[cedws]

After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear. In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.

[everforward]

It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).

I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.

Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.

TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.

[oreally]

I can make a study that shows 0 wars in the region for decades despite having an army, and say that the logical conclusion should be to disband the army.

People often quote research to mislead and push their narratives. Widen the scope and their narrative falls apart.

In this case it's about going past this (often western-ish) belief that all children are born good and that something in their lives makes them bad. I'd like to propose a different take: that some children will often test their boundaries upon others and choose to say some threats are no big deal, until they actually go through the pain. Amongst those who go through it, even if there's 1 who remembers the pain and refrains from committing the same act in the future, it's worth it. Caning won't stop everything, but it is but one part of the whole net to tackle problem youths, and has effects down the road.

[bwfan123]

> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments

Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.

[BobaFloutist]

Singapore also has 1. ~70% of residents living in public housing.

2. Onerous taxes on automobiles, leading to extremely high public transit usage.

3. Is a city with a controlled national boarde.

I would be very curious to see what would happen if you applied those three factors to any other major city in the world. But for some reason people nearly always only talk about the executions and spankings...

[maxglute]

Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.

[everforward]

Got a link to a study or meta-study? I tried searching, but the results I can find from Singapore match Western research.

A notable divergence here is that Singapore leverages the death penalty _much, much_ more heavily than even the US does. Per capita death penalties were 20.3x higher in Singapore than the US. Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead. That's certainly a strategy, but it's going to make deterrent effects look a lot better because a lot more of the recidivist population is going to end up dead and no longer contributing to crime stats. I.e. it may not be that deterrence works differently there, but that they're more willing to just execute people who aren't deterred.

[gottorf]

Putting your different points together:

> piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent

> not think of consequences

> Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead

Sounds like (in general, not talking about minors) when you execute the people who for whatever reason cannot think far enough ahead for punishment to be an effective deterrent, you eventually will be left with people who are able to do that, who will comprise a less criminal society.

[everforward]

Sure, but that’s not deterrence anymore. The question there is less “will it work” and more “is this morally justifiable?” especially given the concerning proximity to eugenics (which started off as eliminating crime by eliminating people with “crime genes”).

[golem14]

Yet somehow, people aren’t that deterred if they keep executing people at a 20x rate than the U.S.?

I’m confused about that because the executed obviously are not deterred anymore, but the the not-yet executed people still are getting caught at the higher rate than in the U.S.?

Maybe the prison population is much smaller, because people are either law abiding or dead?

[everforward]

The incarceration rate is much lower. The US has an incarceration rate of 541 per 100k, Singapore is 178 per 100k. Singapore is just much more likely to execute convicts; in part because SG has a mandatory death penalty for some crimes, and in part because much of the US doesn’t have the death penalty in all.

It does not appear to be an effective deterrent. https://www.academia.sg/extra/death-penalty-research-appendi... This article has a criticism of the SG government report (Study 6 header) on the deterrent effect when they added the mandatory death penalty in the 90s. The big takeaway is that convictions didn’t drop notably (cannabis convictions dropped a single percentage point, opium convictions went up 2%. Average opium weight seized dropped a ton, but is still like 13 times the mandatory death penalty limit so hard to call it there).

[maxglute]

This 20+ years ago, I think look up "guan" / 管 (to govern) parenting style studies. For quick search, maybe research by Shek on HK school kids, only because name sounds familiar, I don't have access to psych journals anymore.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18047239/

I think look for east asian studies on behavior control / psychologic control and academic outcomes. Usually it was framed in kids raised by "invested" parents with (or without) CP will do better academically than kids who are neglected, i.e. hands off parents. Caveat those research shows CP can still lead to emotional regulation problems, but also higher academic achievement, which IMO what literature / or western rational misses, it's very east asian lens though, you raise kids do well in school, they will get decent opportunities in competitive east Asian environment -> integrate better with society -> have less chance of antisocial behavior.

Rest personal opinion.

