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Dec. 1, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
49:22
EPISODE 617: THE SINGAPORE OPTION

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A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran. - This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
- Deliver us from evil.
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
Today is Friday, December 1st, 2023.
Today's episode is a very special episode that we title, "The Singapore Option." Will Chamberlain joins me, and I gotta tell you folks, when you look out about all the crime that's going on, and then you also talk about, you know, the problems of our prisons, and certainly we want to crack down on crime.
We also don't want these overcrowded, overstuffed prisons.
What to do?
Is there another option?
Well, yes, there is.
It's called The Singapore Option.
Why not, instead of incarcerating people for all of these years, you take violent criminals and you flog them.
Basically, we'll be talking about this, we'll be going through how Singapore deals with violent crime, and we'll also dissect that case from the 1990s.
Michael Fay, you might remember him, he was an American teenager who got caught up in this.
He had to be caned in Singapore, but guess what?
He actually was able to turn his life around.
I think that you might find this information important.
In March, news a Singapore court had sentenced an 18-year-old American to six strokes with a bamboo cane swept round the world.
It's the first I've heard of it, I'll look into it.
And Michael Fay, who insists he was tortured into confessing that he spray-painted cars, was instantly caught in the middle of a raging debate.
Yes, says one.
People should be responsible for their actions.
Let the vandal take his beating, says another.
If anybody just put themselves in this position.
I don't think anybody would want their kid or someone close to them to be beaten with a cane. - After President Clinton personally appealed for leniency, Singapore reduced the sentence from six lashes to four.
But that wasn't much consolation for Michael Fay.
- I was bent over halfway.
I mean, my back was bent in a 90 degree and I was cuffed, buckled like this.
And he's whipping as he's going on each step Can you hear the whip?
Yes, I can.
And on the third step, he strikes, and he cuts open your buttock.
And there's a lot of pain.
There's a lot of pain.
Throughout the incident, Singapore insisted its strict laws made it one of the safest nations on Earth.
Why does Singapore, and certainly many other Asian countries, but definitely Singapore, Seems to have these luxurious airports, incredible infrastructure, amazing downtowns, just an absolute jewel in the South China Sea.
And the question is, why don't we have those things?
Well, a lot of people, including conservative commentator Matt Walsh, a friend of mine, decided to say that it's because Singapore beats their criminals and Singapore executes drug traffickers.
And of course, most famously, we remember the case of Michael Fay.
Back in the 1990s, who was caned four times, not six, sentenced to six, reduced to four, for vandalizing over 18 cars.
It was 50 acts of vandalism total.
He pled guilty.
He was spray painting, doing all sorts of things, which by the way, you're told not to do.
So we went and looked up, what happened to Michael Faye?
How's he doing now?
What's his life like?
Well, guess what?
He returned to the United States.
He went back to college.
And he now runs a successful food and beverage business, all thanks to caning.
And so to talk through these issues and go through it, I want to bring on a former colleague of mine at Human Events and currently the Senior Counsel at the Internet Accountability Project, my good friend, Will Chamberlain.
Will, thanks so much for finally joining the show that you, by the way, helped create.
That's correct.
Thanks for having me on, Jack.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
So the behind the scenes of this is that when Will was publisher over at Human Events, he gave me all ringy ding ding one time and said, Hey Jack, you should start this like video podcast kind of thing.
And I said, do you think anyone will watch it?
And you're like, I think so.
Let's see.
And here we are, what a year and a half later.
Yeah.
Something like something like that.
You've, you've, you've done really, really well.
So it's sort of a little, a little bit sad.
I can't be a part of it, but.
Um, you know, things, things, and things have a way of changing too sometimes.
Yes.
But, um, but we'll, you know, walk me through this.
Um, when we see the success of something like Singapore, I mean, I remember if you go back to the sixties Singapore, it's like a backwater port.
I mean, it's, it's, it's nothing.
It's, it's just sort of like a little dollop just kind of hung off the edge of Malaysia.
You know, it's a city that, you know, nothing necessarily wrong with it.
