"In Defense of Flogging"

This is an interesting and provocative piece by a professor at the John Jay College of Law and a former police officer.  Whether the author is truly serious about flogging is less clear than the larger point that he is making -- that the rehabilitative model of punishment was itself a cause (not the cause, but a cause) of the proliferation of penitentiaries (where one ought to be, of course, penitent) and later (round about the 1950s) "correctional institutions."  I suppose the argument fits neatly with the claim that we entertain politely, comfortably, liberal ideas that by incarcerating the offender we are improving him, we are communicating to him his moral wrongdoing with the hope that he internalize the message, we are righting some sort of mystical imbalance in the universe which he created.  But really what we are doing is using the force of law (it is always the force of law which in the end matters) to remove him from our midst and congratulating ourselves that we are treating him with the "respect" that the liberal state purports to owe its villainous subjects. 

Corporal punishment, says the author, would return the punished to the public eye -- it would make the rest of us, for whom the world of crime is a shadowy specter that we hide from compulsively, that we tremble to see, confront it after a fashion.  I once heard Judge Alex Kozinski say that if we are to retain capital punishment, executions ought to be publicly broadcast, so that we can see and sense and feel what we are doing.  Here's James Fitzjames Stephen on the subject (from the piece, Pain, in his collection, Essays by Barrister):

It should not be wished that whatever is wrong and bad should be penned off from the rest of the community in a moral cesspool . . . . A somewhat more precise acquaintance than is commonly possessed with some of the secrets of prisons and hospitals would make many of us sadder, and most of us wiser.