Jane Galt is Right

I may disagree with Jane Galt about controversial topics like taxes and income distribution, but when it comes to basic issues like public whipping, we’re in full agreement:

…deterrence and retribution are legitimate questions of justice--but I also think that jail is lousy, immoral, and highly inefficient way to achieve them.

Lousy because jail makes the criminals cost us money. Yes, courts cost money . . . but what costs money is the troublesome process of sorting the innocent from the guilty. We're spending money on the blameless, not the perpetrators. Once they're convicted, we know (as well as frail humans can) that they're guilty. Why should we spend money to punish them, when they could be making money, or hey, just entertainment, for the society they've wronged? Fastow's skills may not be much, but stick an ankle bracelet on him and set him to painting overpasses or something.

Inefficient because criminals are very bad discounters of time, or they wouldn't be criminals. Expensive, long prison terms aren't very effective deterrants. Optimal punishments are short, extremely harsh, and immediate.

Immoral because the great tragedy of human life is the finiteness of time; I'm not sure we ever have a right to take away someone else's pitifully few moments simply to punish them. Locking people up because they are a danger to others is a necessary evil; locking them up because we can't think of anything else to do to them is not. Morally, I should think a public whipping post vastly preferable--and more effective--than a one-year jail term.

My readers, particularly my more sensitive liberal ones, are even now recoiling in horror at my barbaric suggestion. But we all know that in fact the real punishment offered by prison is that meted out by other prisoners--that for many or most people, a prison sentence is a long and barbaric series of beatings and rapes. We know that this is true; we do almost nothing to prevent it; and we send people there anyway. Indeed, this is the aspect of prison--not the incarceration away from families, friends, and good takeout--with which cops threaten suspects. I should think a clean, quick beating from a government official would be more to anyone's taste--except the of course the animals who rule the prison dominance hierarchy.

Tucking criminals off in prison simply allows us to pretend to ourselves that we are doing something not-so-bad, when what we really intend is full-blown evil. If jail really were merely a dull spell of menial service jobs and mediocre food, I suspect many Americans would think it wholly inadequate to the demands of justice.

Yes. I made the same suggestion about 20 years ago, for essentially the same reasons. Suffice it to say, the suggestion was not well received by my lunchmates. (“Wouldn’t the state be liable for welts?”)

But think about it. Our current system essentially outsources punishment the same way the CIA outsources torture. (“We’re not being inhumane. The inmates promised not to rape anybody.”) And the worst criminals end up getting the least punishment, because the worst criminals are exactly the ones to whom the punishment function is outsourced.

If I have come to have reservations about public whipping, it is only because I have become more of a fascist over the past 20 years. As a utilitarian, I tend not to buy into the whole concept of “justice.” The purpose of prisons, as I see it, is to prevent crime. The best way to prevent crime (so the empirical evidence indicates) is to put people in jail before they commit crimes. Unfortunately, the justice advocates generally object, because they say it’s unjust to punish people who haven’t yet committed crimes, and of course there is also the practical problem that we can’t predict with much accuracy who is going to commit a crime. But when someone does commit a crime, it provides both (1) a fairly good predictor of future criminality, and (2) a good excuse to get around these silly “justice” concerns. So there is a good case, it seems to me, for putting criminals in jail.

Nonetheless, whipping would be cheaper, and it might provide good entertainment for some people. We’d have to weigh the costs and benefits. And for white-collar criminals, who are unlikely to have criminal opportunities in the future, the case for whipping over prison time is pretty much a slam dunk. OK, Mr. Fastow!


UPDATE: Chris Dillow made the same suggestion in June (as he notes in the comments here). Interestingly, he doesn’t make the argument (our trump card, as I see it) that prison life is already at least as brutal as state-inflicted corporal punishment. Perhaps that’s not so true in the UK. If we have 3 bloggers on board already, perhaps we should start a club, analogous to Greg Mankiw’s “Pigou Club”. Call it “the Corporal Punishment Club”? But that sounds slightly perverted. How about “the Effective Deterrence Club”?