The caning is no joke. A former director of prisons in Singapore once said, “The officer uses the whole of his body weight and not just the strength of his arm … He pivots on his feet to deliver the stroke … After three strokes, the buttocks will be covered in blood.” A retired prison officer says that each stroke of the cane splits the skin-“It happens every time” -and, yes, the scars last for life.
George Fay thought Americans would be outraged. He believes his son’s confession was coerced, and that he is innocent of some of the crimes for which he was convicted. He hoped that American public opinion would force the Singapore authorities to commute the sentence. Forget it. In a NEWSWEEK Poll last week, 38 percent of Americans approve of Michael’s caning, while 52 percent do not. But it’s those in the minority who are calling the tune. In letters to Congress and telephone messages to the Singapore Embassy (which, with typical efficiency, has set up a voice-mail box to handle the calls), support for the caning has been strong. Michael’s pain has become the hot issue on talk radio. According to Michael Harrison, a talk-show host in Springfield, Mass., who edits an industry newsletter, 90 percent of recent callers want to see Michael striped. “I get hate mail, I get hate calls,” says George Fay. “I’ve seen an ugly side to our society. The very thing that could save Mike is outrage by the American people, and the opposite is happening.”
What’s going on here? True, police say, Michael got involved with a group of kids who vandalized 50 cars in a posh part of Singapore last year. True, he was known in the Singapore American School as a troublemaker. But this was his first offense; in 1989 he had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and placed on medication. If he had spray-painted cars in Kettering, according to municipal court Judge Larry Moore, he would probably have been fined a maximum of $750, ordered to pay some restitution and put on probation. Instead, he’s going to be thrashed and bloodied in a foreign land, and America doesn’t seem to care. President Bill Clinton may have called the sentence “extreme” (though Singapore points out that Michael could have got eight strokes), but America has hardly championed Michael. Why not?
It’s Michael’s bad luck to have become the lightning rod for two fashionable arguments, neither of which helps him. The first claims that though the overall crime rate in the United States may have declined in the last two years, Americans are right to be mad as hell about crimes of vandalism. An important way of reducing all crime, it is said, is to clean up the streets. The second claims that there are some wonderful “Asian values” of order and responsibility typified by Singapore’s penal code. Lim Soo Ping, deputy secretary of the Singaporean Ministry of Home Affairs, says that the price of fighting crime should be paid by “crooks and troublemakers, not by lawabiding citizens.” Michael can’t win. Some conservatives call talk radio and demand swift and terrible retribution for his sins. Some liberals are in equal parts skeptical that America is so terrific and eager to give due weight to the habits of other cultures. Besides, even liberals are tough on crime these days.
Though America remains a violent place, we were supposed to be reaching a consensus that corporal punishment was uncivilized. David Rothman, a professor of social medicine and history at Columbia University, has been shocked by the support in America for the caning, which he calls “something approximating torture.” This is not quite where historians thought the world was heading. Rothman of the Enlightenment, the period between roughly 1740 and 1840 saw a profound change in Western attitudes toward punishment and a growing distaste for the willful infliction of pain. Once, punishment was public; authorities imposed a “spectacle of suffering” that was meant to terrorize the populace. In 1759, wrote Voltaire in “Candide,” the English thought it was “a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.” The stocks, the pillory, the gallows, the guillotine-all were meant to instill a fear of authority.
But the very publicity of punishment backfired. Mobs could (and did) rescue favorites who had been condemned. And then fear turned to disgust. Public executions in America were attacked in 1787 by the highly influential Dr. Benjamin Rush, who gave a paper on the subject in Benjamin Franklin’s house. Increasingly, punishment was moved inside prisons. Britain last used the pillory in 1830; France in 1832. New York banned public executions in 1835, though it took more than a century to stop them for good. In 1936, Rainey Bethea was hanged for murder in Owensboro, Ky.; The New York Times guessed that 10,000 attended, some of whom snipped bits of Bethea’s hood as souvenirs. And the United States hasn’t seen such a spectacle since.
Flogging, too, fell afoul of a new mood of civility. Reformers argued that if you were going to lock someone up, you didn’t need to thrash him, too. The last state to flog a man was Delaware, which used “Red Hannah,” a whipping post in New Castle, until 1952. (Delaware used the pillory until 1905-its legislature was unwilling to fund a system of prisons, and the state became notorious for its attachment to the lash.) Though no international treaty formally bans corporal punishment as a sentence for crime, the U.N. Human Rights Committee declared in 1982 that bans on torture or cruel and degrading treatment “must extend to corporal punishment.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, as elsewhere in the West, the use of the paddle in schools came under attack. Good teachers know the value of humiliating troublemakers-which suggests that the stocks and the pillory had their uses-but they now beat kids much less than they once did. In 1976, says Irwin Hyman, the director of a center for the study of corporal punishment at Temple University, only two states banned corporal punishment in schools; today, 27 do. The NEWSWEEK Poll shows that 56 percent of Americans disapprove of the practice. Hyman thinks that makes sense; his research shows that far from discouraging deviant behavior in schools, the paddle may actually increase a propensity for violence. “Whenever people are given power to inflict pain on others,” Hyman says, “that power is abused.”
