Corporal Punishment for Adult Offenders   -  idebate

Corporal punishment is best defined as the use of physical pain, injury, discomfort or humiliation to penalise unruly or criminal behaviour. It has been widely applied in the context of criminal justice throughout human history. Where liberal democracies now overwhelmingly favour custodial sentences as a response to criminality, sentences incorporating flogging, whipping, beating and disfigurement were much more common before the nineteenth century.

Many non-western and non-liberal states retain corporal sentences. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Singapore are notable examples. Singapore uses caning to punish a wide range of criminal infractions, including motoring offences. Iranian and Saudi sentencing practices, drawing partly on conservative interpretations of Islam, include both flogging and permanent physical disfigurement – the later in response to violent or sex crimes.

Europe hastened to abandon corporal sentences during the eighteen hundreds. Changes in policy were motivated by a penal reform movement that condemned excessive and unregulated uses of physical punishment. The same group of reformers highlighted the potentially positive outcomes that could be achieved by encouraging criminals to address the causes of their criminality and to acquire skills that would allow them to reintegrate into society. Criminals were seen as individuals in need of “treatment” and “curing” rather than punishment.

Over the last forty years, since the beginning of the war on drugs and sudden jumps in crime rates in the United States during the 1980s, the rehabilitative mission of prisons in the US, the UK and many European states has largely been abandoned. The prison population in the US has spiralled to 2,300,000. The UK currently incarcerates 83,000 of its citizens. Lack of funds, increasing costs and restricted staffing levels mean that the intensive interaction with inmates rehabilitative schemes require can no longer be carried out. Prisons’ purpose has shifted back to the control and punishment of inmates. Prisons are widely described as a deterrent to criminality, despite the lack of any empirical link between the length of prison sentences and rates of offending.

Recently, radical criminologists such as Peter Moskos [i] have suggested using carefully applied, medically supervised corporal punishment as an alternative to prison. The debate around corporal punishment focuses on the efficacy of purely custodial sentences, and the nature of society’s need to punish harmful deviant behaviour. It also examines the growing popular support for reintroduction of corporal sentences in many liberal democracies. Inevitably, debates on corporal punishment must examine the moral arguments surrounding state sanctioned uses of physical harm.

Arguments in favour of Corporal Punishment

Arguments against Corporal Punishment

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