Peter Moskos
Subject: Using Corporal Punishment
Bio: Professor in the Department of Law and Political Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Reading: Cop in the Hood is here and In Defense of Flogging is here
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and crime.
The topic today is Using Corporal Punishment.
Our speaker is Peter Moskos who is the author of the books Cop in the Hood as well as In Defense of Flogging. Peter is a Professor in the Department of Law and Political Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I want to find out from Peter what it is like policing in the Eastern District of Baltimore when he was a police officer and why he thinks we need to reconsider physical punishment in lieu of incarceration.
Buckle up.
Peter Moskos:
In Defense of Flogging is a thought experiment to focus on incarceration and punishment. The idea that isn't discussed enough is flogging. We don't whip people in America because it is cruel, it is unusual, and it has a horrible racist legacy with slavery. Instead, we invented the prison system.
The basic gambit of the book is if you were found guilty of a crime and sentenced to five years in prison, would you choose 10 Singapore style lashes and then be released and go home? I don't know anyone who would seriously choose five years in prison over 10 lashes. But we don't offer that choice because flogging is supposedly beyond the pale. And instead, we impose a punishment that is far worse than flogging and see it as a sign of progress and modernity.
Prisons are a revolutionary American concept from the late 1700s where the Walnut Street Jail became the Walnut Street Penitentiary. Did it work? Well, it depends on how you define what the goals of the system are. The progressives of the era, the Quakers in Pennsylvania decided that physical punishment was unacceptable, and we had to cure the criminal in the same way that we cure a sick person.
The idea was solitary confinement, and it goes with a Quaker ideal that silence equals salvation. You treat the criminal and not the crime. There was no alcohol or sex in prison. They would use segregation by race and by gender.
Europeans came to see this concept of the penitentiary. Americans were proud of it. But most people weren't fooled. Charles Dickens came and very graphically described the horrible conditions and that people in solitary confinement were going literally insane.
Prisons are generally seen to have three purposes. The first is rehabilitation, this idea of curing the criminal. It works for some. I don't want to say it never works, but most prisoners get released and end up rearrested within a few years.
The second purpose of prison is incapacitation. They physically keep people from committing crimes on the street. They do a very good job with that. And perhaps today it's underrated.
The third goal of prison is punishment. But prisons weren't designed to punish. They were designed to cure. Now, why might you punish someone? There are generally two reasons. The first is to deter crime. The general deterrence is, I'm going to punish you so other people see it and don't do it again. And the other concept of punishment, which is not very popular, is simply that you deserve it. You do something wrong; you deserve to get hurt. The just desserts concept can quickly spiral out of control if the purpose of punishment is simply to express society's disapproval that you did something wrong.
I am questioning the purpose of prison. We topped out at 2.3 million prisoners in America, which I think is shameful. It is going down, it's still the highest in the western world, but we're also a very violent country. It's not clear how many prisoners we would need to balance public safety with a humane modern society.
We entered an era of mass incarceration starting in the early 1980s, and we were nearly constant in our number of prisoners at 500,000 people, and then it just went up and up and up with the war on drugs and it peaked in 2005. The prison population seems a political choice.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's talk about recidivism. Do people who get out of prison commit crime and go right back in?
Peter Moskos:
When people get out of prison, they go back to the same environment that they lived in when they were committing crimes. So, it's very hard not to revert to that same criminal lifestyle. It is hard to get a job when you get out of prison, not just because of the felony conviction that's certainly part of it, but because you lack social skills. You don't become well socialized to non-criminal society while in prison. There is some truth to the idea that it's a school for crime. It would be amazing in a way if people did leave prison better than they went in. And though some do, and often that's because of a religious conversion.
Often, it's because people age out of crime, and they simply become less violent. Crime is a young person's game, so it's harder to do it when you're older. We don't want to give up on second chances, but it's always going to be a heavy lift.
Larry Bernstein:
Who's in prison?
Peter Moskos:
You generally hurt somebody to end up in prison. It's not a nickel bag of marijuana. People are sentenced for what the crime they're convicted of, but they're often given a sentence based on the crime they committed. What I mean by that is if you shoot at somebody and are arrested and I'm carrying drugs, and that's the totality of the circumstance in the crime. Well, when it comes to prosecution, the intended victim doesn't show up. It's very hard to show that the shooting even happened, but we got you for drugs. So, you plea down to drug possession, but the real crime you're being sentenced for is this shooting, but that's not going to show up when you look at the sentence. So that leads to many people thinking falsely, that even when you look at the percentage of prisoners that are there for drug offenses, that it's purely a drug crime. There's often very often violence associated with that but that's what they were able to get you on.
