Prison is worse and is a more effective deterrent than caning

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2024-11-29 03:00:04

Lately on Twitter/X there has been a lot of discussion about caning. Singapore, the posterchild of caning, is held up as a role model of criminal justice reform by using caning, which the U.S. also ought to adopt. It sounds good in theory and seems to have worked for Singapore.

Canning does genuinely seem to me like the perfect punishment for certain kinds of civil disobedience. It’s like, I don’t really want to ruin an 18-year-old‘s life for violating the law during a protest, but I do want the punishment to scare them. And, having gone through it, I… https://t.co/hPLcNcm63A

This thread—and especially the number of people who said they reconsidered after Googling 'caning'—has forced me to conclude that you guys don't understand how bad caning is.

Such Twitter debates also presuppose a sort of false dichotomy in which a country much choose between caning or prison, but this has never been the case in reality. Singapore does have prisons and capital punishment for more serious offenses. Singapore has a prison population of 9,500 out of a population of 6 million, which on a per capita basis is average among developed countries.

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