In Defense of Flogging Read Free Page A

issues, the so-called “broken windows.” At the same time more than one million foreign immigrants moved to New York City. Whether due to a strong work ethic, fear of deportation, traditional family values, or having the desire and means to emigrate in the first place, immigrants (nationwide and in New York City) have lower rates of crime and incarceration than native-born Americans. Astoundingly, today more than one in three New Yorkers are foreign born. Although policing in New York City deservedly received a lot of credit for the city’s crime drop, strangely, few people credit immigrants and almost
nobody seemed to notice the winning strategy of “decarceration.”
    Looking elsewhere in the United States, we can see even more refutations of the connection between imprisonment and crime rates. Crime rates have spiked and fallen quite independent of prison rates, which have only gone up. If we were to give increased incarceration credit for the crime drop of the past two decades, we could just as easily give it credit for the crime increase in the two decades before that. From 1970 to 1991 crime rose while we locked up a million more people. Since then we’ve locked up another million and crime has gone down. So what’s so special about that second million? Were they the only ones who were “real criminals”? Did we simply get it wrong with the first 1.3 million people we put behind bars? Because the incarceration rate has only gone up since 1970, we could correlate anything with this increase. We could just as easily credit incarceration with the collapse of Communism or the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series.
    One reason prison doesn’t reduce crime is that many prison-worthy offenses—especially drug crimes—are economically demand-motivated. This
doesn’t change when a drug dealer is locked up. Contrast that with, say, pedophilia: An active pedophile taken off the streets means fewer raped children. A child victim doesn’t go out searching for another criminal abuser. But that’s exactly what a drug addict does.
    An arrest in the war on drugs usually creates a job opening. Arrest thousands of drugs dealers (and pay millions of dollars for their incarceration), and other needy or greedy people will take their place. Nothing else will change. As long as dealing drugs is profitable, which it can be, there will be a never-ending supply of arrestable and imprisonable offenders. The war on drugs may have started as a response to a drug problem, but it’s created an even larger and entirely preventable prohibition problem.
    Prison reformers—and I wish them well—tinker at the edges of a massive failed system. I’m all for what are called “intermediate sanctions”: House monitoring, GPS bracelets, intensive parole supervision, fines, restitution, drug courts, and day-reporting centers all show promise and deserve our full support. But we need much more drastic action. To bring our incarceration back to a civilized level—one we used to have and much more befitting a
rich, modern nation—we would have to reduce the number of prisoners by 85 percent. Without alternative punishments, this will not happen anytime soon. Even the most optimistically progressive opponent of prison has no plan to release two million prisoners.
    There might be other ways to reduce the prison population, but none of these seem particularly viable. We could legalize and regulate drugs and also get soft on crime, but that’s also not likely to happen anytime soon. And we can’t and shouldn’t just swing open the prison gates and shout, “Olly olly oxen free!” We need to maintain some balance of justice, punishment, and public safety.
    As ugly as it may seem, corporal punishment would be an effective and, believe it or not, comparatively humane way to bring our prison population back in line with world standards. To those in prison we could