But if the movement of public opinion has been against caning, why isn’t there more vocal support for Michael? The editor of the Dayton Daily News says that as the week went on, he received more calls opposing the caning. But spotted owls have been given more breaks than this. The answer lies in graffiti-daubed subways, in the stench of urinedrenched stairways, in the tire-kicking rage of finding your car antenna snapped off.
Americans outraged by such disorder may be on to something. In an influential article in 1982, James Q. Wilson of UCLA and George Kelling of Northeastern University argued that if society wanted to fight crime, it should “recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.” Kelling now explains the “broken windows” argument by saying, “If you want to prevent crime, waiting for it to happen and then stopping it may not work. If you restore order, people will be less fearful, use the streets and maintain [order] themselves.”
Follow that logic, and you don’t laugh off an escapade like Michael’s as youthful indiscretion. You hammer him, just like Singapore has done, and just like (though without using the cane) Rudy Giuliani, the new mayor of New York, would like to do. Since January, Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton have cracked down on “quality of life” crimes, scaring the daylights out of kids who skip school, rounding up the squeegee men who waylay cars at the city’s tollbooths.
All this, doubtless, will make the Singaporeans feel smug. Not that they need much encouragement. With a population of 2.7 million, Singapore had 58 murders and 80 rapes last year, compared with 1,058 murders and 1,781 rapes in Los Angeles. The city-state bans spitting in public and failure to flush public toilets. Corporal punishment is on the increase. In 1992, 1,422 people were sentenced to the cane; in 1993, 3,244. And for two years its diplomats have waged a paper offensive against those who would impose “Western values” on the East.
Lee Kuan Yew, the creator of modern Singapore, recently told Foreign Affairs magazine that in America, “The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society.” Americans, he thinks, should not “foist their system indiscriminately on societies in which it will not work.” Singapore sources close to Michael Fay’s case say that the authorities backed away at the last minute from a plea bargain that would have spared the rod. The case has sent a clear and no doubt intentional message to the kids of the newly affluent Singaporean middle class: if we can thrash an American, we can certainly thrash you, so put that spray can back on the shelf. And there may be more messages to come. Stephen Freehill, another American, may soon face charges similar to Michael’s (unlike Michael he has refused to enter a plea bargain). Stephen is only 16 years old, the minimum age at which he may be caned.
To some degree, the governments of other East Asian states share Singapore’s view that what matters is not “human rights” and “civil rights” but order and economic success. In 1986, despite protests, Malaysia executed two Australians for drug smuggling, and its prime minister, enraged by implications of corruption in the “free” British press, has banned British firms from receiving new contracts. Thailand has jailed 42 Americans for drug offenses, 15 of whom are serving life sentences. Tell that to America’s talk-radio crowd and they’d demand a few more Asian values at home.
But perhaps they shouldn’t. For the whole claim for those vaunted Asian values is drenched in hypocrisy. In high-minded Singapore recently, the producers of a stage play with a couple of scenes of brief nudity equipped it with a red warning light, so that members of the audience could avert their gaze as if they were 19th-century vicars. But Singaporeans and Malaysians flock to Thailand’s sex parlors to enjoy child prostitutes. Thailand may incarcerate loads of small-fry mules smuggling dope, but it leaves untouched the drug kingpins who work in collusion with government, military and police officials. And many Asians are far less unhappy about “Western values” than their governments. In the last 10 years, members of the new Asian middle class from South Korea to Bangkok have been prepared to demonstrate for (and die for) not order and economic success but free speech and human rights.
American penology is itself loaded with hypocrisies. Most Americans may balk at caning people, but from the president on down, they don’t mind killing them. Amnesty International reports that since 1977 America has executed five men who committed crimes when they were juveniles. There was little outcry in America last year when Ramon Montoya, a Mexican citizen, was executed in Texas, though Mexico abolished capital punishment in 1929. The conditions in some American prisons are hardly more civilized than those in Thai brothels.
That blot on America’s record is worth remembering. Jim O’Dell, the police chief in Kettering, describes himself as a “hardliner against the criminal.” But he thinks the caning sentence in Singapore is “inhumane and insensitive … I don’t think it’s a punishment that should be used by civilized people.” Yet the sad fact is that civilized people do use inhumane punishments, in America as much as in Singapore. When the last call has been made to the last talkshow program on Michael Fay, when the last smug reference to Asian values has been heard, when the last accusations of mutual hypocrisy have been traded, one truth will remain. West or East, the path that men of the Enlightenment took toward human decency more than 200 years ago still stretches ahead of us all.