But it certainly isn't this worldwide phenomenon that we talk about now.
How did Singapore go from that to this?
I mean, you really have incredible statesmanship.
I mean, Singapore is a testament to the value of having really, really talented statesmen.
Basically, Lee Kuan Yew, who was the founder, effectively, of Singapore as an independent country and president for a very long time, I think, or prime minister, rather.
He was prime minister for something like 30 years.
And his son is currently Prime Minister of the country, was one of the most talented and brilliant statesmen of the modern era.
And as a result, he took a very, very tiny postage stamp of a country that was, as you say, something of a backwater.
And through his leadership and wise policy in the talent industry, the Singaporean people turned it into one of the places that has one of the highest GDP per capita in the entire world, is incredibly wealthy, a beautiful, safe, incredible place to live.
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And that isn't done by, you know, adhering to like a libertarian utopia or anything else.
It's a it's a number of different sound policies.
But one of them was very, very tough on crime.
Was it was it done through social policies?
Was it done through handouts?
Was it done through improving everyone's economic standing?
Was it done through critical race theory?
Because, of course, you know, Singapore is a diverse country.
It is certainly a multicultural country in a sense.
And they have Malays, they have Indians, they have Hindus, they have Yeah, I wouldn't say that's exactly how they did it.
But, you know, it's certainly not a homogenous society.
So was it done through diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory and handouts and reparations?
That's how they did it, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't say that's exactly how they did.
I mean, there is, Singapore is a very, very diverse place and was during when Lee Kuan Yew was taking power and part of his skill was managing the various diverse coalitions to form a very, very stable government, incorporating them all into his government.
But that was done not necessarily as a, you know, based on the buzzwords of diversity makes us stronger.
It's sort of that's a way to tamp down ethnic strife.
He always saw that as how do we keep this place as peaceful, peaceful and safe, as strong as possible?
And simply excluding one large faction from the government was always going to create a problem.
But I think, you know, it is to be fair.
I mean, Lee Kuan Yew was not some radical libertarian.
There's plenty of social welfare in Singapore, but there's also an enormous amount of economic freedom.
And there is, as I said before, extreme toughness when it comes to crime, vandalism, harsh punishments and punishing things that we wouldn't think to punish, like spitting gum out on the streets.
Right, and of course that's, I think most people do think of that.
They say you can't spit gum out on the street.
I've pulled some up here.
Producer Angela has thrown some together.
Small items like candy wrappers are fined 300, I'm not sure if that's dollars or UN, for a first time offense.
Larger, if you throw a bottle on the ground that you're drinking, that's considered defiance against Singaporean law and requires a court appearance.
Penalties include corrective work orders where the offenders clean up a specified area while wearing bright green luminous vests.
Of course, the chewing gum is the famous one, ultimately began their operations of their MRT, which is a $5 billion project, and vandals started putting gum on door sensors, and of course, the rest is history.
First time offenders, that's a $1,000 fine.
Will, can you walk us through some of the drug laws of Singapore?
I can tell you off the top of my head, the drug laws in Singapore are extremely punitive, in the sense that if you're caught possessing even a very, very small amount of heroin, for example, within Singapore, you get the death penalty.
And there's a few minor exceptions, but they're trivial.
Singapore is extraordinarily hard on drugs.
That's selling a possession.
Even possession, right?
If you come in with even possession, if you have a possession above a certain amount of heroin, and it really is, honestly, I think the total amount of heroin needed to trigger the death penalty is a little more than one dose.
They're extremely serious.
Other drugs, it's bigger because they do acknowledge that for things like cannabis, they want to get the traffickers, not necessarily the users.
Um, with this kind of punishment, but, uh, in general, the, I mean, the law, the drug laws in Singapore are extraordinarily strict.
Um, and, and they're, they give fair warning to people.
Like if you find a Singapore, you'll be given a card before you even land that says, if you come into the country with drugs, you will get the death penalty.
Which, and they would consider that drug trafficking.
This is of course is, uh, Brittany, Brittany Griner going into Russia was, was considered drug trafficking, even though she had like a couple of edibles or something.
