Is corporal punishment ever OK?

I'm totally against it for the most part. But there are certain cases, like this case of the teenage girl with cerebral palsy having her hair set on fire by her classmates,

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=586578&mesg_id=586578

in which I feel that the perpetrators should be dealt with physically. Another case would be where that guy drop-kicked a chihuahua and killed it.

There's something about people picking on weaker living beings just for the sake of being mean and causing pain that incites me to violence. I understand that it's hypocritical and could be counter-productive (and that it even possibly comes from the same dark place of the human psyche), but in cases like that it seems like they just need to get a serious ass-beating.

It feels about as close to true justice as one could possibly get, to me.

What do you think? Is corporal punishment ever OK?

...and there are more effective means of punishment.

We never spanked our boys -- grounding them or extra chores worked out much better.

Getting beaten oneself by a more powerful being as a consequence of hurting or threatening someone weaker seems very appropriate- and educational.

I know that spanking children for general misbehavior is a bad idea. But look at the nature of these cases.

You should never hit the child hard enough to do any damage, so there's a moment of discomfort and then the kid's free to go about his business, for better or worse. And after so long, the kid just gets used to it.

OTOH, being grounded and missing something that you REALLY wanted to do has a much stronger impact on the child than just being hit. One time our older son told us he was going to be at this one kid's house for the night. About 2 a.m., we got a call from the police that he was in a car that had been stopped for the driver being drunk.

Well, our son terribly embarrassed by being caught by the police, caught in a lie to us, and having us pick him up in front of all his friends, he also got grounded for 60 days and missed a lot of stuff and from then until he moved out of the house, he had to provide us with a phone number and we'd call him to confirm his whereabouts.

There was no repitition of that problem, but if we'd just spanked him -- if that's even a practical option for a 16-YO -- he might have just shrugged it off.

for your typical teenage misbehavior.

It's just... I'm a really vile and evil bastard, some would call me a fascist. But I'm anti death penalty. It is not a good deterrant. and it accomplishes nothing. OK, you killed this person... wouldn't it have been more efficient to rule that he no longer had human rights and work him like a animal? Use him for medical tests? Isn't taking satisfaction at their death kinda... I dunno disturbing. The only way you can feel justice is done is for them to die. BLEGH. Whatever.

That, to me, is the ultimate in hypocrisy, and as Dave Attell has said, it hardly can be called a "punishment." I don't like the death penalty at all. It's fucked up, totally inhuman.

But look at these cases and think about the appropriateness of a good ass-beating. Doesn't it seem like justice would be served well in that way?

Corporal punishment just continues a self-perpetuating cycle.

We need to empty our prisons of all non-violent criminals.

Violent criminals have to be housed in isolation, because it is often impossible to rehabilitate somebody desensitized to violence. And they have to be kept away from other prisoners and the general population, sometimes forever. That doesn't mean they can't be given an opportunity to rehabilitate themselves, just that "finding God" won't cut it. I'm not sure how the Scandinavian systems work, but I know that our system just perpetuates and increases the violence it is supposed to deter or stop.

There's some serious counseling to be done with the kid, but any principle that would KEEP the kid who is the actual THREAT in school while suspending the victim is the person who need the living FUCK beat out of them if we are to resort to violence. I expect uncivilized and not totally socialized kids to make mistakes even to the point of animalism. When the adults who are supposed to be in positions of authority do it, I feel differently. What the fuck were they thinking allowing a kid who has set another kid's hair on fire to remain in school while punishing the developmentally disabled kid? These are allegedly educated people? Not in my book.
Any idiot with the intellectual agility of a small soap dish can recognize where the real problem lies...why couldn't this principle?

but I do think it's kind of pointless. My two older siblings got spanked (they seem to recall it happening more often than our folks do?) myself and my younger brother never did - there's no real difference between how good/bad we were as kids or how we ended up as adults.

knuckles. Maybe even a baseball bat in really egregious cases.

