The case for corporal punishment

post by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2025-02-23T15:05:28.149Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

  Objections
    But torture is barbaric!
    But the constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment!
    But torture causes long term physical and psychological damage!
None
1 comment

Preceded By: The case for the death penalty [? · GW]

Scott's essay https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you is going to be my main source for most of my claims here, I recommend reading it either before or after.

Prison is very expensive, on the order of $100,000 per person per year. So what are we getting for our money?

I know of 4 main purposes of prison^[1].

1. Deterrence: The threat of prison may discourage criminals from committing crimes.
2. Incapacitation: Whilst a criminal is in prison they cannot commit (most) crimes.
3. Aftereffects: Prison may reform criminals into the sort of person who doesn't commit crimes.
4. Policing: Knowing the criminals they catch get put in prison encourages police to do their jobs. Police presence is actually one of the most effective ways of preventing crime, but there's got to be something backing them up.

Unfortunately it's not really cost effective for any of them.

1. The deterrence effect of prison sentences appears to be weak.
2. Prison very effectively incapacitates criminals but the cost is linear in the amount of time you incapacitate them. Further, the chance a criminal commits a crime once they leave prison does not drop the longer they're in prison, so if incapacitation is worth the costs, then it's worth it for life^[2]. There's no reason (from an incapacitation perspective) to let someone go after 5 years. Putting someone in prison for life costs millions of dollars.
3. If anything, prison increases the chance criminals commit further crimes. This is likely because they've lost their jobs, homes and families, but gained lots of criminal friends.
4. Since prisons are expensive and overflowing, most petty criminals are let off with a slap on the wrist. Whilst doing so is cost effective deterrence, this discourages police, giving them the impression that petty crimes are not worth following up on.

In those situations where it's worth paying extremely high costs to prevent someone even being able to commit a crime, my preferred solution is to execute them [LW · GW].

But how do we cheaply and effectively deter thieves, in a way that shows police their work is effective, and doesn't throw a wrench in criminal's lives that might force them down the wrong path?

The answer is obvious. Instead of locking a criminal up, thereby causing them a small rate of pain/unpleasantness over a long period of time, find something that causes a similar total amount of pain and unpleasantness but compressed into a much smaller length of time.

The biblically mandated solution is 40 lashes, and I think that's definitely in the right direction. Unfortunately severe beatings can cause permanent injury and high medical costs. However the intelligence services of the world have invested lots of effort into researching useful questions like how do you cause the maximum psychological terror to someone whilst minimising physical harm. They may be able to provide some useful advice.

For any length of prison there is a level of torture where someone would be indifferent between the two options. Switching a prison sentence to an equivalent level of torture would be no crueller to the convict, would be far cheaper to the state, scales far better than prison, would presumably have only limited difference in deterrence, and would allow the convict to carry on with their life as normal afterwards.

Plus it would show police that petty crime is taken seriously, and catching criminals isn't pointless.

Objections

But torture is barbaric!

Of course it is! And so is prison! The difference is that people in prison are locked behind iron walls where you don't need to think about them, and that prison is a minor barbarism played out over a long time, instead of a major barbarism played out over a short time, thus far easier to ignore. It doesn't make much difference to the convict either way.

But the constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment!

Indeed it does! And when it was written corporal punishment was the standard, and imprisonment was unusual. It is far more likely that the authors of the 8th amendment would have considered imprisonment cruel and unusual than a beating.

But torture causes long term physical and psychological damage!

Indeed it can! And so does prison! But whereas changing the prison system to remove negative aftereffects is difficult and expensive, with slow feedback loops, adjusting torture to minimise aftereffects can be rapidly iterated on and cheaply implemented.

1. ^{^}

   Ignoring vengeance and justice, which don't interest me.

2. ^{^}

   Or at least till they're old enough they're not much of a threat. But at that point they have poor health, they don't have a pension, and they don't have a job, so the public is still going to end up footing the bill for their food, rent and healthcare.

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