I forget exactly what it was, but it was some, What we would consider in the US minuscule or in Washington DC, by the way, is completely legal.
You know, anyone can go buy some great movies about this, by the way, because Singapore is not the only country down there in Southeast Asia that has strict drug laws.
They do have strict enforcement, but Thailand, Malaysia actually have similar laws.
You can watch Broke Down Palace with Claire Danes or Return to Paradise, great Joaquin Phoenix film that actually do deal with a lot of these things.
It's just it seems that in the West, we've gotten totally away from that.
Now, of course, President Trump's come out a few times and stated that, you know, when it comes to these opium, opioid dealers or fentanyl dealers, just straight up death penalty.
And we should throw them.
Duterte, of course, did this in the Philippines.
for a long time and was extremely popular for doing so.
So a couple more minutes left.
Will, why, and I want to break this down in the next segment, but why did Lee Kuan Yew decide to take this two-track approach to revamp and revitalize Singapore?
Will Kuan Yew: Well, I think on the one hand, he wanted to maintain social cohesion, So he didn't want, you know, a lot of people who were struggling in the in the streets that would, you know, rise up to his power.
And remember, again, how incredibly diverse Singapore was.
There had to be some form of social welfare just to ensure you didn't have that constant factional strife and civil, effectively civil war in such a tiny place.
But I think when it comes to why he was so draconian about the drug laws, his view is pretty straightforward.
And we don't take it for granted, but you've got to think about not just how many lives does a single drug dealer destroy?
How many families do they destroy in the act of dealing large amounts of heroin or cocaine?
They destroy hundreds of families, hundreds of lives.
And so from the perspective of the Singaporeans, of course, drug dealing should be met with the death penalty.
You may not intentionally murder someone in the same way, but you're responsible for so much death, so much sickness, so much harm.
Um, so much destruction to people's lives.
This, by the way, is why, uh, Maurice Hall in the George Floyd case refused to take the stand and took the fifth because his lawyer rightfully pointed out that in the state of Minnesota, if you sell someone a lethal dose of fentanyl and it kills them, then you can be liable for third degree murder.
Yeah.
I mean, as, as you should be.
Um, and I think that the, you know, Singapore just takes it much more seriously.
I think Lee Kuan Yew in a famous interview once said that if we give, if we could hang these dog dealers a hundred times, we would.
That they take it that seriously.
And it seems like they have a very good reason to, a very good moral reason for saying, sorry, no, no, no, this is what you're doing.
The activity you're engaged in is causing so much trauma and so much death and destruction that you need to be stopped.
And we need to deter this behavior as much as possible.
What you're saying is it's pragmatism, pragmatism, pragmatism.
That our values are What works is what we're going to use.
We're not necessarily taking this from a holy book or a philosophy book.
We're going to use what works.
Now, Will, one thing that I want to to stress, and this is something that I saw getting totally lost in that Twitter debate, is that it's not just harsh on crime policies that made Singapore successful.
It also was the fact that you're right.
They dealt with the intercultural strife as best they could.
Right.
Give everyone sort of a way in.
But then also that they totally superheated their economy and they were considered one of the four Asian Tigers in the 90s.
It was Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore.
And so this idea of, hey, how about instead of everybody getting upset that, you know, that somebody's got more than me or that this is going on or that's going on, we all just get rich together.
Yeah, there's an enormous amount of economic freedom and a complete, you know, a very, very serious focus on free trade, getting people to come in and start up companies there, like inviting foreign corporations in, soliciting them.
There is a huge amount of focus on workforce development from the perspective of Lee Kuan Yew.
So, for example, the first language and the national language of Singapore is English, and that did not have to be the case.
After the United Kingdom left and, I mean, first it was part of the Malaysian Federation and then an independent country, there's not a whole bunch of English people of origin from the United Kingdom in Singapore.
So that easily could have been, you know, they could have adopted Mandarin as their primary language.
They could have adopted Indian or one of the Indian languages as their primary language.
