It will not be seriously questioned that society has a right to protect itself. If the whipping post proves to be a perpetual and potential protector against the burglar, the highwayman and the cadet, why cry down its effectiveness? New York had an epidemic of gunmen; Chicago had an epidemic of highwaymen; Boston and Philadelphia made war on cadets. Delaware simply painted her whipping posts and multiplied school houses.
Within recent weeks, in Philadelphia, Judge Norris S. Barratt declared from the bench that nothing except a thoroughly good whipping at a public post would serve to adequately punish a wife beater before him. This learned jurist is intimately familiar with social and political conditions in Delaware and, before the Sons of Delaware, most ably defended the whipping post as an aid to crime prevention.
Solitary confinement has been proved a failure. It rots out the prisoner, destroys all ambition, and when his hour of freedom comes he is without initiative, without occupation and without hope. Trades are now taught these men, but day after day they are “lined up” as professionals, and their lives become a misery to them.
Now I repeat that the basic idea of punishment has to do with the protection of society against the criminal. It would be a little beyond me to explain the psychological effect of a public whipping upon the mind of a professional criminal, but of course I had ideas. The fact remains, however, that the mere prospect of such a whipping keeps men out of Delaware who would not hesitate a second to “shoot up” a dance hall in New York or Chicago.
It is a fact of common knowledge that ship masters of undoubted courage, of tested and proved valor, are as timid as little children when ashore; that firemen who never give a thought to personal peril at a conflagration, bawl and make an awful to-do about having a tooth filled. Frank Gotch, the wrestler, who could tear an ordinary man apart with his hands, bows with absolute submission, I am told, to the will of Mrs. Gotch.
Doubtless the men of science, the psychologists, have a definite name for this phenomenon of the mind. I do not know this word, but I do know that burglars and highwaymen who would brave the police force of Philadelphia or any other large city will not even consider a “job” in Delaware and that these men when asked why, invariably reply that they will take no chance of the whipping post. It may be a display of vanity more than fear. I do not quite know.
I have no quarrel with those who want to reform prisons, but I am a most earnest advocate of any and every method that prevents crime, and this the whipping post does to a marked degree.
The sense of shame that follows a public whipping is quite a different matter from the innermost feelings of the same man flogged in privacy. In the underworld, where there exist strata of preferment just as there are social equations in organized society, a man who has done “a bit” of long duration lives in a degree of reflected glory. A yeggman who has served ten or twelve years in Cherry Hill, Sing Sing, Joliet or any one of the other notorious prisons has a certain standing among his fellows in crime. But it is a curious yet certain fact that the man who is whipped in public loses caste at once and forever. It seems to be that in having been sentenced to be whipped, the scene in the court room, the display in the jailyard and the final flogging—all produce a profound and a lasting mental shock.
This is not true when a mere warder calls a man out of his cell, beats him and then throws him in a dark hole. This performance is followed by mere resentment. The victim of this system, and the prisoner is very often a victim, merely promises himself to kill the warder if he ever has a chance, or some like foolish threat. Not so when a High Court, a Chief Justice, amid scenes of dignity and decorum, orders the whipping. It is the effect upon the mind of the man whipped and the result of the whipping upon the minds of other criminals that count. It is purely psychic but it is none the less effective.
None of the men whipped in Delaware is punished to the point that very great physical torture follows. Such a lashing would create a martyr of a criminal, and this must be avoided.