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Memories of the 28th Century

Effective punishment

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2 Comments
by
PeterL
, 09-10-2016 at 10:37 AM (1563 Views)
The purpose of jail is twofold: to try to convince people to not commit crime again and to keep the guilty away from society for a time. Jail certainly does sequester people, but for jail to be an effective training device, the recipient of the training has to understand and remember it afterward, and for some of the people jail is not training in the sense that I mean; although inmates may learn more criminal techniques, and they barely remember it afterwards. Jail time should be effective aversive training, and it would be for some people, but some people who are so lacking in intelligence that they don't really connect jail time with reason to avoid crime. To them it’s some time with friends when they get “three hots and a cot” (three hot meals a day and a cot to sleep on), and that’s better than they usually have.

I originally was going to write in favor of reinstituting corporal punishment, but the idea of carefully developed aversive conditioning might be more effective and less painful. An online search showed that aversive conditioning has been tried on pederasts with limited success, but it hasn't been used with the general prison population. How someone might apply aversive conditioning to criminals would have to be related to the particular individuals, and the treatment that Alec in A Clockwork Orange received would not work, or I don’t think it would. One problem with many criminals is that they seem to have imbalances in brain chemicals that are often self-medicated with illegal drugs, and they often are of low intellect, which implies that they cannot readily learn, and the results of aversive conditioning are a form of learning. While I am telling myself that the results might not be significant, I think that it might be worth the trouble of trying aversive conditioning.

The question of whether corporal punishment might be more effective than jail is still open, and corporal punishment might be used as a tool for conditioning. We might also want to use some other sort of conditioning. I was thinking that flogging probably was used for millennia because it appeared to work, and it was easy to apply. Even a very stupid person can connect the pain of the whip to inappropriate behavior, and the flogging might leave welts that would scar and remind the offender in the future.

I believe that the results would be variable, and they probably would come through a rather complicated and subjective analysis of the situation. The analysis would involve the odds of getting caught again, the benefit of the illegal activity, the severity of the pain, and personal triumph of winning, if the criminal was not caught again. The calculation is similar to any value related decision; does the gain outweigh the cost? And pain would be one of the costs. Sensitivity to pain is a personal variable that no one except that individual could ever determine.

This has me wondering if the stocks and pillory were effective. They certainly were hated and avoided, but they rely on community shame and standards. I think that the effectiveness of any punishment (other than death) would partly depend on who imposed it and the relation between punisher and punishee. Psychopaths probably are effected by punishment, while people in a personal relationship with the punisher would find the psychological component of the punishment more sever than the physical. That last probably is why my siblings and I were more moved by "just wait until your father gets home" than we were by the stick that my mother used. I think I just convinced myself that judicial corporal punishment wouldn't work, unless the punishee felt connected to the court or legal system, and the lack of connection with legal system might be one of the reasons for high rates of recidivism.

I'm still wondering whether corporal punishment would work as a deterrent to recidivism, and the information available online is too variable to use to make a decision, and, as I mentioned, my personal experience is that it would work sometimes and not work other times, and only the convict being punished could know with any confidence in advance.

What think you? And why was corporal punishment used for so long unless it seemed to be effective?






http://debatewise.org/debates/2591-c...nt-for-adults/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporal_punishment

Meta-study on Effects of Corporal Punishment
https://www.researchgate.net/profile...f33b764e08.pdf
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Comments

  1. desiresjab's Avatar
    Very interseting, Peter. I cannot say too much because I have a short story brewing on the topic. Nothing ever stopped crime, that I know of, even the possibility of the death sentence. In the old west, if someone rustled cattle or horses, there was almost a certainty they would die, if caught, yet such crimes occurred. In times much harsher than our own, people continued to commit crimes that would earn them death. Criminal activity did not cease because a few were executed or given long prison terms.

    Prison is a differnent experience for everyone. Some are frightened to death every second, others only more angered by their confinement. For the latter it is much less of a punishment. At least they have the former to take their hatred out on. Prison sentencing, period, is an out of whack notion. Sentencing, however, is not.
  2. PeterL's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by desiresjab
    Very interseting, Peter. I cannot say too much because I have a short story brewing on the topic. Nothing ever stopped crime, that I know of, even the possibility of the death sentence. In the old west, if someone rustled cattle or horses, there was almost a certainty they would die, if caught, yet such crimes occurred. In times much harsher than our own, people continued to commit crimes that would earn them death. Criminal activity did not cease because a few were executed or given long prison terms.
    A cost/bebefit analysis goes on before a rational criminal commits a crime, and the result often is that the chance of being caught is smaller than the potential benefit if not caught. They usually are right in the analysis, as long as we aren't talking about "crimes of passion". Burglars is seldom caught, and the punishment is usually small when they are caught.

    Prison is a differnent experience for everyone. Some are frightened to death every second, others only more angered by their confinement. For the latter it is much less of a punishment. At least they have the former to take their hatred out on. Prison sentencing, period, is an out of whack notion. Sentencing, however, is not.
    I agree. There are people in prison who should not be, and there are people on the street on probation who should be locked away. It's largely a matter of what gets the attention of legislators.