But they adopted English because they knew that it would give them an advantage in the global marketplace.
And so you have A slew of very, very wise and sound policies economically that really made the country very wealthy, rewarded, you know, economic industry, kept taxes reasonably low and allowed for you to build, you know, really build Singapore into this economic powerhouse that then when combined with their seriously tough on crime policies has made the place a wonderful place to live.
And and that's something that I think we should also get into in the United States.
So obviously we have the tension between left and right when it comes to economic policy.
I think the right is settling into a place where, OK, we don't want to be full on.
Libs when it comes to, oh, we're going to just hand out everything and we're going to raise carbon credits and somehow that's going to make the planet cooler or stop global warming or whatever.
But at the same time, we're also not going to be full on.
This is where the new right kind of comes in, where we're not going to be.
President Trump came out and I've seen a lot of conservatives coming out saying recently about, no, we're not going to go Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and shut down or cut or privatized.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, that we're just not going to touch these things.
We're just going to leave them where they are.
Obviously, it's it's smart politics.
And and I think really, there's the country's just not ready for that, I think, in a lot of reasons.
And so finding this better, this better middle ground, whereas Romney and Paul Ryan were trying to go full, like get rid of all the entitlement programs right away, even these ones that people paid into their entire lives, which I think rightfully so made people lose their minds.
But at the same time, You are also seeing, you know, conservatives and the new right, I think, and I just wanted to get into the criminal section of it, because it's sort of like, which one are we?
Are we the people that are saying that we want to be tough on crime, or are we the people who are saying that we support the First Step Act?
Because it seems like we're trying to do both at the same time right now, and I don't think that makes sense.
Yeah, no, I look back at some of my old tweets about the First Step Act and I kind of cringe, honestly.
I think that they were, I ultimately think that was the wrong policy and that we should, that we need to be stricter on crime and that we went in the totally wrong direction.
Um, like the problem, as I said before, we do need criminal justice reform in this country.
We need more people to go to jail and for the penalties to be more severe.
I mean, you know, whether it's like people not getting severe enough penalties for serious crimes like armed robbery and assault.
Or whether people aren't getting serious enough punishment for sort of these, you know, crimes of choice and convenience, the sort of protest crimes where people stand in the middle of highways or destroy public patrimony and throw paint on or throw tomato soup on paintings.
All that stuff should be punished more heavily.
And it's the kind of stuff that Singapore would never tolerate in a million years.
I mean, again, they would give you a thousand dollar fine for spitting out gum on the sidewalk.
Imagine what they do if you threw tomato soup on a painting.
Yeah, there was Helen Andrews in D.C.
was counting fair jumpers.
She just went down to the Metro and was counting fair jumpers one morning in the DC Metro.
She counted 40.
She even asked somebody, she said, well, why do you do this every day?
He said, well, it's cheaper.
And someone else said, I don't think I've ever paid for the Metro in my entire life.
Just never done that.
And this gets into the broken windows theory.
And I've interviewed Mayor Giuliani on this.
And I've always said that in, you know, In addition to his 9-11 response, it's one of the greatest things he did as mayor was to clean up the city of New York.
And the broken windows policy, the broken windows theory, to break it down for people, I have like sort of the textbook definition here.
That was something that Giuliani put into practice.
The broken windows theory stems from the work of two criminologists, George Kelling and James Wilson, who suggested that minor disorder like vandalism acts as a gateway to more serious crime by focusing on small offenses often referred to Yeah, it worked really well.
It worked in Singapore when it was done too.
violent crime and other undesirable activity would decrease.
Well, when Giuliani attempted or put enacted this policy, put it into practice, did it work?
Yeah, it worked really well.
Um, worked in Singapore when it was done to, uh, there's, I think there's sort of this.
Yeah, it's wildly successful.
There are really good reasons to think that there's a causal relationship between punishing low-level crime and reducing higher-level crime.
You end up with nicer places that people are happier to be in.
Let's start there, that seem much safer and cleaner.
In general, I think people's environment has some impact on the likelihood that they will want to commit crime in the first place.
