has probably the most punitive system in Western world and much harsher than most of the rest world, yet they one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world.
I recently spent a whole day in court (waiting for a traffic matter to be heard)and my observation was, a lot of these people didn't deserve to go to goal, and they didn't, they had mental problems, low self esteem, low education, they had made questionable lifestyle choices, drug and alcahol problems, some might call them the dregs of society, I thought they had fallen through the cracks and there was no one there to point them in the right direction, it was a pitful sight and one that no one could be proud of, they had failed society and society has failed them.
I don't think well meaning or career minded university educated middle class counsellors are the answer, perhaps a mentor program using reformed acholics, drug users and crimanals, some one they can relate to, in conjunction with counsellors.
I don't know if it would work, but I have seen some amazing turnarounds on a couple of ABC TV programs dealing with the worst murders thieves and rapists in South Africa, these were serious habitual career criminals, beyond the pale and they rehabilitated them , if you watched The Choir Of Hard Knocks you can see what you can achieve if you push the right buttons.
And by the way I have been a victim of crime (I had my tools of trade stolen $10,000 worth and no insurance) and I know how it feels, you have fantasies about what you would do if you caught them, knowing all the while that you wouldn't really do anything, it just makes you really angry.

My daughter is a school teacher and she has no discipline problems, she doesn't yell, abuse or hit kids and has nothing but scorn for teachers who do, she works on a system of mutual respect and uses phycology to sort out problem kids and has amazing results, she cured one kid (who had nearly driven his prevous teachers mental) in 2 weeks by simply ignoring his behaviour until he stopped, it worked.
Her kids all love her and she loves them, they will do anything she asks and love going to school.
Maybe love is the answer.
Although you won't get much of that in OLO, I have never met such a bunch of mean spirited, miserable, nasty, hate filled b@stards in my life.

What amazes me alanpoi, is that your daughter was able to use algae to solve disciplinary problems in schoolchildren! This is truly a brave new world. I heard they will be making fuel and food out of the stuff soon too.

I hear bugs live in it and eat it.

Thanks for pointing that out it will be handy for scrabble.
Isn't English a teratoidal language.

When practised by the maladroit it certainly is.

But this is neither corporal nor punishment, so I guess I must add an obligatory sentiment:

Flogging's too good for them, put them in the Big Brother house instead and we can all have a good laugh.

I think that criminals that are not dangerous to the public should be given the OPTION of trading jail for corporal punishment.

Ok, so now we are stuck with algae eating, rotten food to make fuel out of and then we sell it to those who make cultures with to make yoghurt, which brings us back to food...huh?
Spanky

alanpoi, you cannot be as close to the truth than with your comment on South African crime and the so-called corporal punishment they recieve. My wife was attacked two weeks before leaving South Africa last year in broad daylight, the criminals over there have got it in their tiny minds that crime does indeed pay, as if and when they are caught, they get a cell with tv, comfortable bed and a chair, this along with three meals a day. The lifers get it even better! It will take about 200 years for S.A.to come right, as it did in the USA.
Spanky

Thank you all for your comments. I received a small snapshot of how people feel in relation to this subject.
Alanpoi, sorry you were having a bad day yesterday. Shame on you Bugsy. Your stirring didn't exactly help (tongue in cheek.)
Spanky, I fully agree that back in the "bad ol' days" some teachers, yes even "good Christian" brothers and sisters were insane child abusers. I too witnessed what amounted to floggings of defenseless children in the class room and continued to be appalled to this very day by what I saw, but I rather feel that the pendulum has swung too far the other way in the last couple of decades when it comes to petty criminals walking out of court with no disincentive at all to curb their behaviors. Even though my topic drifted into the class room, it was originally aimed at the petty crim.
Alanpoi, I hear you concerning those who fall through the cracks, but I believe I covered that aspect by suggesting in one of my posts about having in place safeguards such as a mental health assessment prior to punishment. I full well realise that a huge percentage of people incarcerated in the United States are those suffering mental illness and the same is beginning to happen right here in Australia.
There's no simple answer to crime, but I tend to think that the big players in the criminal world are either born into it (criminal relatives) or have graduated from minor criminal activity. It's in the latter that I believe crime statistics can be minimised by corporal punishment.

