From the History of Punishment

For the most history execution has been both painful and public in order to act as deterrent to others. Physical punishments and public humiliations were social events and earned out in most accessible parts of towns, often on market days when the greater part of the population were present. Justice bad to be seen done.

One of the most bizarre methods of punishment was inflicted in ancient Rome on people found guilty of murdering their fathers. Their punishment was to be put in a sack with a rooster, a viper, and a dog, then drowned along with the three animals. In ancient Greece the custom of allowing a condemned man to end his own life by poison was extended only to full citizens. The philosopher Socrates died in this way. Condemned slaves were beaten to death instead. Stoning was the ancient method of punishment for adultery among other crimes.

In Turkey if a butcher was found guilty of selling bad meat, he was tied to a post with a piece of stinking meat fixed under his nose, or a baker having sold short weight bread could be nailed to his door by his ear.

One of the most common punishments for petty offences was the pillory, which stood in the main square of towns. The offender was locked by hands and head into the device and made to stand sometimes for days, while crowds jeered and pelted the offender with rotten vegetables or worse.

In medieval Europe some methods of execution were deliberately drawn out to inflict maximum suffering. Felons were tied to a heavy wheel and rolled around the streets until they were crushed to death. Others were strangled, very slowly. One of the most terrible punishments was hanging and quartering. The victim was hanged, beheaded and the body cut into four pieces. It remained a legal method of punishment in Britain until 1814 beheading was normally reserved for those of high rank. In England a block and axe was the common, method but this was different from France and Germany where the victim kneeled and the head was taken off with a swing of the sword.

 

Task 3. Review the text.

Crimes and Punishments

 “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishments, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance, is more likely than its initial emergence could have been.” (Hannah Arendt)

“The severity of the punishment must also be in keeping with the kind of obligation which has been violated, and not (only) with the interests of public security.” (Simone Weil)

On the television screen, a middle-aged woman is telling a reporter about the death of her daughter; her voice and facial expression oscillate between tremulous grief and controlled rage. Three years ago, on a spring evening, her twenty-year-old daughter was walking home from the bus stop after a day of college classes. A young man stopped her at knife point and demanded her purse; she gave it to him and then started to scream. He stabbed her in the chest. She was dead on arrival at the nearest hospital emergency room. Because there were several witnesses, the police were able to arrest the killer on the same night. Six months later, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and received a sentence of zero-to-seven years. In just thirty months, he was released from prison for good behaviour.

“I just can’t get over this”, says the slain girl’s mother. “I will never get over this. To know that the price of my child’s life was less than three years, that this man is free now to do the same thing to someone else – I can’t reconcile myself to it. I can’t believe any more that there is such a thing as justice in the world. Everything I tried to live by, everything I brought up my children to respect: things just don’t work that way.” The woman tells the reporter she is active in an organization for crime victims and their relatives. “We all know we have to get on with our lives,” she says, “but that isn’t easy to do under the circumstances. I felt as though my girl was killed twice - once by that scum, and once by the judge who said, well, you only have to go to jail for a few years. They killed her memory, saying that was all her life was worth.” The outraged mother spoke of justice, not revenge, but revenge was obviously one element in an ideal of justice to which she had adhered, without giving the matter much conscious thought, until the day when the issue was transformed from an abstraction into a painful personal reality. This sense of justice is so fundamental to our psychological well-being that it rarely intrudes upon our consciousness; like many basic assumptions, it remains largely unexamined unless and until it is sorely violated. The symbolic “scales of justice” have a real meaning for most citizens, who believe that the legal system exists to maintain a moral and social equilibrium, and to restore, the equilibrium when it has been violently disturbed.

There is, of course, a wide range of opinion on what constitutes appropriate redress. For those, whose concept of justice is concerned primarily with the criminal’s rights and prospects for rehabilitation, any extended punishment is simply another crime. For those focused totally on the victim’s rights, only executions or other severe penalties will suffice to restore a sense of moral balance. Between these extremes lies a broad concept of justice that demands a greater measure of retribution than the American legal system currently dispenses, a spectrum of retribution that excludes both execution and the release of a killer from prison in less than three years. This intermediate sense of justice – one that is, I believe, shared by the largest proportion of the public – has been outraged by the inadequate response of the legal system to the rising incidence of violent crime during the past twenty years. Such outrage is unquestionably the single most important factor in the emotional resurgence of support for capital punishment today; it must be addressed by those who refuse, as I do, to include death in their concept of retributive justice.

It is true that a measure of popular enthusiasm for the death penalty exists independently of the general level of crime arid violence in society. Otherwise, there would be no support for capital punishment in Western Europe, England, and Canada, whose crime rates make them appear as nearly pastoral realms in comparison to the United States. In view of the relatively greater personal safety they enjoy, it’s not surprising that those Europeans who favor capital punishment expend less passion on the issue than the Americans do.

A significant exception to this lack of passion is apparent when Europeans begin to talk about the need to “get tough” with perpetrators of political violence. The United States has been relatively unaffected by the kind of highly visible terrorist acts that have influenced public opinion in England, France, Italy and Germany. Even our most traumatic political assassinations have generally been; perceived as isolated acts rather than as full-scale ruptures in the fabric of society. This perception of violence as a phenomenon for which the instigators are personally and individually accountable reflects a characteristically American attitude that extends far beyond issues of crime and punishment. (Wild Justice by Susan Jacoby).

 

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