In Defense of Flogging

To punish criminals, we rely on an expensive, inefficient, and vastly overcrowded system of penitentiaries. with more than 2.3 million people behind bars, america now has more prisoners than soldiers--more prisoners, indeed, than any other country on earth, more even than Stalin at the peak of the Soviet gulags. And yet our favored mode of punishment does little but breed criminality and destroy family ties and job prospects. we need an alternative, a method of punishment that is cheaper, transparent, and more humane. with an argument that is at once boldly philosophical and devastatingly pragmatic, criminologist Peter Moskos forces us to drastically rethink accepted notions of crime and justice--and to ponder the possibilities for real change--in In Defense of Flogging.