Differences Between Judicial Corporal Punishment And Incarceration

This article is an examination into the differences between judicial corporal punishment as implemented by Islamic countries, and incarceration in the United States. Incarceration, particularly in the United States, is widely known to be a massive taxpayer burden— to the tune of over $52 billion per year. In 2012, the annual cost per inmate in the United States was approximately $21,000 for low-risk inmates, and up to $34,000 for high-risk offenders. Additionally, incarceration places a significant financial burden on the offenders themselves, because they would lose their current jobs, and any job prospects they would have in the future. In comparison, the judicial corporal system in Islamic criminal justice system costs significantly less …show more content…
Firstly, corporal punishment is more forgiving in the long term, compared to incarceration, because of its finite nature. While incarceration typically has a maximum time limit attached, it may not be strictly adhered to. Therefore, some offenders will spend an unnecessary amount of time in prison than what they were originally prescribed. In corporal punishment, the offender is released after a brief recovery period, usually a few days, back into their homes, where they are taken care of by their families. This system means that the government is only temporarily suspending a person’s freedom for a few days, as opposed to incarceration, where you can spend years in prison without a definitive release date. Additionally, incarceration can cause long-term collateral damage to be inflicted on the offender’s family and their …show more content…
The Islamic criminal justice system, by the authors’ own accounts, takes a much more detailed look into individual criminal cases than perhaps the American criminal justice system does. Therefore, one would assume that the Islamic criminal justice system will encounter fewer cases of wrongful conviction than the American system. Consequently, I disbelieve the authors’ statement that incarceration is the superior method of penal punishment when dealing with the issue of wrongful convictions because the Islamic criminal justice system would theoretically have much fewer cases to begin with, and therefore you cannot make such a sweeping statement that the American system is better, because they have so many more cases of wrongful conviction to begin with. Perhaps instead of claiming the American system is superior because incarceration is only temporary compared to the more permanent nature of judicial corporal punishment, the authors could address the flaws in the American system that create so many wrongful convictions in the first