Bender in Singapore.......

WOW,........ i'm a lucky bloke, lucky the nuns didn't have that one.
am in agreement, its possibly needed here in our days. think it could help keep our jails a little emptier.

Mabe if your law system incorperated that into punishment there would be less people assulting police officers......

mmmm i remember getting a plastic ruler slapped accross my arse hurtthats mum not when dad got home!!!!

It is a barbaric punishment.

WTF[}:)]
All jokes aside - that's not right...
What did he do to deserve that??

Crime week on Triple J this week...you're all barking up the wrong tree.

A noted criminologist said on the Jays that harsher punishments have no effect as a deterrent because the perpertrators never think they'll get caught.

He said the true deterrent is showing that a high percentage of wrong-doers get busted. Longer gaol terms only fill up the gaols.

As for the Singapore option. It is barbaric and I question whether it has any effect at all on crime rates, apart from making red-neck vigilante types feel good about themselves.

Flame suit on...

Point taken Pointman. Perhaps the cost and effectiveness of current forms of punishment punishment should be considered too. How much does it cost to lock someone up for six months? Recitivism rates for released prisoners in Australia are very high. This indicates little rehabilitation takes place in our gaols and most probably most inmates leave prison more likely to commit crime and more knowledgable about committing it than when they went in.

There are definately some people in our society who are anti-social and constantly commit crimes. Sometimes they get caught by police. Sometimes they don't. When they get caught they give excuses why it happened before the magistrate. After a few times before the magistrate they use up their excuses, then they get sent to gaol. They most probably get out in a year or less and go back to their old life.

Its a quite expensive system that usually doesn't achieve much. Why not have a cheap system that doesn't achieve much?

"Exhibiting imitation arms when committing scheduled offence"

Does that mean that if you have prosthetic limbs you are more likely to be caned

There has been a lot of research into the effectiveness of this, and where the research is done in an objective manner, the result is that it is both cheap, fast and very much more effective than the mandy pandy so called compassionate approach that we prefer here in the western world.

For punishment to have the greatest effect on someone it has to be as close as possible to the offence. The longer it is delayed the more the recipient forms the opinion that it is just society doing somehting else bad to them that is not deserved and therefore needs to be repaid with further wrongdoing.

Those who have received the lash when asked some time later whether they have had the inclination to reoffend have said that while they might like to, whenever they think of it they get the immediate thought of their previous punishment and that takes the shine off the attraction of repeating the offence, so they don't.

I don't think it should be used as a first punishment for everything, as some people here seem to think will automatically happen, but there are numerous cases of repeat and habitual offenders where this would make a world of difference. It would remove the now long established belief in them that they can do what they like because all they will get is a bit of counselling or home detention or some other penalty which they can totally ignore.

Back in the middle of last century this sort of thing on a milder scale was carried out as a matter of course in boarding schools. I can tell you from experience, it worked. You really thought carefully before you tried again whatever the stunt was that got you in that situation.