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Punishment and Social Practice: On Hughes's The Fatal Shore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

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Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1988 

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References

1. There are, after all, a number of reputable histories of transportation and Australia's early settlements, all of them and more listed in Hughes's excellent bibliography.Google Scholar

2. Heaven and Hell in Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). See also his book based on the TV series, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).Google Scholar

3. Jonathan Simon, Back to the Future: Newman on Corporal Punishment (Review Essay), 1985 A.B.F. Res. J. 927, reviewing my book, Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals (New York: Macmillan, 1985) (“Just and Painful”).Google Scholar

4. G. Rusche & O. Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).Google Scholar

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).Google Scholar

6. However, Simon's essay is a scholarly work that stands out against the many emotionally charged reviews that my book has elicited.Google Scholar

7. Intellectuals of this period were much more directly connected to politicians than they are today. Bentham, Paley, and many other reformers had constant contact with members of Parliament and other politicians. The idea that intellectuals could affect social practice is not all that outrageous. Alisdair Mclntyre has developed this thesis in After Virtue(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) in regard to morality.Google Scholar

8. The role of transportation to America has been little studied by American penologists or historians. The only work specifically on the topic is K. Scott Christianson, The American Experience of Imprisonment 1607-1776 (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Albany, 1981).Google Scholar

9. This compares to about 17,000 lashes a day in India, which was not a penal colony. See Graeme Newman, The Punishment Response (2d ed. New York: Harrow & Heston, 1985) (“Newman, Punishment Response”).Google Scholar

10. This should serve as a salutary reminder to those who claim without examining the actual facts of prison life that “all prisons do is deprive criminals of their liberty.” Prison is, in fact, inseparable from corporal punishment. The Australian penal colonies are but an extreme example of this point.Google Scholar

11. See Newman, Punishment Response ch. 4. Whipping in the military was abolished in 1881. It continued in Australia long after that time.Google Scholar

12. Hughes is careful to distinguish between the system of assignment of convicts in Australia and slavery as it was known in the United States. Convicts were rarely assigned for life. Their time as indentured servants was finite; their children, even if born while their parents were assigned, were born free. A system of slavery like that of the southern United States, with generation after generation as slaves, therefore, could not arise in Australia.Google Scholar

13. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).Google Scholar

14. One presumes he meant that it would be Native Americans performing this ritual. The harshness of his functional morality is unveiled if we restate his question: What are Native Americans for? Google Scholar

15. This is a common and misguided criticism of corporal punishment. The current fad for community corrections could be criticized on the same grounds. Community corrections can be traced back at least to the biblical stoning of the prostitute when Jesus pronounced, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Community corrections was the punishment in colonial America, as so clearly demonstrated in Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter.Google Scholar

16. See Ernest Van den Haag, Punishing Criminals (New York: Basic Books, 1975).Google Scholar

17. See Pietro Marongui & Graeme Newrnan, Vengeance: The Fight Against Injustice (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987).Google Scholar

18. Dante provided a vivid account of this philosophy based on atonement, and in her annotations to this trilogy Dorothy Sayers has developed the most systematic account of this process I have read. See Dante Alighieri, Purgatory, trans. Dorothy Sayers (London, Penguin Books, 1955).Google Scholar

19. Strictly speaking, incarcerated criminals are not incapacitated at all. They are still able to commit crimes against other inmates and their guards, which happens probably at a higher rate than on the outside.Google Scholar

20. Even taking into account the differences in crime rates, since it cannot be shown that crime rates are related consistently to rates of imprisonment.Google Scholar

21. See James Q. Wilson & Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).Google Scholar

22. Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal (New York: Grove Press, 1982).Google Scholar

23. Graphically portrayed by Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast (New York: Random House, 1981).Google Scholar

24. For a detailed account of these minute rules of Australian drinking behavior, see Graeme Newman, The Down Under Cookbook (New York: Harrow & Heston, 1987). The only difference today is that Australians drink beer; in the penal colonies it was rum, encouraged by the New South Wales “Rum Corps.”Google Scholar

25. I have considerably condensed the enormous amount of evidence that Hughes amasses to support this harsh judgment. It attests again to Hughes's prowess as a writer that he could convey page after page of horror and abuse without producing the kind of boredom in the reader similar to that produced by pornographic novels.Google Scholar

26. Maconochie was incredibly ahead of his time. I have only presented the simplest of outlines of his program. He even planned to include group therapy, though on this, the authorities balked. See at 501.Google Scholar

27. I have in mind here, the theses of Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936). We struggle against prevailing paradigms constantly. I tried to do this in Just and Painful (cited in note 3). Sometimes it is more effective to argue within a paradigm and thus highlight its contradictions. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). My intent in Just and Painful was(1)to directly contrast the contemporary practice of prison with the old practice of corporal punishment and demonstrate (I thought easily) how barbaric our modern practices are, and (2) to lay bare the inherently coercive nature of the retributive justification for punishment.Google Scholar

28. Prisons have their own complex imagery, which I have described in Just and Painful. The imagery is complex because it involves a fantastic contradiction: that prison is at once both too severe and too lenient a punishment.Google Scholar

29. Here we recognize our old friend, the theory of general deterrence. The defects of this ethic are well known, especially its inherent lack of limits. See Just and Painfwl part 2 (cited in note 3). Much confusion exists concerning the supposed distinction between deterrence and retribution, its presumed opposite. However, it is apparent that in 18th-century England, retribution itself was used as a deterrent. See Newman, Punishment Response, esp. chs. 7 & 8 (cited in note 9).Google Scholar

30. Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper, 1968).Google Scholar

31. It would be interesting to research whether the pioneering, frontier spirit provided the right kind of challenge to people to “start their lives over.”Google Scholar