I don't like this idea at all.

While I don't agree with the smacking bad, I think the idea of having corporal punishment as part of the justice system would be all kinds of foolish.

For starters, it sends the message that violence is okay (just as long as its the establishment doing it).
I don't like that at all - it makes it harder to send the 'violence is unacceptable' message.

Secondly, it'd be a woeful deterrent. Unless you're going to do such physical damage to the person that it will cause a long-term disability, it's the kind of thing you'd get over pretty quick as oppsoed to incarceration. You could just grit your teeth and it would all be over.

Whilst I appreciate your contribution TLTR, I'm afraid the approach of trying to send a message that "violence isn't acceptable" simply isn't working. And I don't know about gritting your teeth until it's over. Love it or hate it, physical pain is proven to be an unfortunate way of getting what those in charge want.
I'm fairly certain that those who had a taste of, for example, the strap across their backs, quite apart from the humiliation would never wish to endure the same again. Being forewarned of double the dose for the next offense would certainly put me off.

TurnRightThenLeft,

Isn't incarceration also a form of violence?

To be an effective deterrent, the punishment obviously has to be commensurate with the crime: if that means long-term disability, then the criminal is probably dangerous to the public and must remain in jail anyway. Also, isn't being imprisoned for a long term a form of a long-term disability anyway? it only costs the public much more than an invalid-pension.

Spanky I don't know what you are on about I said or know nothing about corporal punishment in SA. I only mentioned a couple of experiments with hardened criminals that had nothing to do with corporal punishment.
Don't worry about the stirring Aime I am used to right ring ratbag ridicule. They learn from their fathers its called the 4arse.

The Isle of Mann was the last place in Britain to have corporal punishment. It used to be done in the privacy of the jail yard with a doctor in attendance.
Someone who got a dose of it complained to the European Court that it was a 'cruel and unusual' punishment.
It was stopped and the crime rate went up.

There is something very strange in the minds of those who administer corporal punishment. I worry about having those sorts of people in our midst at all, let alone giving them the 'authority' to dispense 'justice' of this sort. Never mind the 'baddies'! What sort of 'goodies' will we have?

Not meaning to sound facetious Waterboy, but I wasn't aware there were in fact any exponents of corporal punishment "in our midst."

Now, suppose you're walking down the street and see a person run up behind an old woman, grab her shoulder bag, knocking her down in the process and breaking her hip. The police catch him quite quickly (despite bad press, the police are actually very good at what they do), but the courts let him off with a community order. The woman involved is not only traumatised and will forever be too scared to step outside her door alone, but will also spend many weeks in hospital, much of it spent in pain. My question to you Waterboy is this (and with the greatest respect).......

What do you propose would be a better deterrent for such behavior? How would you treat the perp? Oh, I forgot to mention, this was his seventh offense for similar anti-social behavior.

I very much doubt that a 7th offence wouldn't draw a goal term.

However bad it is, pain fades, unless you're inflicting permanent damage.

Yes people could grit their teeth and get through it, especially hardened criminals. I'd never consider anything like robbing a store, but I know if I did, corporal punishment wouldn't be nearly as much of a deterrent as jail time. It would be too easy to say, "even if I'm caught it'll all be over in a day" and go ahead with the crime.

And as bad as the pain may be, memory fades when temptation arises.

Besides, when you legalise this kind of cruelty you are going down a path I don't want to see us tread.
Sooner or later you have to redefine your limits of what is acceptable punishment. You drop your standards a little, what's to stop you dropping them some more?

We could legalise stoning... that'd make for a public spectacle as well. After all, how different is a few lashes of the whip to a few well placed stones?
Heck, why not just take a thief's hand like they do in some of the more repressive regimes. That'll certainly dissuade him from doing it again...

