Peter Moskos

The book is basically two books: one against both the present system of mass incarceration and the ineffectual programs of prison reform thereof; and one for flogging as a more humane, effective, and socializing alternative for punishing criminals. The former is not entirely convincing, as he generally overstates his case and caricatures proponents of incarceration, though he makes many strong points; the latter is quite potent and persuasive.

The book could be criticized as disingenuously defending flogging just to shock you and thereby bring attention to the injustice and ineffectiveness of mass incarceration. And that criticism has some merit, but he ultimately treats flogging and more traditional approaches to criminal punishment as serious alternatives. This is made clearest by his eschewing of, not only mass incarceration, but also prison reform. He genuinely sees the need for a third option.… (mehr)

A thoughtful and interesting essay-slash-short-book that does exactly what the title suggests: makes a case for flogging in modern society. The thesis is this: the United States' prison system is out of control, inhumane, and ineffective; a system of voluntary flogging, however brutal of a practice it is, would accomplish the goals of criminal punishment at a fraction of the cost, more honestly, and without the massive damage to society of prolonged mass incarceration. Moskos spends a ton of time saying "I know you're still horrified at this idea…", but I was pretty much on board after the initial statement of intent. Interestingly, Moskos doesn't try to make a case for flogging as a deterrent, pointing out only that imprisonment appears to be largely useless as a deterrent so flogging could not do worse (fair enough). He claims instead, simply, that we should flog because people want criminals to be punished. I don't know how I feel about this idea in general, though I acknowledge the pragmatism of it and it's true that we can't do worse than we already do. He's also pretty dismissive of all prison reform efforts, without providing as much evidence as other claims receive. This might be partly out of necessity to the argument being made—defending flogging depends on it being placed among alternatives that are equally brutal, and if prison reform held the potential to be humane and effective, no one would agree to implement flogging. However, he does make a convincing argument that the things most wrong with prison are also the things that make it prison, so any system that effectively treats criminals is likely to not look much like prison at all. In all, it's a quick read and worth it for the chance to ponder an unusual idea. You might be convinced as well. I'm not sure yet how I should work "I read an essay and now I'm pro-flogging" into casual conversation, but I'll figure it out.… (mehr)

High marks for originality and accessibility. Most of the essay is spent document how our current system of criminal punishment, incarceration, is expensive, ineffective, and counterproductive. Better, he says, we return to corporeal punishment which satisfied the need to punish, but does so in an expedient manner that doesn't destroy the psyche or permanently stigmatize the violator. Only when he favorably suggests that we should return to the old days when police could "beat and release" rather than being required to arrest everyone does his argument lose steam. But on the whole, one wonders if the voluntary option to be caned (two strikes for every year of being jailed otherwise) shouldn't be on the table.… (mehr)

A sociologist got hired by the Baltimore PD as part of his research. He concluded that there was “no culture of corruption or brutality among Baltimore City patrol officers,” which makes me side-eye his account a bit. (He quotes one officer who says that his pension is worth $1-2 million, and that he’d be a fool to risk that—but people do dumber stuff all the time.) He does talk about the culture of CYA policing, staying in a car rather than walking a beat and getting to know people, as well as about superiors more concerned with arrest statistics and avoiding having an officer caught on camera doing something wrong than with preventing crime. “Arrests decrease when the hassles of arrests—lack of departmental support, citizen complaints, the burden of court, an ineffective court system—make putting away the bad guys no longer worth the trouble.”

Police like cars because they’re safer, don’t involve walking, and are shielded from the weather; supervisors like cars because they can keep track of officers more readily and can dispatch them more quickly, even though quick police response is rarely very important to solving a crime and walking a beat would be better. Residents, he reports, often conclude that all cops are either “incorrigibly corrupt or completely apathetic.” But Moskos concludes that it’s mostly the latter, along with aggressive arresters/searchers who stretch the truth in an arrest report but don’t graduate to full-scale beatings and planting evidence, yay? Police officers arrest people for trespassing, “but people want the suspect to believe that the real crime is failure to obey.” Arrest is also used to make sure people will comply with future orders and to punish bad attitudes. “Officers gain compliance from a suspect and control of a situation by implying that [the] arrest decision is based entirely on personal—even extralegal—discretion rather than some legitimate but mundane and extremely minor or technical violation of the law.” (I don’t know why Moskos contrasts those—that’s why having lots of laws it’s easy to violate enables abuse.)

Gone are the days, Moskos says, where police officers might offer suspects a hit or two in order to avoid a troublesome night in jail—perhaps, he suggests, to those suspects’ detriment. Force “no longer defines the core of policing,” and is now backup. But he doesn’t exactly connect the dots: because of the volume of policing, that can be true even while force itself remains at horrific levels.

Training too was more about surviving a dysfunctional institution than interacting well with the public; the key concern was officer safety, but no one was trained about de-escalating conflicts or dealing with troubled people who don’t respect authority. I believe that every profession occasionally hates/jokes cruelly about its clients, but it’s still pretty troubling to read a quote Moskos gets: “Junkies don’t have rights. They’re not even people. Who gives a flying fuck about a junkie!?” Moskos concludes that a focus on drug addicts hurts police—leading them to seek arrest statistics rather than other measures of success, and reinforcing their ideas that the public is the enemy. Given the car-based culture, every additional step “from stopping the car to exiting the car to questioning people on the street … is a form of escalation on the part of the police officer…. Police officers always assert their right to control public space.” There are only three possible outcomes, Moskos says, to a suspect’s interaction with the police: arrest, departure, or “deference.” In 1999, Baltimore police shot 32 people and killed five; they killed 23 people from 2004-2007. Police officers, meanwhile, were more likely to die or be injured in car crashes—police officers often refuse to wear seatbelts.

Moskos claims that police have little incentive to break the law in big ways or perjure themselves, though that’s in large part because the law is already so favorable to many tactics police use to get “consent” or to justify searches (he doesn’t exactly put it that way). Yet he also discusses common arrests for “loitering” even though the people targeted didn’t meet the legal requirements; the point isn’t to convict people, but to show them that officers must be obeyed. Shocking statistics: 45,000 residents of the Eastern District, and 20,000 arrests, most of them drug-related. 56% of black Baltimore men in their twenties are on probation, on parole, in jail, or in prison. More than 10% of men in the Eastern District are murdered before they reach 35, Moskos says, though there’s a big division between men who aren’t involved in the drug trade and those who are. Moskos blames drug criminalization for a lot of policing’s problems—along with its direct effects on minority neighborhoods, the drug war also encouraged the Supreme Court to limit suspects’ rights. When a 75% drop in world opium production (after the Taliban took over Afghanistan) didn’t change prices in the US at all, the drug war is lost; criminalization isn’t worth its costs, such as the plethora of “million-dollar blocks”—individual city blocks in which the government spends more than one million dollars per year to incarcerate individuals from that block. Along with decriminalization, Moskos is also an advocate for “policing green”—without a car, getting to know people, saving fuel (yes, that seemed a little anticlimactic, but ok).… (mehr)