A young American man in Singapore Is to receive a severe caning under the law there for punishIng vandalism. Do you approve or disapprove?
58% Approve 52% Disapprove
In the U.S., would caning be the right punishment, too harsh, or too easy for those convicted of: (percent saying too harsh)
60% Vandalism 79% Panhandling 73% Graffitispraying 4B% Gang fighting 42% Assault 48% Robbery 36% Drug dealing
THE NEWSWEEK POLL, APRIL 7-8,1994
Which comes closer to your view:
59% Support surgical or chemical castration of men repeatedly convicted of rape or child molesting
34% Oppose It as extra harsh or not likely to prevent other forms of assault in the future
FOR THIS NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES INTERVIEWED 751 ADULTS TELEPHONE APRIL 7-8,1994. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS. SOME RESPONSES NOT SHOWN. THE NEWSWEEK POLL Copyright 1994 By NEWSWEEK, INC. Amputation and corporal punishment Most commonly severing hands and feet
Singapore is not alone in meting out severe punishments. A global roundup of the 16 countries with corporal punishment on their books.
Punishments include amputating hands and stoning
Flogging reintroduced in 1991; not yet used
Flogging mandated for 42 crimes
Thousands of women reported stoned for adultery since 1979
Last caning in 1977; plans to abolish it
10 years in prison and caning for embezzlement
In 1991 3 men convicted of rape were publicly flogged
In 1992 a woman accused of adultery received 200 lashes
Caning for rapists, robbers, vandals and foreign tourists who overstay their visas
Since 1986 over 75,000 criminals, mostly blacks, have been flogged
Children as young as 7 subject to flogging, mutilation and execution
Caning for youths convicted of petty or violent crimes
Last year police flogged an 11-year-old 20 times for cocaine possession
In 1989 a 16-year-old was given 550 lashes for drinking alcohol
77 prisoners flogged over a 3-month period
1993 legislation allows caning of juveniles
Twenty three states still permit corporal punishment -usually paddling -in public schools, but state-sponsored flogging of criminals in the United States became rare by the 20th century. And the pillory -an upright wooden frame that confined offenders and allowed the public to pelt them has been virtually extinct in this country for more than 150 years.
John Adams’s ‘Rules for the Regulation of the Navy," drawn up in the Constitutional Congress, authorized flogging on American warships, permitting up to 12 lashes on any enlisted man for such offenses as swearing or drunkenness.
Pennsylvania, setting the pace for penal reform, passed a new criminal code establishing a system of proportional prison time to replace the system of capital and corporal punishment, the hallmarks of the English Code.
The pillory was abolished in the United States, except in Delaware, which abolished it in 19O5.
Several state prisons experimented with the “shower bath,” in which inmates were placed in a small closet, with their legs, arms and necks confined in wooden stocks. They were drenched with streams of water for hours at a time.
The Senate abolished naval flogging.
The Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery, under which blacks had often been flogged.
New Jersey became the first state to ban corporal punishment in schools. But local authorities defied the ban, which wasn’t honored until the 20th century.
The revised Articles of War banned flogging, branding, marking or tattooing on the body of any serviceman.
The last legal flogging in the United States was held in Delaware, which did not abolish the practice until 1972.
More than 500,000 public-school students were subjected to physical punishment during the school year-compared with 1.4 million in 1981-82.
In a survey of parents, 38 percent said they used time-outs to discipline their children; 24 percent used lecturing, and 19 percent used spanking. In a similar survey in 1962, 59 percent said they used spanking.
West Virginia becomes the 27th state to ban corporal punishment in public schools.
PHOTOS: The pillory; whippings
STEVEN STRASSER
SINGAPORE IS PROUD TO BE tough. As a multiethnic island run by a Chinese majority and surrounded by potentially hostile Malay powers, the little city-state has always based its survival on tight discipline. Singapore, which inherited its criminal code from British colonialists, cracks down against anything that smacks of a political challenge–including, in an earlier era, men with long hair. Its heavy fines-1,000 Singapore dollars ($640) for such offenses as using chewing gum, spitting or feeding birds-are legendary. And holding a foreign passport has never been a guarantee of immunity. While Michael Fay faces the cane, a Dutchman and a young Hong Kong woman-who like Fay was only 18 years old when arrested-face the gallows for drug smuggling.
Many Americans living in Singapore believe the punishment in the Fay case is too harsh for the crime. But overall, Singapore’s toughness is one of its greatest selling points to foreign investors. Government corruption is practically nonexistent, contracts are enforced and the streets are clean and safe. Singapore is booming, and it gives its people excellent housing, health care and a secure retirement (which it requires them to save for). An American visitor marveling at the glistening city recently asked his hosts how Singapore could be preserved if the whole island were picked up and deposited in the United States. The answer: You would have to put a barbed wire fence around it.
