Corporal punishment

SIGNIFICANCE: Although corporal punishments were once commonly applied, they have been eliminated from the American justice system as the United States moved toward exclusive reliance on fines and restrictions on freedom, such as probation and incarceration, as methods of criminal punishment.

In seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe and colonial America, people routinely received physical punishments for violating society’s rules. These corporal punishments included branding; whipping; flogging; cutting off ears, fingers, hands, or tongues; and placing people in stocks—wooden structures in a town square into which a person’s head, arms, or legs could be locked. These corporal punishments were legacies of religious beliefs that had also encouraged torture, burning people at the stake, and public executions for a variety of offenses, both serious and minor. A basic belief that underlay these physical punishments of people’s bodies was an assumption that people who misbehaved were possessed by the devil and therefore unable to conform their behavior to God’s rules for society.

During the Enlightenment period of the late eighteenth century, the emphasis on corporal punishment in Europe began to be displaced by reforms intended to rehabilitate offenders. Instead of branding or whipping them, various localities began to incarcerate them with a Bible or make them work in prison shops in the hope that they would discover God and self-discipline and thereby become good people.

Punishment in the United States

During the colonial and postrevolutionary periods, the United States employed many of the corporal punishments that had been brought from Europe, including whipping, branding, and placing in stocks. The movement away from corporal punishments in favor of incarceration occurred during the nineteenth century.

In the southern United States, corporal punishments of the most vicious kinds, particularly whipping, branding, and dismemberment, were applied against African American enslaved people as punishment for escapes or any other infractions as defined by slave owners. Local law-enforcement officials and courts reinforced the institution of slavery by actively supporting these forms of punishment.

After the Civil War, corporal punishments began disappearing as formal punishments for crimes, but their use still flourished on an informal basis. Police in many localities throughout the country utilized beatings and even torture as a means to punish people informally and to obtain confessions. While corporal punishment was used successfully to obtain many confessions, these confessions often came from innocent people who had simply been selected for victimization by unethical police officers. Such abusive behavior by police officers became less common in the twentieth century as policing began to become a profession with training, and as judges scrutinized the activities of police.

Corporal punishment was used in prisons and jails until the 1960s. Prisoners in some states were beaten, locked in small compartments, and otherwise physically coerced into obeying orders. Officials sometimes permitted inmates to abuse other inmates in order to force prisoners to perform labor under harsh conditions. These practices were outlawed by federal judges as a result of lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s.

Corporal Punishment and the Law

By 1969, all but two states had abolished whipping as a punishment for prison inmates. The final two states were effectively barred from further use of corporal punishment when a US court of appeals decision said that Arkansas’s continuing use on prisoners of the “strap”—a leather whip attached to a wooden handle—violated the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments (Jackson v. Bishop, 1969).

Beginning in the 1970s, prison officials, like police officers, could not use corporal punishments. They could, however, use physical force for self-defense and for gaining control over people who were fighting, threatening, or disruptive. Despite the prohibition on corporal punishments, occasional lawsuits are still filed against police officers and corrections officials who have beaten criminal defendants and inmates.

The formal abolition of corporal punishment in the criminal justice system did not mean that corporal punishment no longer existed in the United States. Parents are permitted to apply corporal punishment to their children as long as that punishment does not cause injuries or break laws against child abuse. In addition, corporal punishment is permitted in public schools in many states. In 1978, the Supreme Court decided that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments did not apply to disciplinary corporal punishments in schools (Ingraham v. Wright, 1978). Thus many schools continued to use corporal punishments, most frequently paddling with a wooden paddle, as a means to punish misbehaving students. By the early 2020s, twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia had banned the use of corporal punishment in schools, and many individual school districts in the remaining states had done the same. However, seven states did not prohibit corporal punishment in schools, and fifteen states had laws that expressly permitted the physical punishment of public school students.

Although support for corporal punishment of children has been declining in the United States since the 1960s, in the 2010s approximately 70 percents of Americans agreed with the statement “it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking,” according to a 2013 study. However, debate over the effectiveness and appropriateness of corporal punishment on children remains heated. While studies have shown corporal punishment to be effective in the short term at curtailing undesired behaviors by children, many psychologists have pointed to evidence demonstrating the long-term negative effects on children’s behavior and mental health. The American Psychological Association reports that physical punishment of children is associated in the long term with increased aggression, antisocial behaviors, and other mental health problems. More than two dozens countries have passed laws banning corporal punishment of children in all settings, including in the home. In 2006, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a directive asserting that corporal punishment of children should be eliminated in all settings through “legislative, administrative, social, and educational measures.”

In 1994, public debates resumed concerning the desirability of corporal punishment when Singapore sentenced Michael Fay, an American teenager, to six lashes with a bamboo cane for committing acts of vandalism. Although the US government protested on Fay’s behalf that the punishment (“caning”) was barbaric, leaders in many American local communities seized on the issue to advocate the reintroduction of corporal punishment as a cheaper and more effective punishment for juvenile offenders. Corporal punishment was not reinitiated, but the debate demonstrated that many Americans still considered corporal punishment to be an effective deterrent to misbehavior by young people.

The debate about corporal punishment reentered the American mainstream when star running back Adrian Peterson, of the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings, was arrested for child abuse after an incident in which he allegedly used a switch to punish his son. Peterson was put on probation and suspended by the NFL for the remainder of the season. The incident highlighted not only the debate about corporal punishment but also the prevalence of it among different racial and religious groups. According to the blog FiveThirtyEight, based on data provided by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, while support for spanking has been declining, it remains prevalent in both African American culture (more than 80 percent, compared to about 70 percent among White people) and among born-again Christians, about 80 percent of whom support it.

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