TRTL,
The removal of the left hand as they do in some arabic country's could go down very well all over the world, as barbaric as this may sound, except we all know the reason for it being the left hand only. It will indeed make the would-be perpetrators think before doing and I can think of a few places that could do with such drastic measures.
Spanky

TRTL, I'm wasn't saying that we should use corporal punishment as a deterrent to serious crime. If you get caught robbing a store, you should perhaps expect a jail term.
As for cutting off a hand for theft, I think I've got a better idea and one that is not so detrimental to the future earning ability of the thief. Let's start with the little finger of the non dominant hand, then, should that person commit another crime, the next finger could be removed, then the next and the next until the unrepentant thief find the courts are beginning on the dominant hand, but I seriously doubt it would get that far. I'm sure after the second or maybe the third digit was missing, the thief would realise that crime REALLY doesn't pay!

Very droll, Aime. Er... that *was* supposed to be a joke wasn't it?

One of the problems that we face with an increasing prison population is that relatively petty criminals that are jailed for say a second or third offence, go into jail with hardened crims. What other tricks of the trade can they learn whilst inside to help boost their income (and reduce the chances of being caught) once they get out.

That said I've worked with people that have been in jail for armed robbery (so fairly hardcore stuff), and they have managed to become pretty good, contributing citizens (although you could always pick that there was something different about them). I certainly didnt have any problems working with them.

If corporal punishment was to be reintroduced in say schools, there would need to be strict rules around what is acceptable, and good monitoring of what went on. Eg you couldnt give the cane to anyone in your own class, they would have to be sent to a particular teacher. Both teachers would then be required to fill out paperwork (which in itself is a reasonable deterrent to any sadistic teacher), which would have to be lodged with the Dept of Education or something like that. That way activity and the reasons for it could be monitored. You could also rotate the "punishing" teacher to reduce the risk of teachers forming an agreeance not to report. Or require punishments to be reported in the school newsletter so that kids had a chance to say bullsh!t that's not right, and parents had some idea about what punishments were dished out and why. It could be done in a way to reduce the chances of abuse to almost nil.

Good ideas Country Gal. I'm sure there are safeguards that can be put in place such as the ones you suggest. The idea of corporal punishment should never be about anybody getting "even." It's meant to be a deterrent and if done correctly, could be a very effective tool to curbing anti-social behaviors.

WHAT A SMALL MINDED BUNCH OF BAST@RDS/B!TCHES

Spanky... Aime... cutting off fingers and hands?

I hope you're joking.

If not, then I sincerely hope neither of you are let anywhere near a position where you could make those kinds of decisions.

Alanpoi wrote....."WHAT A SMALL MINDED BUNCH OF BAST@RDS/B!TCHES."

Alan, all I can say in response to that is.... "thank you, thank you!" as Aime bows from her soap box to the thunderous applause of the more sane amongst the posters.

Ok CJ Morgan and TRTL, I can now longer keep the whimsical smile on my face from exploding into raucous laughter. Gee! Lighten up guys :-)
If you knew me better, you'd learn to appreciate the fact that I am blessed, or cursed, which ever way you look at it, with a dry sense of humor. Of course I was joking about the fingers. Removing postage stamp sized pieces of skin from areas of the back and applying salt to the wounds can be just as effective as long as it's done correctly and the bonus is that the anti-social 'so and so' is not only branded as such for life, but still has his fingers to write out job application forms (or Centrelink forms) and provided he/she wears a shirt, nobody should ever find out.

I should hasten to add that perhaps this post has indeed, run it's course. Thank you for all who added balanced debate no matter what your views. My purpose for the post was simply to gain an idea of what people thought about corporal punishment. I guess the "nos" have it!

Aime,

Would have you given the Paris Hilton the cane/strap? What about John Howard for not wearing his seat belt a few years back? Bronwyn Bishop for refusing to turn-off her mobile phone on an aeroplane, dangerous and obstinate! Mark Latham for a zillion reasons.