Just and Painful
JUST AND PAINFUL: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals
- by Graeme Newman
- Notice by C. Farrell
"JUST AND PAINFUL: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals" is an entire book on the Web, by an American academic, Graeme Newman. He is Professor of Criminal Justice at Albany University. The book argues the case for judicial corporal punishment (JCP). It was first published in 1985.
Briefly, he argues that JCP can be justified on the grounds that society requires offenders to be punished as well as reformed, and that prison does neither properly, as well as costing the taxpayer a fortune.
What I found most interesting was Chapter 13, in which he pulls to shreds the Cadogan Report - the 1938 British government study which has always since, even very recently, been trotted out as the justification for claiming that JCP does not work.
Cadogan's resilience over all that time, and not only in the UK, has been quite extraordinary. Nobody ever seems to have dared to question it publicly. I always thought some of its argumentation pretty shallow and arbitrary, so it's most welcome to find it subjected at last to critical examination by a real academic philosopher.
Unfortunately the kind of corporal punishment Newman has in mind is electric shocks - because, he says, they can be scientifically administered and accurately regulated. However, he does countenance the possibility of "whipping" (details not specified) for violent offenders.
You can download each chapter of the book separately from
- http://www.albany.edu/~grn92/jp00.html ( X Site down 08/20 R/ )
- https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2596&context=mlr ( X site active 08/20 R/ )
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