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

I first heard of using caning as a punishment for crimes in 1994. At that time an 18 year old by the name of Michael Peter Fay was all over the news on all the mainstream media. He was caught vandalizing and stealing from cars in Singapore. Unfortunately for him the punishment for such acts in that country is 6 cane strokes. [1] Half of America was outraged at the harsh punishment and people like me were glad that thief/vandal wasn't going to get off easy. Caning isn't a new thing it's been used for years and all over the world. When you're done reading this debate, you'll see why America should give it a try as well. INTRODUCTION This debate is heavily influenced by the excerpts from the book In Defense of Flogging, written by Baltimore cop Peter Moskos. The United States Prison system has huge problems. There are too many people locked up for too long and for stupid offenses. Moskos put's it well: "Even bad people have some attributes that help their family and community function. From behind bars a prisoner can"t be a father, hold a job, maintain a relationship, or take care of elderly grandparents. His girlfriend suffers, his baby"s mother suffers. Their children suffer. Because of this, in the long run, we all suffer."[2] COSTS OF INCARCERATION It cost just und $24,000 to incarcerate somebody for a year.[3] It's not cheap to lock somebody up, feed them clothes them and keep them under constant watch. I'm not exactly sure what the costs of beating somebody with a cane is, but I can assure you it costs nowhere near that much. If you count state and local jails, the prison population is somewhere around 2.4 million people (mostly nonviolent) in prison right now.[4] I mean 74 billion dollars is spent housing prisoners every year.[5] I offer a low cost solution to this problem. FELON UNIVERSITY A lot of critics of the current prison system in America argue that incarceration acts as a type of felon university. Petty criminals get locked up with hardcore criminals and learn the trade, so to speak. They go into prison some small time pot dealer and come out meaner, stronger and with more criminal intent. This applies half of all criminals. About 50% are locked up for non violent offenses. 20% are locked up for victimless drug offenses.[6] This is horrible. We're taking your run of the mill crack head or pot dealer and turning him into a criminal who will ultimately do greater harm to society. This part of my argument isn't even debatable. There is pretty much a scholarly consensus that prison does not reduce the recidivism rate of criminals.[7] Just about every new study on prison and recidivism rates that comes out continually affirms what the consensus already is. Putting people in prison doesn't help them or society. It's just screwing up a person's life as well as their friends, family and the community. I'm taking this a step further though. Not only does prison fail to reduce the recidivism rate, it actually increases it. A study from Rafael Di Tella and Ernesto Schargrodsky concludes that people who were on house arrest reoffended at a much lower rate than people who were sentenced to prison. In this study the recidivism rate for prisoners was 22% and for those on house arrest was a mere 13%. This study was conducted in Argentina to account for a bunch of influences that could bias the study. The judges in Argentina in charge of assigning a person to electronic monitoring (here after referred to as EM) typically does so without meeting the offender and has very little knowledge of him, and it's done almost immediately after arrest as opposed to after a lengthy trial. The offenders sentenced to EM in Argentina are just as likely to have serious offenses as those not. Another thing that makes Argentina a better place to conduct this study than America is that America uses EM as an extra punitive action instead of as a replacement for other punitive action.[8] Another study done by Donald Hutcherson asked the question "Are prisons really a finishing school for criminals?". The study have some surprising answers. It took a look at illegal income from people before or without prison sentences and compared that with the income after release from prison. It turns out that after people go to prison, they either build better networks to help them make money or learn the trade better. Maybe some combination of both. The illegal income sky rocketed after a prison sentence to an additional $11,000 dollars a year.[9] Why are we making criminals worse by sending them to prison? It's pointless, and ineffective. Let's give them the option of being caned so we can save tax payer's money and make society a safer place. SOCIAL CONSIDERATIONS About 3.6 million parents are under some form of correctional supervision.[10] Most of these children are under 10 years old and 8 is about the average.[11] 38% of families use partial or total deception of a child to justify a parents prison sentence. Sometimes referring to prison as a school or military camp.[12] This has some catastrophic effects on the mental health of a child. Children who are uninformed or misinformed of their parent's incarceration are reported to be more fearful and anxious.[13] There is a lot of suffering these children have to face, because our justice system likes to put people in cages when better alternatives are available. According to PEW ""After release, former male inmates work nine fewer weeks annually and take home 40 percent less in annual earnings, making $23,500 instead of $39,100. That amounts to an expected earnings loss of nearly $179,000 through age 48 for men who have been incarcerated." also ""Before being incarcerated, two-thirds of male inmates were employed and more than half were the primary source of financial support for their children"[14] Caning somebody, is a better alternative and has a lower recidivism rate than throwing them in a cage and throwing away the key. Sure, people do bad things and need to be punished but why should their entire family and the community at large be punished as well. I think that movie Hitchcock with Will Smith is a good example of the prison system today. In Hitchcock Will Smith gets thrown in prison for some stuff that can barely be considered wrong. After a while society discovers that throwing black people in prison for stuff that can barely be considered wrong is worse for society than just letting them go. In this story society learns it's lesson and frees Will Smith so he can save the day, but in real life we haven't got that happy ending yet. The rate of HIV jumps significantly when incarcerated to about 3 to 5 times that of the general population.[15] This is incredibly bad, because it creates a public health concern for the community at large. It's also not a mystery that a disproportionate amount of black people are affected by incarceration.[16] This has some extremely bad effects on the black community, which include significantly more teenage pregnancies (as a result of women significantly outnumbering men) and also STD transmission. [17] If the prison population was reduced it could have a significant effect on actually reducing the crime rate. [18] The current system is like a problem that keeps perpetuating it's self. It's like the person who over eats because they're depressed but is depressed because they're fat. CONCLUSION The current penal system is so heavily flawed, I can't see how my opponent could defend the status quo. I have BOP, but should my opponent advocate for significant prison reform, they'll then be forced to share BOP with me and show me how their solutions are better than mine. All the problems I mentioned have a simple solution. Implement caning as an option over incarceration for people who aren't an imminent threat to society and who are healthy enough to participate in such a punishment. Why not make this one change that can have such a significant impact on society at large? sources [1] http://www.corpun.com... [2] http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com... [3] http://www.justice.gov... [4] http://www.bjs.gov... [5] http://www.bjs.gov... [6] http://www.bjs.gov... [7] http://tpj.sagepub.com... [8] http://www.nber.org... [9] http://tpj.sagepub.com... [10] Mumola, 2000 [11] Ibid [12] Morriss, 1965 [13] Johnson, 1995 (note) source material for 10-13 http://aspe.hhs.gov... [14] http://www.pewtrusts.org... [15] http://www.bjs.gov... [16] http://www.naacp.org... [17] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... [18] http://www.nytimes.com...