The power to punish

I read this week that corporal punishment at school is still legal in about 19 states in America. It had never occurred to me that kids can still be hit in schools; it seems so outdated given that it was banned in the UK about 20 years ago. Then I remembered that this country still has the death penalty, and it suddenly didn’t seem so shocking that punishment could be dished out in the form of inflicting pain on another person. I was certain that I didn’t believe in the Death Penalty, but I then a few days after this I watched an episode of Bones, where a guy was on death row for killing a young girl, and the lead character (a liberal sort of person) said that she agreed in the death penalty for people like the men in Rwanda who’d hacked hundreds of children to death at their desks at school. I’d always thought a worse punishment would be to spend the rest of your life in prison, but what’s the point? And do people like those Rwandans deserve to keep on living? These people aren’t and won’t contribute to society, could potentially get out of their sentence later in life and are a financial burden on the people that their crimes have affected (in the U.S. it costs approximately $30,000 a year to keep a prisoner). It’s not about money though, really – it’s about how much evil you have to commit, and how many human rights you abuse before you start losing yours.

The original article though was about the fact that a disproportionately high amount of corporal punishments in schools in the US are given to students with disabilities. 13.7% of students in the US have disabilities, and 18.8% of corporal punishments are given to them (20.8% in Texas – 10,222 out of 49,157 beatings in 2008). I don’t think teachers should be allowed to physically discipline children.