Wylted 100th Debate: The United States should implement caning as a punishment for criminals.

Thanks, Wylted.=Aff case=The Aff case only goes two possible ways, and either way you vote neg. Wylted has finally given a plan of action as to how we are going to implement caning in the United States. Up until this point, I had assumed there would be some kind of mandate forcing the justice system into giving all convicts a choice as implied in the first round, but wylted now chooses to argue that judges make the decision to allow caning or not while considering the "human element" and statistics. First, do not allow him to get away with this. In the first round, he heavily implied that other than a handful of extremely dangerous people all criminals would get the option of caning. His backtracking now completely shifts the impacts I argued in my case. Secondly, he just lost every single one of his impacts. There is absolutely no way that caning would become a popular element in the justice system as caning would be politically toxic. Not only would it appear barbaric and cruel to the average voter and racist to a huge subset of them, but judges would not give criminals a pass using caning for the same reasons that judges continue to hand down long prison sentences--to protect their political careers. Scott Alexander explains[1]: "...ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to implement."The only way to fix the prison system in the United States is to work within the system and do what we can under realistic constraints. The case could easily be made to voters that criminalizing drugs is, overall, a bad policy and leads to more violence in society--things are already moving in that direction. Convincing voters that we should go back to a penalty civilized countries have abolished for centuries and is soft on crime compared to a prison term will be incredibly difficult. He later argues against my point on the death penalty that juries should have the option to eliminate the caning option. First, he's being inconsistent. Who decides, the judge or the jury? You simply can't vote aff in the absence of any kind of coherent plan. Secondly, he just lost all of his impacts again because jury trials only constitute about 5% of criminal trials in the United States[2] so if it's up to juries, few cases will have the option on the table and even fewer will implement it.He's also *still* not said *how* we are going to determine who is a danger to society or not. It's not worth the risk of letting murderers off--if we're basing this off of statistics, murderers and rapists have extremely low 3 year recidivism rates of 1.2% and 2.5% respectively[3]. I contend that letting murderers off with a spanking is a moral abomination.The second way the Aff case goes is that you ignore any need for a plan and just take the impacts at face value. The *only* possible way for Wylted to still win the debate is to have impacts for caning so powerful that they override the need for a plan of action. The reason Wylted still loses here is because he never made any argument as to why caning would be better. Caning avoids the unique disadvantages of prison, sure, but he made no argument as to why it's good in it's own right. He should have given some kind of comparison between countries that use caning and those who don't but he didn't and, in his last round, he can't. You have no reason to think caning will be better so you vote Neg. With that said, I'll now do a line by line rebuttal of his case, but you shouldn't read it--you're already voting neg because Wylted has failed to do what he needed to win the debate. CostsThis is easily outweighed by the social costs of having a justice system that doesn't actually punish criminals. Moreover, since I immediately free about 20% of the prison population and gain around $47 billion in revenue annually, I account for about 85% of these costs. He talks about how there are lots of non violent criminals behind bars, except the single largest subset of non violent crime in state prisons is property crime[4], the same kinds of crimes that he himself offered as examples of crimes with high recidivism rates we wouldn't give the caning option to. Indeed, since there's no way juries/judge/some system he hasn't explained yet would give the caning option to violent criminals and he's ruled out giving it to property violators, the only two kinds of offenses he could possibly use caning for are drug offenses and public order offenses. I have already shown why I have a better plan regarding drugs, and public order offenses such as DUI rarely get lengthy prison terms so he isn't saving very much money anyway. It's not like Wylted can just abolish the entire prison system--I had assumed that *all* convicts with a few exceptions would get the caning option like the first round implies. Since they apparently don't, he's probably not going to be saving much money at all. The costs argument swings solidly in my favor as I without a doubt save and make the taxpayer a quantifiable amount of green.Felon universityFirst, a good deal of the reason these kinds of impacts happen is because the prison system mixes violent and dangerous criminals with those who've only made a mistake. Because I free up about 20% of prison space, we can afford now to do some serious reshuffling and keep violent prisoners away from non violent ones. Wylted then shoots himself in the foot. In his attempt to show how bad the prison system is, he mentions that there's significant evidence to suggest that keeping people under house arrest using electronic monitoring reduces recidivism. Let's do that instead of doing caning and hoping it works. Vote Con. Social considerations It is indeed unfortunate that some children have to suffer because of their parents actions, but this is no reason to let their parents off without punishment. Indeed, I could make the same arguments my opponent does to argue for abolishing punishment in general. Moreover since Wylted decided to backtrack and argue that it's actually the judge/juries choice and not the criminals choice and I've shown why judges and juries will never choose to cane, he loses all of his impacts here. Ending the drug war would do a lot more to help society both in America and abroad by ending the governments war on the black community and ending the conflicts that have killed tens of thousands of innocents as the cartels and governments grapple for power over territory. =My case=I. Morality of punishmentWylted shows a video of a person being caned and says it's really painful. First of all, there's no way that caning petty criminals in such a way that all of the skin on their buttocks is removed would be allowed under the 8th amendment--SCOTUS doesn't even let us painlessly execute a vicious and cruel child rapist[5]. Any caning used in America would be far more mild. Secondly, even if you take this at face value if I had a choice between that punishment of life imprisonment I would choose to be caned in a fraction of a second and I'm not nearly as tough as most criminals. There is simply no way around it, allowing murderers and rapists to get off with a mere caning is a moral abomination the likes of which should be enough to fill anyone who has a sense of justice with righteous indignation.II. The death penalty The substance of this contention is largely gone once Wylted decided to change his position--and I still contend that the debate ought to be judged under the assumption that every criminal who isn't an immediate threat to society--which includes most murderers-- is given the caning option, but Wylted makes some really turnable responses. For one, he suggests with eagerness that since we now have caning as a punishment juries would be okay with discarding the ancient, sacred, and immutable legal principle that the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in order for juries to convict. I don't even know where to begin with how problematic this is--he argues that it would be preferable to have "some" justice in these "fuzzy" cases. The very reason these cases are "fuzzy" is because the prosecution failed to prove its case! Pro is seriously advocating that we should subject people to a painful punishment and give them a felony on their record when they were not proven guilty just to be safe. Vote Con.III. My counterplansPro concedes we should legalize drugs. Vote Con. He concedes to the unique impacts in my case that outweigh everything he has by several orders of magnitude. Pro also says that forcing criminals to work is slavery and we live in a "free" society. We actually live in a society where penal slavery is protected under the 13th amendment[6]. He argues that criminals don't make much, but the idea is there would be no min or max wage but rather they would be paid the market value of their work. Besides, even with low wages forcing them to pay back their victims is preferable to the status quo. Prisoners should be forced to take responsibility by repaying their victims.Wylted misunderstands the point of the Norway example--we should not follow their lead in aesthetics, but rather in the philosophy of punishment where rehabilitation is valued and prisoners are treated as persons. This is the true cause of their low recidivism rate. Sources:1. http://tinyurl.com...2. http://tinyurl.com...3. http://tinyurl.com...4. http://tinyurl.com...5. http://tinyurl.com...6. http://tinyurl.com...