ABSTRACT
The infliction of bodily injury as a punishment was formerly supported by all who theorised on the subject. In civilised communities, cutting off the ears or the tongue were not uncommon three hundred years ago. Branding was thought proper in New England, as every one knows from The Scarlet Letter.16 Torture to extort confession was taken for granted. It still exists, as the Wickersham Commission discovered in investigating the ‘third degree’, but it is now illegal, even when practised by the agents of the law.17 On the whole, every advance in civilisation goes with a mitigation in the severity of punishments and a diminution of physical chastisement. In spite of all the fears of the sterner moralists, gentler penal codes are usually accompanied by a lessening of crime. There is no case for corporal punishment, whether statistically or as a matter of the psychology of individual criminals.
