CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 June 1938, Page 9

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

BRITISH COMMITTEE'S REPORT. Speaking on the report of the British Committee on Corporal Punishment, Professor J. L. Briefly said in a broadcast talk: —“The committee was emphatic that this or any other punishment is justified only if it either reforms, or deters, and judged by this test the evidence satisfied it that the case. for corporal punishment breaks down. As a reformative influence indeed there is hardly any case to meet. Corporal punishment as inflicted by a court is essentially non-constructive. Administered by a parent or schoolmaster it may well be constructive, for then it is, or ought to be, part of a continuous course or character training. But a magistrate or judge is in a quite different position. He is a stranger; he cannot judge the probable psychological results of the punishment, which are far more important that the physical, and when punishment is over, he has done with the case. So far as effects in character go, they are either nil, or —and this is the serious matter —actually harmful. That corporal punishment may be deterrent, is an argument with more substance. But the committee was satisfied that whatever deterrent effects it has add practically nothing to the protection which society can secure by other punishments, such as imprisonment. Evidence pointing to this conclusion was very voluminous.”