In Defense of Flogging 1st Edition

Great book, featuring some great ideas. As every other review will explain, he asks the reader to imagine that he or she has been sentenced to several years in prison, but then suddenly given a choice: you get six months taken off your sentence for each stroke of the whip you accept. In a five year sentence, you could take ten whips and walk out a free person that very day. Would you take that deal? And if so, then why does our system consider flogging "cruel and unusual" but prison perfectly humane, when nearly anyone would prefer the flogging?Let me get this out of the way: If you found the book "meh" because you had to read it for a class, then I very much doubt you read it. Which is sad because this one is short and readable and I can't think of a topic that's more engaging to real people. If you're that lazy and sheltered, then what are you reading at all?I'm glad that Moskos left that weaselly question mark off the title. But it still permeates the book. His point is that he uses this thought experiment to show people the terrible inequities and horrors of our systems for crime and punishment, and our own tendency to look away rather than confront those problems. Bravo. But I think Moskos is a little to eager to remind us that his whole idea is just a rhetorical trick. Is he serious or not? If not, then why not? In the current intellectual climate on campus, I get why he has to be a little less bold than he gives himself credit for, but that's unfortunate.Some have said that the book is too long for his point. In my opinion, it's too short. This is a book caught in the limbo between popular political book and article for an academic journal. I agree that this is too good an idea to leave to academia, but it didn't quite make the jump to a full book, either. That "didn't know who its audience is" problem very nearly made me go to four stars.And lost at times in the book's cuteness is the seriousness of the dilemma he presents. If flogging is so bad, then go ahead and tell us why. If his points hold so much water (and I strongly believe that they do) then why not just stand by them wholeheartedly and endorse corporal punishment? If there's some third way that's more merciful to the criminals, more just to the victims, less costly to the government, and less corrosive to our society, then let's hear it. Moskos comes out and says he has no better solutions. So why not back this one until he hears something better?Overall, if you're still reading this review, you'll probably have sensed how thought-provoking Moskos's book is. And he doesn't just reiterate this dilemma for a hundred pages. He talks about the penal system prior to mass incarceration, the religious origins of the penitentiary movement, and the interactions between modern prisons, criminal culture, the judicial system, and policing. He also refreshingly points out an aspect of the penal system that academics often miss: the sense of justice for the victims and bystanders that calls for punishment, not merely "rehabilitation", for a sentence to be accepted as just. He also provides solid arguments about how rehabilitation is itself an empty promise, an excuse for the system as is rather than a serious effort with demonstrable effects.

This was a pleasant read. The author presents his arguments, counterarguments, then rebuttals to those. It is a quick read, basically a long article or essay. I would have liked to see the following (it is not worth deducting any stars for missing these though):1. It would have been nice if he had broken the main text into chapters.2. I would have liked for him to have presented his opinion on "Norway's controversial 'cushy prison' experiment" (h[...]). Not that I necessarily think this experiment is a good idea; I just would like the author to have presented his opinion on it given what he wrote in the book about prisons in the U.S., and I think the experiment had started before the author finished the book (not sure about that though).The book is well researched. On other thing he missed though, which is just a tangential point, is that he talks about the drop in crime in NY and suggests that this may have been due, in part, to better policing ("broken windows"). The authors of Freakonomics suggest that this might actually be due to the legalization of abortion resulting from Roe v. Wade (the cohort of unwanted children who would have committed crimes were simply not born).It is a good book, and I do recommend reading it.

The American criminal justice system is broken. It is inefficient (lengthy delays), it is expensive (most defendants cannot afford private criminal defense lawyers, leaving public defenders with impossibly large case loads), and too few defendants are rehabilitated ("frequent flyers" clog the system). Too many people are being warehoused for crimes involving theft, a substantial number of which are committed because of drug addiction. While they are living in jail and prison ("schools for criminals"), they learn more creative ways to score drugs and steal things after they are released. For-profit prison companies give substantial donations to elected officials to pass laws to increase criminal penalties, and to approve the building of new prisons. Peter Moskos covers a lot of territory in a few pages, and suggests a different approach for punishing people who do not need to be locked up to keep us safe from violent predators - flogging. His suggestion - to allow Judges to offer defendants who have been convicted of certain crimes a choice - incarceration or flogging - ought to spark a national dialogue about the state of our jails and prisons, and whether there might be a better approach. Many people will dismiss his ideas out of hand, and simply label them as "cruel and unusual." But what is more cruel - 5 years in prison or 10 lashes?

The writer is a conservative sociologist who also worked as a cop in very tough East Baltimore. He proves conclusively that the only way to reduce prison overcrowding and hopefully even reform some of the criminals is to reintroduce flogging as an alternative to custody.

Interesting, thought provoking read, not overly long and reasonably balanced, in my opinion.

All ok

People interested in buying this book will know what it's about, even if not, the title sums it up rather well, so I'm not going to say too much about the content here.Peter Moskos, cop and jurist, proposes the abolition of the US' current prison system in favour of corporal punishment. He does quite well.Within the first pages he states that prisons are cruel, ineffective and uneconomic, not delivering any of its promises while costing a lot of money. Whipping, he claims, is not only more effective (what probably many people would agree with), but also less cruel. This, for me, was the main point of the book. What sounds paradoxical first becomes clearer from page to page, when Moskos backs up his claim with statistics, example cases and philosophical reasoning. I must confess he had me after the first ten pages, but I estimate that even a very skeptical person will eventually, if not agree with him, have a different view about the American prison system as it is now.That Moskos is not overtly politically motivated (I, at least, couldn't find tendencies too much to the right or the left) makes the book even more enjoyable and trustworthy.There are a only few minor flaws for me. I found his language a little too flippant. Some of his sentences seem to me like somebody who tries to sound cool, but maybe I misjudge and that's just the way American authors of today write (I think the same about Nicholas Taleb, to give a reference), so let's just say that I enjoy his reasoning but not the words. I also see a slight tendency do redundancy in the last third, but maybe the subject is so controversial that he feels the need to elaborate more on his idea to convince people. The next point is substantial: While Moskos says that we should have prison for people who choose it or people who have to be locked away for the safety of society, he doesn't amplify the latter. I think that's a problem because, if his proposition will ever be discussed seriously by those in charge or the public, this will be a major point of discussion. The last point is purely geographical: As a European I know now a lot more about the flaws of the American system, but not of our own, which would make the book much more valuable for me.All in all a great book, I can recommend it to really anyone.