Corporal Punishment

Students at a school in Alabama who violated a restrictive prom dress code were given a choice between suspension and paddling. Now, I'm a bit surprised to learn that corporal punishment in public schools is still legal in twenty states in the United States. But there's a few more specific issues here. For example, who does the paddling? And what is the message being communicated? Suppose these adult or almost adult girls are paddled by male principal or a male teacher. And they get paddled for wearing too skimpy a dress, no less. I know many parents say that spanking hurts them more than hurts the child -- but do we really want teachers and principals who routinely spank students? What motivation makes them OK doing this, or worse, happy about spanking students? Consider now, on the national scale, torture -- who does the torturing? Torture can have profound effects of the torturers as well as the tortured, as torture becomes viewed as end in itself; moreover, it can be hard to control.

But there is another interesting aspect to this corporal punishment story. When offered the choice between paddling and suspension, all but one student opted for paddling:

"We're too old to be paddled," Erica DeRamus said. "This is high school. We are seniors. If you're going to act up, give us another option besides getting paddled, because this is not the 1940s. We don't take corporal punishment now."

It seems most students (except the above student) thought that paddling was less severe than expulsion. I am reminded of (with how much justification I'm not sure) Kant's words about how the scoundrel would choose convict labor over capital punishment, if given the choice:

This fitting of punishment to the crime, which can occur only by a judge imposing the death sentence in accordance with the strict law of retribution, is shown by the fact that only by this is a sentence of death pronounced on every criminal in proportion to his inner wickedness (even when the crime is not murder but another crime against the state that can be paid for only by death). - Suppose that some (such as Balmerino and others) who took part in the recent Scottish rebellion believed that by their uprising they were only performing a duty they owed the House of Stuart, while others on the contrary were out for their private interests; and suppose that the judgment pronounced by the highest court had been that each is free to make the choice between death and convict labor. I say that in this case the man of honor would choose death, and the scoundrel convict labor. This comes along with the nature of the human mind; for the man of honor is acquainted with something that he values even more highly than life, namely honor, while the scoundrel considers it better to live in shame than not to live at all... Since the man of honor is undeniably less deserving of punishment than the other, both would be punished quite proportionately if all alike were sentenced to death; the man of honor would be punished mildly in terms of his sensibilities and the scoundrel severely in terms of his. On the other hand, if both were sentenced to convict labor the man of honor would be punished too severely and the other too mildly for his vile action. And so here too, when sentence is pronounced on a number of criminals united in a plot, the best equalizer before justice is death. (VI:333-334 MM)