Corporal punishment offers no restitution

The argument

The objection begins from a claim about what makes punishment work. The most effective punishments have a restitutive aspect to them: they do something for the party that was harmed, and in doing so they require the transgressor to engage with the harm rather than merely to suffer for it. That engagement is the point of the restitutive process. It is what gets the transgressor to acknowledge that their actions had a detrimental impact on the lives of others, which is the change in understanding a punishment is supposed to produce. Corporal punishment has no restitutive factor. It inflicts pain and nothing else follows from it. The person punished is not asked to repair anything, is not brought into contact with what their action cost anyone, and is given nothing to do that would make the harm's reality apparent to them. What they take away is the experience of being hurt, which teaches them about the punisher rather than about the person they wronged. The comparison with other penalties makes the gap concrete. Community service and fines each offer some collective benefit: labour is performed that the community receives, or money is transferred that can be directed toward those affected. Something flows from the offender to the wronged party, and the obligation is discharged by producing it. Corporal punishment produces nothing. It does nothing for the individual wronged by the infraction or transgression and nothing for the community, which is left exactly as the offence left it, having watched a penalty imposed that compensated no one and failed to compensate the victims affected. A punishment that neither repairs the harm nor brings the offender to understand it is failing at both of the things punishment is for. Because corporal punishment offers no restitution, corporal punishment is bad.

Context

Restitution is an important part of the punitive process. Corporal punishment offers no form of restitution to the victim or the community that suffered.

Premises

Counter-arguments

We do not have to make amends to a victim in order for a punishment to be effective. Many crimes are victimless crimes in the sense that there is no victim for the offender to offer restitution to. These offenders are still able to learn from their crimes and be rehabilitated. Therefore, restitution is not an essential component of the punitive process.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Restitution is not an important part of the punitive process.