On judicial corporal punishment

I oppose capital punishment for civilian crimes, for reasons I shan't go into here.  But I favour the use of judicial corporal punishment and indeed other forms of non-prison punishment, such as those exposing people to public ridicule or opprobrium (e.g. I understand that in some parts of America those convicted of certain traffic offences are required to stand by the roadside wearing placards detailing their crimes).

Do I need a reason for being in favour of such punishments, or would it be sufficient simply to refute arguments against them?  Why should we assume that prison or community service or monetary fines are the only legitimate forms of punishment?  I would have thought the natural startpoint to be that punishment should be just, whence the natural sequel is that the punishment should fit the crime, and it is far from obvious why prison is the only punishment to fit every crime.

Hence, I don't accept that I need any particular argument in favour of such punishments, beyond that they may serve the needs of justice better, be more fitting for certain kinds of crime (or certain kinds of criminal), than alternatives such as prison.

In particular, my main motivation for wanting to use these other punishments is that they could, in certain cases, be more humane than prison.  I do not favour corporal punishment on the grounds of doubting that prison is "tough enough".  Specifically, it seems to me that in certain cases, by using corporal punishment in combination with imprisonment, we could cut down on the amount of time people need to spend in prison.

In that sense, corporal punishment allows people more life post-punishment, and they are less likely to be dehumanised by prison or to fall into bad company.  They will also carry the psychological imprint of the corporal punishment - a potentially cleansing turning point for their lives.  Perhaps they may also carry scarring to serve as a (potentially private) reminder of their errors.

Corporal punishment or public humiliation might allow us to discharge some of the vital retributive element of punishment and more visible deterrence, thereby allowing more scope for prison to focus on rehabilitation (perhaps somewhat in tension with the public protection aspect).

I believe that a richer set of punishment instruments would also free us to feel less inhibited about prisoners doing things like outward bound exercises - if they have been flogged before they serve their sentences and the imprisonment aspect is less about retribution, then perhaps there would be more public acceptance that outward bound courses serve (as they do) a useful rehabilitation and character-building function.

Of course, the choice of when and when not to employ corporal punishment would require fine judgement - infinitely better left to judges than politicians.  But presumably a key factor would be the nature and history of the criminal.  A young armed robber who is regularly beaten by his parents might be a less appropriate subject of flogging than would be a white collar fraudster who had made a cost-benefit calculation - or perhaps a judge would consider it to be the other way around.

The key counter-argument I want to address is the instinctive thought that there is something "barbaric" about physical punishments.  I reject this.  Indeed, history suggests the opposite - in less centralised and less orderly societies it is relatively much more common to have financial payments to victims.  Be that as it may, I see nothing but assertion in the claim that corporal punishment is "uncivilised".  And even if it were so, do we really want "civilisation" if that dehumanizes, separates us from justice, drives us to a world in which criminals are to be reprogrammed instead of treated as moral agents and punished in proportion to their misdeeds?  Corporal punishment is earthy, it connects us as a society to pain and blood, it prevents us from turning our faces away from what we do in the name of legal justice.  I believe that our current legal system, as a consequence of its over-politicisation and because of strange cultural attitudes we have developed, involves many perverse disparities between the punishments meeted out.  Corporal punishment, because of its visibility, would expose society more to the consequences of its decisions, and make us try a little harder to ensure that judgements were just for the crime and the criminal and the victim rather than comfortable and comforting for society.  That's what I want from a "civilised" justice system.