MORE HISTORY


In early America, fines, public punishment (whipping, stocks, pillories and mutilation), the death penalty, banishment and shaming punished criminals. Those who could not pay fines, including slaves, servants and women, were more likely to receive corporal punishment. 

Corporal punishment included cropping ears, nailing   
ears to wood and ripping the ears away, branding and other forms of permanent disfigurement, but usually corporal punishment was imposed with a whip or cat-onine-tails. Movements promoting democracy, social equality, pacifism and idealism caused societies to abandon corporal punishment, but it was not abandoned due to ineffectiveness. Just and appropriate punishment has proven social value in connection with a reward structure, social interaction, religion, goals and families. William Penn came to America in 1682 with a charter from King Charles II allowing his pacifist colony to incarcerate under hard labor as an alternative to most capital and corporal punishments. Penn had seen productive prison workhouses in Holland and wanted them in his colony. He thought it a tragedy to execute criminals when reforming them was a possibility. 
William Penn’s laws provided corporal
punishment for sexual offenses. Penn’s plans were delayed until well after his death, because the appropriate prison system did not exist. The public objected to chain gangs of prisoners working in Philadelphia’s streets. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail had 16 cells and experiments with solitary confinement began there. After Penn’s death, colonial officials in Pennsylvania reverted to flogging, pillories and hangings in the absence of a prison system.
 
George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Edward Rutledge and James Wilson collectively supported corporal punishment with the whip. Those Founders had the  
New Articles of War modified in 1776 to permit 100 lashes instead of just 39.  
Later, in 1781, George Washington sought more punishment options and authority to administer 500 lashes. The knowledge of Puritans and slaveholders disciplined young Americans, white and black. Reformers had not yet invented the penitentiary when the U.S. Constitution was written.
 

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