And then, you also create a culture of abiding by the law and expecting to be punished, even if you break the law in small ways.
Which leads to further, you know, a kind of culture grows where people just start abiding by, you know, you know, abiding by the law on their own.
And then once you get there, then you get to the situation where you've freed up your police officers to track down serious crime and make sure that gets punished too.
But it's the idea here is that you shouldn't be letting go of the rope, that you should be punishing these low level crimes in order to make people understand that this is a place where you're going to be expected to abide by the law.
And I think I think the idea of a gateway to, you know, once you start breaking the law, maybe you'll start breaking it in different ways, or you'll you create a social expectation that breaking the law won't end up getting punished.
And I think I think we see that you look at the places where they talk about, oh, we need to stop prosecuting these little offenses.
And they're they're nightmares to live in now.
And they're disgusting to San Francisco.
We're trying.
We're we're essentially right to just explain for folks what you're saying is that what we've enacted or the Soros prosecutors or the woke prosecutor, we're doing the opposite.
We're doing the exact opposite right now.
And, you know, I'm from the Philadelphia area, originally from the Bay Area.
But our home areas, right, and hometowns essentially, are experimenting with the opposite of this.
And it's a free for all.
It's a free for all of death and murder and blood of people, of children in many cases.
And it seems like we're not even allowed to talk about it. - Yeah, I mean, it creates a really terrible culture.
I mean, I think about, you know, that that store owner who sprayed the homeless woman with water like that.
That shouldn't happen in the first place.
He called the police on that woman 20 times.
She was breaking the law.
But when the police do nothing, you get not only do you get like increased law breaking, you get vigilantism.
I mean, the entire point of having a justice criminal justice system in the first place is to prevent vigilante justice and the sort of, you know, vendetta type Reciprocal murders.
That's, that's, that's how, why justice systems came to be in the first place.
One of the things, you know, liberals fail the sort of Chesterton's fence argument where they, they destroy something without understanding why it was built in the first place and what problems it solved.
What is Chesterton's fence for the audience?
So Chesterton's, Chesterton had a saying about his fence or Chesterton had a saying, it went something like this.
If you see a fence and you don't know why it was put up, you shouldn't take it down.
Right.
You should be able to answer the question of why it was put up first.
And if you don't have a good answer to that, then that you don't understand the problem it's solving.
It's a good border policy too, by the way.
Yeah, it's good border policy, right?
You shouldn't take down fences unless you fully understand why they were put up.
To get into that further, it's by the way, you know, there's somebody else who understood this same issue.
And that person was Karl Marx.
Because if you actually read Uh, Marxist theory that it isn't, he doesn't just believe in the, you know, joie and the proletariat because he also understood something called the lumpen proletariat known as, you know, I would say in English, the criminal class, that there are groups of people who could essentially be just, just geared towards criminal activity or, uh, for a variety of reasons, or you're always going to have criminals in any society.
We just know that, um, we can get into the issues why, but also the maker issue, I think, Is that if you're catching those criminals when they're committing the minor crimes, if you've caught the person who is dealing drugs at 14, then maybe they won't become a high level drug dealer at 16.
If you've caught them when they're smashing windows, when they're doing vandalism, we've seen this time and time again.
And any criminologist will show you that no one starts out with, with, you know, no serial killer starts out with serial killing.
They start out with smaller.
Yeah, it does a lot of good.
It helps with rehabilitation, as you say.
of this, the broken windows policy, guess what?
It catches that.
Yeah, I mean, it does it does a lot of good.
It helps with rehabilitation, as you say.
It helps with deterrence.
I mean, one of the things there's a criminologist I think there was a study in Hawaii where they were looking at how to ensure that people comply with a drunk driving program.
And essentially, one of the ways they did it is they made people they had a system that wasn't super punitive necessarily, but was almost always enforced.
Right.
There was never any getting out of it.
And so you could you just people knew that if they didn't show up on, you know, to for their alcohol test, if they didn't do something, Police would be there within hours and they would be taken away.
