Let convicts choose: Prison or the lash?

It was a pretty good column, and I always had a hunch it would make an even better book. Now it has, and I only wish I had written it.

Peter Moskos, a criminologist at the City University of New York and a former Baltimore police officer, has just published “In Defense of Flogging,’’ a serious if startling proposal to drastically shrink America’s “massive and horrible system of incarceration’’ by letting most convicted criminals choose between going to prison and a semi-public flogging with a rattan cane. An absurd thesis? Don’t reject it out of hand, Moskos says, before considering what you would want for yourself. “Given the choice between five years in prison and 10 brutal lashes, which would you choose?’’ A flogging would be intensely painful and bloody, but it would be over in a few minutes. Prison would mean losing years of your life, being locked away from everything and everyone you care about.

Offered those alternatives - hard time or the lash - most people would choose the lash. Better the short, sharp humiliation of a flogging than the prolonged emotional torture of being shut in a cage. Better to be punished and be done with it.

Despite its title, “In Defense of Flogging’’ is less a brief for the resumption of corporal punishment than an indictment of America’s system of mass imprisonment.

The United States locks up people at a rate unmatched anywhere. There are 2.3 million people behind bars in this country - more than the populations of Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco combined. Both in raw numbers and as a percentage of the whole, the United States has more prisoners than any other country. With an incarceration rate of 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, America outjails not only every advanced democracy - in Canada and Western Europe, the rate of imprisonment is about one-seventh what it is here - but even the world’s dictatorships and autocracies. In Russia, the incarceration rate is 629 per 100,000. In Cuba, it’s 530. In Iran, it’s 220.