I think studies even then say CP also reinforces entire generational violence cycle etc, shit west find horrid, but in east asia it just means strict parenting with optional CP -> prevent anti social behavior... so generation CP loop not virtuous or anything but functional. Like from memory the studies were not pro CP, or CP doesn't have negative effects, just CP effective corrective tool for some, which when applied to east asia society/social layer = if your kid going to have no future without CP, might as well as apply it, because beating a kid to pass national exams opens more opportunities for good life than not. Kids there have that context for "tough love". Asia diaspora with academic focus brings this with them to west. Same from other diaspora (i.e. first gen immigrants from poor countries) that beats kids for not trying hard enough to "make it" because they're socially disadvantaged vs locals/natives. Then subsequent generations adopt western soft parenting, grades / work ethic reverts to mean, which IS (generally) fine in advanced economy context since you can be pretty stupid in west and still do alright. Hence in west-minded find CP archaic, until west starts realizing soft parenting is generating soft populous that is geopolitically not competitive (current anxieties)... which was previously covered up via immigration... from diasporas that are not soft.

Singapore executes like 20 people a year, there are way more than 20 bad apples there. Either way, I think punitive state violence and corporal punishment as parenting instrument different topics. Should state beat people for deterrence, I don't know. Does it have affect on social order? I think statistically likely, maybe not worthwhile. And for some cultures mass catharsis from punitive justice is not... unuseful. Does it prevent individual recidivism? Broadly I don't think so, desperate people do desperate things. Should parents have CP as tool? Yes, shouldn't be universal but also not prohibited - some kids might need a slap or two early in life to shape behavior that correlate with social / upward mobility "success". Which matters in some society much more than others.

[cedws]

Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.

To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.

[roryirvine]

Corporal punishment was banned in the UK in 1998.

In the 28 years since, there have been 175 terrorist-related deaths. Compare that with the 28 years before, when there were 3,262 terrorist-related deaths.

[cedws]

The point of my reply was not that caning equals less terrorism. It was that lenience kills. Your cherry picked numbers also don't really demonstrate anything, much of that 3,262 figure was due to the Troubles.

[roryirvine]

Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.

But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.

[ivanb]

Most if not all the terrorist-related deaths are attributed to The Troubles that ended in - you guessed that - 1998. It is not possible to attribute the deaths or lack thereof to corporal punishment.

[roryirvine]

Well, yes, obviously.

But it's even less possible to claim that the lack of severe punishment has increased terrorism, as cedws was saying.

Even when you exclude NI, terrorism is lower now than in the past yet punishments have not become notably more severe.

[rvnx]

How many terrorists had to be killed upfront in their country to reach that result ?

[roryirvine]

None.

Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.

The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.

[AshleyGrant]

I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.

My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.

I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.

I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.

I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.

The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.

Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.

Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.

Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?

[forshaper]

It is the threat of competent violence that keeps me from, say, sunbathing in a park without clothes on, on a nice day. Our world runs on violence, but we mostly try to deny it, because it serves the few that control the many to keep the many divided.

Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.

[AshleyGrant]

> Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.

That's a rather flippant attitude when given the details of what we're talking about. "Oh well, some folks get caned, whatcha' gonna' do?!"

Also, if the only thing that keeps you from sunbathing nude in a public park is the threat of someone kicking your ass, then that says a lot more about you than you might think. It's not "oh, I shouldn't expose myself to others who have not consented to being exposed to my naked body," it's "someone will inflict physical violence on me, thus I won't do this."

"Our world runs on violence..." Yeah, and there's plenty of us who think that is not something we should be proud of and should instead work to rectify instead of blindly accepting it as fact.

[RiverCrochet]

My sister had an interesting take on this:

"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."

I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.

[lava_pidgeon]

There are many western states with welfare state. Do you think otherwise?

[rfrey]

Countries taking care of their citizens is communism? A social safety net leads to empty store shelves? Am I the latest victim of Poe's Law here?

Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net, and I assure you our shelves are not empty and I can listen to all the Mötley Crüe I desire.

[gottorf]

> Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net

The United States has a very well-developed social safety net, despite what Reddit likes to claim. It spends a ton of money making sure the poor are fed, housed, and clothed. There exist literal generations of people who have lived on the public dole.

[DonHopkins]

> the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's

Oh, come on, stop whining. Skrewdriver is still on Spotify.

You're such a snowflake, posing as the victim of government oppression.