Salib’s claim is radical: “We should not imprison people who commit crimes.” Instead we should force criminals to work, under monitoring, in the highest-value available jobs in order to make financial restitution, while adding additional deterrence in the form of “nonmonetary sanctions.” Writes Salib, “this paper does not endorse any particular nonmonetary sanction,” but he notes that “history presents a startling array of options, including: flogging, pillory, running the gauntlope, tarring and feathering, branding, and many more.”
The idea that a combination of financial sanctions and corporal punishment could replace imprisonment seems insane, even to a columnist floating slightly crazy ideas. There will always be a group of offenders sufficiently dangerous to require long-term separation from society. And most of our prisoners, contrary to certain convenient myths, are not nonviolent offenders; they have been convicted of robbery, assault, rape and murder.
But not every violent offender is equally dangerous — a fact already reflected in sentencing, which releases many prisoners relatively swiftly. So there would be room to experiment with Salib’s proposal, to offer some of the convicted the stocks followed by supervised labor, without leaping to the abolish-prison stage.
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