Larry Bernstein:
Incapacitation is necessary. Most violent criminals need to be off the streets, otherwise they'll continue to commit crimes. Going back to your corporal punishment thesis, man commits murder, he gets lashed 20 times and he's back on the street. Do we think that will deter murder or not?
Peter Moskos:
Realistically, it'll deter some and not others. There are some people we're honestly afraid of, and those people simply must be incapacitated. But somebody who's got a beef with somebody and shoots them, maybe if we could get back to classic theories of deterrence, of swift, certain and proportional punishment, that that would have a greater effect. Because right now, the odds that you get caught at all are slim. The court system can take years to go on, and then when it ends sometimes, it is time served. I'm not certain that flogging is the answer for that, but we should open our minds to other forms of punishment than simple incapacitation and imprisonment.
Larry Bernstein:
Some people believe that crime waves are a function of economics and poverty. What do you believe?
Peter Moskos:
If we're talking about crime and punishment, we don't see a correlation at the macro level between poverty programs and crime rates. And the main reason is most poor people don't commit crime. This idea that poor people are different than you and me, and we simply have to accept that they're more violent. No. Most poor people go to work and if they get fired, they don't suddenly shoot somebody.
Larry Bernstein:
I grew up in suburban Chicago. There was very little crime. I read the crime report in the suburban newspaper every week. There were no violent assaults or anything like that. That said, recently there was a July 4th massacre by a lunatic with a powerful gun that killed a bunch of people in Highland Park.
If I lived in West Chicago, my views would be completely different if violence was omnipresent.
Peter Moskos:
It's not omnipresent. I don't want to underestimate the level of violence and it's going on in West Garfield Park and parts of West Chicago. But most people are not committing that violence.
Larry Bernstein:
In your book, Cop in the Hood, you describe the Eastern District where drug dealing is going on and the people are calling 911 and then you would show up as a young police officer trying to clear that corner. A Glencoe policeman isn't clearing any corners. Glencoe citizens aren't calling the police frequently. You had some statistics like Eastern District of Baltimore had 40,000 citizens, 20,000 arrests and a hundred thousand 911 calls in a year. It was crazy time.
Peter Moskos:
We're getting omnipresent. I see what you're saying. The more shocking statistic was 13% of men getting murdered in their lifetime in the Eastern District. The levels of violence are unacceptable and incredibly high, but there's still a lot of people that avoid it and raise their kids and get up and go to school.
We could do a better job of making Chicago safer for everyone. We have done a better job to use Baltimore as an example, where I worked in 2015 after the Freddie Gray riots, police stopped clearing drug corners, and clearing drug corners was as simple as pulling up in a police car and people would walk away. It was ritualized. Everyone knew the game. It wasn't that you were arresting everyone there, but you had the power of arrest. Is that the long-term solution? No, but when police stopped being proactive in that method, shootings doubled overnight in a very similar function to what we saw in other cities around the nation in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, and the third precinct in Minneapolis was burnt down. An immediate drop in proactive policing and a concurrent, immediate increase in violence. These things really did happen overnight. It's like a social experiment and it's not suddenly that poverty or unemployment, all these other things changed overnight. Violence didn't go up with COVID. It went up with civil unrest. It went up with the sense that we can burn down a police precinct. The symbolism of that was major.
This is just my theory, but the real turning point is that after that night Minneapolis the next night in New York you had stores looted. I hate the idea of the thin blue line. It is a somewhat reactionary conservative line, but that line broke down and that's not a good place for society to be. COVID certainly was a huge deal, but violence didn't go up in other nations during COVID. It was a uniquely American phenomenon, and it was one that started on a very specific date in late May 2020.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's talk about your experiences as a police officer in Baltimore. You were a PhD student at Harvard in sociology and interested in policing.
Peter Moskos:
I started grad school in 1995. I've always wanted to study the New York City crime drop. Murders by 1997 were cut in half in New York City, went from 2000 to under 1000. Meanwhile, in the proverbial ivory tower, the experts in the field are saying that what is happening is impossible that police don't prevent crime. This smug assumption among sociologists and criminologists that we have to improve society to bring down crime. The other key things they stressed were gun policy and drug treatment, but none of that was happening in New York. Giuliani cut social spending massively in New York in those years, and he defunded social programs and put that money into policing and violence plummeted.
This is a new paradigm we're in. At some point the old theory is going to have to fall, and I want to be front and center when that happens.
