Why would I be so barbaric? Instead of me telling you, I'll enlist the help of the late theologian John Wenham's woefully obscure book The Goodness of God. Disclaimer: he doesn't directly defend the idea of corporal punishment here, but it's still the passage that convinced me it's a good thing. If you enjoy or are edified or challenged by this passage, I encourage you to buy or rent the book and experience its goodness for yourself.
Whether in fact the Old Testament laws were cruel in comparison with those of our supposedly humane society is not as self-evident as many think. The Old Testament relied mainly on payment of damages, strictly limited corporal punishment and capital punishment, whereas modern society relies mainly on fines and imprisonment. The nearest thing to imprisonment in Old Testament law was confinement to a city of refuge for unintentional homicide. The question of punishment is such an emotive subject that one almost despairs of its rational discussion. Anyone who defends corporal or capital punishment even in the most tentative way runs the risk of being branded as a sadistic ogre. Yet my horror of long-term imprisonment is horror at the sheer suffering that it entails. Far from being insensitive, I hate undergoing pain and seeing pain inflicted. Even though reason leads one to believe that the suffering is not nearly as bad as it looks, I hate to see a fly wriggling on a fly-paper or a fish struggling on a hook, and get little pleasure from watching amateur boxers knocking one another about, despite the knowledge that they do it because they enjoy it!
One would hate, therefore, really to hurt someone physically by way of punishment, and would deplore any system of corporal punishment which was either sadistic in intent or excessive in degree, or which was used without due consideration of the offender’s psychological needs. Even more would one shrink from joining the firing-squad and taking part in an execution. But would this mean having relatively little qualm about committing a man to prison for a decade? If one had no imagination and no compassion, it would of course by easy – no unpleasantness, no soiling of the hands, soon out of sight and out of mind. But in fact my slight experience of prisons and criminal asylums fills me with dismay. To substitute long imprisonment for execution may at first sight seem like mercy. But judged by the suffering to be endured it is, surely, the reverse of mercy.
Long imprisonment is a living death. A man is separated from his wife and family (often causing them prolonged, unmerited hardship), he is put in a single-sex institution where a normal sex-life is impossible, his companions are criminals, he is shut up to his own bad conscience, but in conditions ill-designed to effect repentance and reformation and with slender hopes of satisfactory rehabilitation after release. With unlimited money and with angels for warders (which, realists please note, will never be), some of these evils might be considerably mitigated, but nothing can do away with the fact that a human being is deprived of his liberty. This aspect of the matter is highlighted in our top security gaols, which may be clinically hygienic and immaculate in décor, but in which men of drive and brains and initiative rot out their days. It is true, of course, that the human spirit has a remarkable resilience even in appalling circumstances, and that life, however bad, is seldom one of unrelieved misery; some sort of mode of living is worked out in prison life, in which its lights and shades continue to be felt with pleasure and displeasure. It is often true too that the life out of prison of one who has fallen foul of society may already have lost many of the elements which make up a fully human life, so that in some respects life in prison may be less unpleasant than life outside. (Such men are often at least as much victims of a cruel society as its creators.) But it is a poor defence of long-term imprisonment to say that it is merely substituting one dehumanizing process for another.
If (per impossibile) some sort of calculus could be devised to assess the amount of suffering cased to offenders and their families by our long-drawn-out, physically painless punishments, and compare them with the short, sharp pains of the older punishments, I find it hard to believe that the new would prove the lighter. Furthermore, even in the most enlightened and affluent society, it is an enormous struggle to get adequate funds and suitable staff to run our penal institutions (and in a fallen society it seems unrealistic to believe that it will ever be otherwise). But in the poor, largely rural society of the Old Testament, the provision of humane, secure, long-term prisons would have laid an intolerable burden on the community – apart altogether from the suffering and corrosion of character caused by the loss of liberty.
It is all very well to talk in theory about the enlightenment and humanity of modern penal codes, but in practice the prisons of the twentieth century have probably witnessed torments as vile as those inflicted in any age and inflicted on a wider scale than ever before in history. We think naturally of Hitler’s concentration camps, of Japanese prisoner of war amps and of the prisons described by Solzhenitsyn. One’s mind is numbed as one tries to compute what it all adds up to in human terms. These examples (which come from three of the most ‘civilized’ nations of the world) are, it is true, very bad cases, but they are, alas, not isolated examples. Like the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb they are symbolic of our age. The inescapable fact appears to be that sin will take its toll of misery somehow. The primitive barbarity and the cheapness of life in the ancient Near East is dreadful to contemplate, but is our sophisticated barbarity really less dreadful? No society can hold together without punishment of transgressors, and punishment is by definition unpleasant. Are we really in a position to say that we could have devised for the Israelite people unpleasantness more just, humane and practical than those prescribed in the Old Testament law? I for one doubt it.
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It is a principle [in the Old Testament law] that punishment allows the offender to make atonement and be reconciled with society. After he has paid the penalty the offender suffers no loss of his civil rights. Degradation of the offender as a motive for punishment is specifically excluded by Deuteronomy 25:3, where the number of strokes is limited to forty, ‘lest, if one should go on to heat him with more stripes than these, your brother be degraded in your sight’. The degrading brutality of many punishments under Assyrian law is in marked contrast to the Hebrew outlook.If you're still with me, check out C. S. Lewis' essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (included in the essay collection God in the Dock) for a defense of capital punishment and retributive justice.
