Jon Sanders has made the case for criminal justice reform that relies less on prison, but I’ve yet to hear his take on Peter Moskos’ unusual reform proposals.
Moskos is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The Atlantic highlights his ideas in its latest issue:
In your book In Defense of Flogging, you argue that the U.S. should restore corporal punishment—you say it’s more humane than the prison system, and much cheaper.
Other than fining people—if they have money—I can’t think of a better way to punish than physical pain. I teach criminal justice, and in that field, you’re not going to find many supporters of prison. Those in the political world justify it, but it’s sickening to me that we have 2.3 million prisoners. If prisons deterred crime, we wouldn’t have so many damn prisoners. What I’m proposing is offering people a choice between prison and flogging. When I ask people what they’d choose, the vast majority would choose to get flogged—but many aren’t willing to offer that choice to somebody else. They say no, flogging is wrong. I get that, because flogging is ugly. But we don’t see what goes on in prison, and that’s dangerous. We have more prisoners than Stalin had.