Again- for me it's just people physically preying upon or trying to intimidate the weak. Not doing the dishes, stealing, vandalizing, etc. don't qualify.

Same as the bumpersticker 'Military Solutions Are Problems.'

The urge to lash out in retribution and anger never helps.

Wanna see some lynching photography? That's where violence leads.
http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html

valuable. Thanks for posting it.

By how they saw fit. Kids seem to have more respect. I fear the way kids are raised today.

...not a lack of physical violence. And add some misguided tolerance as well.

Too many parents want to be their child's "best friend," and that just doesn't work. There needs to be a clear delineation of social roles in the household or order breaks down in a hurry.

Heh. ;)

useless..just the memory is stored away in the depths of the mind of the young that that is a cure for all.

Deprivation is far more humane and useful.

Using it as a solution, or it being an option at all might negatively affect the psychology of the perp, and possibly lead to more violence.

Of course, the hope is that it would be more of an eye-opener than a scar.

Edit #2:

Wow I'm sure stupid, I saw 'corporal punishment' and read 'capital punishment'.

But! My original post is here for everyone's enjoyment at my expense!

--

Let's look at it this way.. I'll explain the only possible reasons -for- it I can come up with, and argue against them. If anyone would like to add some more justifications for capital punishment, feel free, I shall see if I can come up with an argument against them too.

1) People should pay for heinous crimes with their lives, that is justice.

A) Justice is subjective. Let's change words here--what you're really suggesting is that capital punishment is revenge, and that revenge is justice. Some may even point to the Bible passage that tells us we should take 'an eye for an eye' and 'a tooth for a tooth'.
But, setting aside the church and state argument for the moment, is it really the place of the government and society at large to mete out revenge? People can do some very bad things. And then in the end, some people who have done very bad things can change, they can recover, and go on to do good things for society. Who are we to deny them that chance?
And in the end, if we kill a killer to take revenge, are we any better than they? Does the fact that someone is not a good person, not innocent, make it justifiable to take their lives? If so--why is it justified for the prison system, but not for every individual? If someone kills my mother, would I be justified to kill them?

2) Capital punishment takes a criminal out of society forever.

A) True, but so does life without parole. And aside from that, occasionally even the government can make a mistake. People have been put on death row for crimes they haven't committed. And it would be naive to assume that none of those innocent convicts ever actually met the lethal injection or the electric chair without ever being able to prove their innocence.

3) Capital punishment is an economically sound alternative to life imprisonment. It thins out our overcrowded prisons.

A) Prison space is expensive. But we don't convict someone and put them to death the next day--they have a waiting period, they have appeals. They spend a great deal of time on death row before being killed. And the extra appeals and extra security measures of keeping someone on death row actually make it more expensive than it would be to keep them for the rest of their lives in prison.
And how does it help crowding if we take someone out of maximum security and put them on death row? It's merely crowding in a different place.


My argument can be boiled down thusly--There is no practical justification for capital punishment that life imprisonment does not also fulfill. There is no economic justification for capital punishment unless we eliminate our lengthy appeals process--do we want that to happen? There is no moral justification for capital punishment except revenge--and revenge isn't exactly a moral justification, from my perspective. Moreover, we're the last industrialized nation to still mete out the death penalty. It actually can occasionally -interfere- with bringing a criminal to justice, because other countries will refuse to extradite criminals to us who might face the death penalty.

Input?

On edit: Don't try to come up with examples of really heinous criminals and expect me to be like 'well oh yeah, THAT guy should get the death penalty..' I would stand against the death penalty for a guy who murdered one person, for a guy who murdered, raped, cooked, and consumed 57 children between the ages of 2 and 7, for Osama bin Laden, for Adolf Hitler, for Joseph Stalin.. I stand unequivocally against it, hee. I don't think anecdotal evidence of 'well doesn't THIS guy deserve to die?' is a very fitting argument, but I may try to respond to any of those..

That is, if I receive any responses like that. Prolly not on DU, though I'd prolly get lots of those over in Freeperville.