merited, will go the way of other “alternatives” to punishment,nbecause it does not address the fact that punishment must benpunishment. The public, in my view, understands and demandsnthis. Legislators understand this to a point, by enacting severenprison terms, but they ignore the fiscal implications of theirnlegislation. These alternatives to prison have simply subvertednthe central idea of punishment: the intentional and deliberateninfliction of pain and suffering on the offender.nThis disjunction between the demand for punishment andnthe acknowledgment of its nastier side is at the bottom of ournproblem. The public demands more punishment, but does notnwant to see its actual effects. Prison does a wonderful job ofnburying the seamier side of punishment and hiding it from thenmasses. The offenders are locked away, and the prisons are builtnin isolated places. Likewise, legislators have been carriednaway with mandatory sentencing without any idea at all of whatnpain a year in prison actually brings to an offender. Indeed, thenjust deserts advocates of the 70’s fed this delusion by assumingnthat, because prison could be measured in years and months,nthis made it a precise punishment. But the reverse is tme: thenactual pain physically and mentally suffered by inmates evennin one day, varies enormously, and is never specified by thenjudge. (Judges who have tried to do this have been houndednout of office. One New York judge sentenced a sodomite tona particular prison, expressing his hope that the offender wouldnget there a taste of his own medicine. The local newspaper wasnoutraged.)nWe have reached the point in the late 20th century atnwhich society, one, is unable to accept the fact that punishmentnis the intentional infliction of pain and suffering onnan offender for an offense; two, is either unwilling or unablento accept direct responsibility for inflicting punishment, eithernfiscally or morally; and three, has abstracted punishment to thenpoint where the number of years pronounced in the prison sentencenis supposed to take the place of punishment. That is,nthe judge pronounces the sentence of x years in prison, but hasnabsolutely no say in what type of prison, what type of sufferingninside the prison the offender will exf>erience. Indeed, therenis an influential school of penologists that believes offendersnare sent to prison not for punishment but as punishment. Theynsee the mission of penologists as mitigating the experience ofnprison. They try to reduce the pain and suffering, whichntakes from the sentence its punitive intent. It was for thesenreasons that I advocated the substitution of corporal punishmentnfor prison for many nonviolent offenders. I hoped that it wouldnhelp us to see the realities of punishment and begin to acceptndirect responsibility for the pain and suffering intentionallyninflicted on offenders. In this way we might come close to thenmoral responsibility displayed by our forefathers whom we arendisposed to judge harshly because of the violent punishmentsnthey inflicted. But at least they administered their punishmentsnopenly and directly for all the community to see. They werennot ashamed to punish.nWhy are we ashamed? I believe it is because of the redefinednsensibilities we are supposed to have as part of living in a “civilized”nsociety. We try to submerge into our unconscious thenviolence that we wish upon offenders. Intentionally inflictingnpain and suffering is seen as emulating the behavior of thenoffenders we punish. But did not the criminal intentionallyninflict pain or suffering on his victim? This is the conundmmnof criminal punishment (and perhaps all punishment): innorder to punish, we must actually indulge in some of the samenbehavior as the one whom we are punishing. The Judeo-Christianntradition understood this contradiction by trying to turnnit to its advantage: it used pain and suffering as a method tonteach the offender a lesson, to correct him. This technique isntaken to its logical extreme in the great epic of Dante’s DivinenComedy. In his scheme sinners are made to practice thenvirtue that is opposite their sin. Property offenders, for example,nare condemned forever to change form, never having a formnof their own, since they never in life recognized the boundariesnof property owned by others. While Dante’s punishments arenintended for those relegated to hell and purgatory, there is muchnwe can learn from his theory of punishment, for Dante inventednways to inflict pain that were at the same time imbued withngood: the painful practice of virtue.nThe problem, I believe, is to figure out a way to extract somethingngood out of the “evil” that is inflicted on the offender.nFor it must be said that there is very little that is positive in ournpunishment system today. Though used by legislatures thatnbelieve punishment will reduce the crime rate, today there isnno morally positive justification for punishing, beyond the entirennegative ethic left to us by the just deserts advocates: then”offenders deserve it.”nOur challenge, therefore, is to produce a punishment thatncarries with it the element of moral disapproval but that alsonturns punishment into a positive act. The 18th-century utilitariansnthought they had the answer to this puzzle when theynargued that only enough pain should be administered in ordernto outweigh the pleasures of the offense. But it soon becamenclear that this was just another version of the deterrence thesis.nGovernments since then have enshrouded this deterrentnprinciple in the moral-sounding words of the “just deserts” argument,nwhen all along their politically simple aim has been tonreduce the crime rate. This might be defensible as a moral justificationnfor punishment if it could be demonstrated that massivenincreases in punishment do in fact deter crime (which itncannot do).nAlthough my scheme for the reintroduction of corporal punishmentnwas so soundly rejected, I have not given up on thenidea on which the thesis was based: to acknowledge our responsibilitynfor inflicting pain and suffering on those who have brokennthe law. I can see now that I began at the wrong end ofnthe criminal justice system, although logically it was the appropriatenplace to begin, since that is where the majority of offendersnare and certainly where the greatest fiscal savings might havenbeen made. However, I recognize that to inflict pain openlynon an offender is an extremely negative act, and certainly I madenno attempt to argue that this process was morally more acceptablenthan the kind of behavior the offender himself may havenperformed. Rather, I based my argument for the moral superioritynof corporal punishment by contrasting its merits to prison.nBy adopting this strategy, I won the battle against the prison,nbut I ignored the more difficult problem of how to apply painnand suffering while at the same time making it a positive act.nI propose, therefore, to turn to the other end of the criminalnjustice system, and ask what we might do to those few whonhave been condemned to death for the most hideous of crimes.nTheirs is behavior that is not so difficult to pronounce as evil,nand whose behavior we might try to avoid in our punishment.nAt the same time, though, in an effort to raise ourselvesnabove the level of the murderer, we must try to extract somethingngood out of the evil that we do to the murderer (such asnnnMAY 1992/21n