I got to Baltimore and the acting commissioner said, “why don't you become a cop for real?” I was hired, went on the streets in the Eastern district through the midnight shift for my 20 months in Baltimore.
Larry Bernstein:
What it's like to clear a corner?
Peter Moskos:
I policed where The Wire was filmed. Specifically, I policed the area around Hopkins Hospital, where there was a 24-hour drug corner at Wolf and Ashland. If drug dealers could just do it quietly, it wouldn't be such a problem. But it goes along with shouting and public drinking, and then someone breaks a bottle and then there's a fight and then there's a shooting.
Clearing corners, you would simply pull up and stare at somebody. There'd be a group of six or eight and you're alone patrolling there, but they would walk around the block because if they don't, then you get out of your car. You could find a legal reason to stop them in part because of the violence there. I will say that any cop could find a legal reason to make a stop. It could be done legally; it could be done constitutionally.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about the police force. Is it integrated? What did you see in Baltimore?
Peter Moskos:
It depends on the city. You can't summarize nationwide. Baltimore is a majority black town with a majority almost all black power structure and a majority minority police department. Baltimore is different than northern Idaho. There's an old guard often represented by the police union of white, more conservative cops.
It's important to remember, for most cops, it is just a job, and you don't wake up in the morning on some crusade. You go to work, you punch the clock, you do your job, and then you go home to your family. Ideology is not up front and center in day-to-day policing. That said, it is a very conservative institution, and most police officers are very politically conservative. But would it be nicer to have more political diversity in the police world? I think yes, but I say that as a lifelong Democrat and liberal voter.
Should that be the main goal? No, we have other things to worry about.
Larry Bernstein:
I love The Wire. Did you feel it was accurate?
Peter Moskos:
The Wire started filming when I was there in Baltimore, and it helped my dissertation and writing Cop in the Hood. It was so much more realistic than any other cop shows ever made. It changed the genre. The dialogue was great. Was it a hundred percent realistic? No, it is a TV show, but I would say it was 80% realistic. But even the parts that weren't realistic often served a greater purpose, whether it was to focus on the harms of the war on drugs and to highlight the stupidity of arresting people for the sake of arresting people.
David Simon's a smart guy and his writers like George Pelicano know the streets. It was from the perspective of detectives as most cop shows are because they're not constantly interrupted by radio calls. Things that weren't realistic just to point it out. You could not keep the concept of Hamsterdam, which was the idea to concentrate all the drugs in one block and let the rest of the area be peaceful, and there's no way you could keep that secret for even a day, but as a thought experiment, that's a pretty great thing. That block was in my post where they filmed the episode of Hamsterdam on the Wire.
Larry Bernstein:
The philosophy of the public officials in Baltimore was to encourage harm reduction and needle exchanges. What did you think of those ideas in practice?
Peter Moskos:
Policies which were called harm reduction take the drug user out of the criminal justice system. Focus on drug treatment was a failure, and it set back harm reduction that could be effective. I've seen it be effective in Amsterdam. What it resulted in was a lot of drug addicts. The quality-of-life issues became worse. People shooting up in public, people not behaving.
How do you get the money to buy the drugs? Are we going to care about the petty theft involved in this? Needle exchange does reduce the spread of diseases: HIV and hepatitis. I am not against needle exchange. The problem is it often is linked to an ideology that is anti-policing. And to simply say we implemented needle exchange is not indicative of success. Did it reduce overdoses? Did it reduce disease? But then what are its impacts on people who are not part of needle exchange? What if you live next to that needle exchange? Are there more needles in playgrounds or is there more violence? I had just like to see some real data.
Larry Bernstein:
You talk about shame and stigmatizing bad behavior. This used to be core to the criminal justice system. Even in the 18th century, we had the stockade, and when you gave the example of flogging in the public square, it was a combination of pain and shame. We've rejected both corporal punishment and the use of shame to change behavior. Why is that? Why are they related to each other and what is it that as a humane society we're going to withdraw shame and corporal punishment from the tool set?
Peter Moskos:
Corporal punishment and shame were linked, but you could have one without the public part of punishment. What is dangerous about the prison system is that it is not transparent. It is not public. We need to know what goes on. There is less corruption, less abuse when things are open and public.
Shame is directed from others as opposed to guilt. We're much more of a guilt culture. From society, that we also want to link shame with a level of forgiveness.
Larry Bernstein:
I did a book club with a Cal Berkeley Sociology Professor David Harding, and he said you shouldn't judge people in prison by their worst decision.
Peter Moskos:
Should you judge someone by their best moment? Of course you should judge people for what they've done. People are complicated and can change, and good people do bad things and vice versa.
