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Defined Terms
Noble Ambitions for Desisting Corporal Punishment in South Australia
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SOUTH
AUSTRALIA
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A Memorandum by the South Australian Branch of the Howard League
for Penal
Reform
dated Oct 1961
sets out Noble Arguments for Desisting Corporal Punishment in South Australia.
14.
Modern Penal Methods.
Corporal punishment is quite out of
line with modern methods of protecting society from its criminals. It has
become increasingly recognised over the past two hundred years
that brutality of punishment alone, far from suppressing crime, increases
it. The pillory, stocks, whipping post, bridle, gag, chains,
shackles, together with mutilation, amputation and branding have
disappeared from civilized countries, although all of these horrors
were at one
time thought to inspire such fear that potential criminals
would be deterred by their threat.
Flogging falls into the same class.
The only fear which seems to be effective
is the fear of detection. Once the police have played their part by
detecting the crime and apprehending the criminal, it is the
experience of every country which has
adopted modern penal methods that subsequent brutality is useless
and harmful. The benefits of probation, of education, of humane
prison conditions, of dedicated social and
prison workers, go for nothing if
society in effect treats the prisoner no better, and often
much worse, than he treated his own victim. Revenge, not reform, is
the fruit of such a policy.
Alas, 60 years later
the Baker's Dozen Unsustainable Problems Within Australian Prison System
evidence that the dignified and righteous virtues of
the South Australian Branch of the Howard League
for Penal
Reform
"....
education, of humane
prison conditions, of dedicated social and
prison workers..." have not materialised, partially due to the subsequent
illicit drug scourge and overcrowding due to
Tough on Crime
proponents. | |
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