Larry Bernstein:
Going back to your flogging example, you said it would be voluntary and you could walk home or hobble home.
Peter Moskos:
Awkwardly. Yes.
Larry Bernstein:
But it goes to the core of do the crime, do the time, and now it's do the crime, whoop your ass.
Peter Moskos:
There's a benefit of honesty, and that's what bugs me about the prison system, we're not honest about it. The benefits to prison max out after a while. Part of the problem is we're not quick enough to punish people for minor crimes and then too quick to lock them up for a very long time. It's almost rolling the dice like you got away with it 10 times, but the 11th, we're going to get you. Since I've written the book with progressive prosecution, people aren't even spending a night in jail when they do something wrong. I think there's a great benefit to you getting into a fight and hurt someone, then you spend the weekend in jail.
That is a great deterrent effect. When I wrote In Defense of Flogging, I was worried it would be misinterpreted and I would become some fascist hero. It never did cross over into the conservative world despite its title.
The left got it. Mother Jones listed it as a book of the year. The Atlantic called me a brave thinker, and maybe it was because there was a vacuum of honesty in this discussion of criminal justice that appealed to people.
Larry Bernstein:
George Floyd ends up dying and the city burns. What happened?
Peter Moskos:
What happened must be addressed. The city burns that crossed the line. It was not inevitable. The city gave up that police precinct. Riots can be prevented; riots should be prevented. It's not the voice of the unheard. These are violent actions, and a mob rule is scary. It was murder with George Floyd. The slogan was no justice, no peace. In this case, there was justice. The system worked in the sense that the cop was arrested, tried and convicted, and there still wasn't peace.
What's interesting is that it happened in Minneapolis. Why was this guy a field training officer, training other cops? There absolutely were systemic problems here that must be corrected. But it turns out that Minneapolis Police Department was a poster child for the academic reform movement up till that moment. It got all the implicit bias training. That was supposed to be an example of successful progressive police reform. A lot of that reform was not productive.
The whole country suffered because cops murdered a man in Minnesota. Police were baffled elsewhere. What does it have to do with me? I have a friend who's a ranking police officer. She's a black woman. And I remember talking to her in 2020, and she said, if I have to look down at one more white bitch calling me a racist, I'm going to go crazy. I am old enough to be her mother. And she's just like, you have picked the wrong side here. You don't understand me. You don't understand what I have done and my commitment and the things I have been through.
People have a right to be angry, but what do you do when you're angry? And hopefully it's not to rob a liquor store. They're supposed to be adults, and you're not allowed to act out no matter how angry you are. 2020 was a disaster. The increase in murders and all the property damage four or five years later, we're finally starting to get back to where we were. But that was quite a setback.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to policing, punishment, rehabilitation, shame, and incapacitation?
Peter Moskos:
I'm optimistic that the pendulum has swung back from crazy. We seem to be more accepting now that the police are part of the solution. They're not perfect but the police have to be seen as part of the solution or else we are doomed. There is no alternative to policing. Now, that's a very limited form of optimism to say we've corrected some of the bad of the past few years. But if you asked me that question a couple years ago, I would not have been optimistic in any way. Violence is going down, not to record lows yet, but it is trending in the correct direction in most places, not everywhere. I'm optimistic that the center can hold.
Larry Bernstein:
Peter, you're working on a new book that is coming out in the next couple of months. Can you give us a little preview?
Peter Moskos:
I'd love to wet people's appetite. The book is called Back From the Brink. It's about New York City's extraordinary crime drop in the 1990s. And it goes back into why I got into the policing field in the first place, because as I mentioned before, I started grad school when crime was going down in New York and no one had the answer. I've been working on it for over 10 years since I conducted my first interview. It is the story told from the police officer's perspective who were on the job at the time. It's a collection of interviews. It starts in the seventies when New York seemed to be going to hell. And it talks about the dramatic transformation and change of leadership and the lives saved in the 1990s when New York City, despite everybody's prediction, cut murders in half. And it should be out in February or March, published by Oxford University Press, Back from the Brink by Peter Moskos.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Peter for joining us today.
If you missed our previous podcast, check it out. The topic was Is the War in Gaza Just? Our speaker was Michael Walzer who is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He previously taught politics and government at Princeton and Harvard. Michael wrote the leading book in his field entitled Just and Unjust Wars. We discussed his moral philosophy of a just war and applied it to the current conflict in Gaza.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, good-bye.
Check out our previous episode, Is The War in Gaza Just, here.
Whipping in the Public Square