And that was different from other places that didn't have as consistent enforcement.
And that was what, you know, that was what was really necessary for something like that.
You need, you need, you need punitive laws that effectively deter the behavior and you need, you need consistency of enforcement for illegal behavior, too.
You certainly need consistency of behavior.
And we're coming up on our second break right here.
But on the next one, I want to get into this question of what is the best punishment for crime?
Are prisons What we need for what we need to do.
Should we have more prisons?
Should we have less prison?
Why do we have prisons?
Where did prisons come from?
Where did this idea come from?
That if you do, if you commit crimes against society, that you have to go sit in a room for a certain period of time, we're going to get into that because what's interesting for people that they may not understand is that the history of prisons isn't quite as old as they might think.
Well, did you know that they censored Aladdin?
Remember Aladdin, the movie, the Disney movie?
I watched Aladdin all the time.
I used to watch, that used to be the movie that I would annoy my parents by watching over and over and over again when I was like six years old.
So I'm sure you remember, you remember the line, um, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face.
The original songs, the traitor who ends up being the king at the end or whatever is, is singing that song.
You know that line was changed?
It was.
Why is that?
And then they say, it's barbaric, but hey, it's home.
Right.
So this line was considered racist, even in the 1990s, by 90s standards, sort of like when America had our first dabble with political correctness and like the OJ case came up, which was the first time America just decided to let someone off from punishment for murder because of the color of the skin and because he was famous.
That they changed it to, it's hot and intense.
Rather, the land is flat and hot and intense.
It's barbaric, but there are times, of course, the line doesn't make any sense.
And then the Will Smith version, it's further changed for 2019.
And they also took away the line of when I actually I don't know why I went down this rabbit hole, but I absolutely had to because I was like, wait a minute.
This was in like an Aladdin movie, right?
If when he says, I'll have your hand, street rat.
You know, and it's the great voice actor, Jim Cummings, who's screaming that because he's referring to the practice of chopping a thief's hand off.
That line is totally gone from the Will Smith version that came out in 2019.
Just gone completely.
That's too bad.
It is too bad.
And so what I wanted to mention, the history of prisons, because I found an interesting article about this when I was just doing research and show prep for this.
And that article was called In Defense of Flogging.
And it said, and to go through it, it was written by a prison reformer, a guy who had been a former police officer in the city of Baltimore, which, you know, just a paragon of safety and peace, Baltimore.
You know, if anyone's seen The Wire, we just know how wonderful and utopian, I mean, you know, Baltimore is probably the American city that's closest to Singapore, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, yeah, very sick sarcasm there.
So here's what's interesting.
He writes that it was the progressive reformers of the past two centuries are responsible for the fact that we have the prison system today.
And the prison system originally came about in the 1800s, early 1800s.
around this idea of their penitentiaries and reformatories.
One of the reasons for this, Michel Foucault, of course, is a huge proponent of this type of the rehabilitative act.
And it's a very progressive idea that you can take someone and rehabilitate them through prison, through the use of holding someone in a cell for an indefinite period of time, or even a definite period of time, that you will somehow change their nature.
And he writes, this is in the Chronicle of Higher Learning, Prisons today have all but abandoned rehabilitative ideals, which isn't such a bad thing if one sees the notion as nothing more than paternalistic hogwash.
And he then wrote, for those who are opposed to the penitentiary system, all that's left then is punishment.
And we certainly could punish in a way that is much cheaper, honest, and even more humane.
We could flog.
We could flog.
That's an amazing article.
I think he's onto something there.
You know, there are a lot of different purposes to punishment.
And there's deterrence, the idea of deterring other people from committing crimes.
There's incapacitation, namely just taking someone who just can't help but engage in criminal activity and keeping them away from the public.
There's about a statement of values about the value of victims and the rights of victims.
Because, you know, if a victim's life is taken away, it's not, you're almost saying as a society that that life wasn't meaningful if you don't inflict severe punishment on the perpetrator.
And then there's rehabilitation.
And it really is like the least important thing when it comes to criminal justice.
Criminal justice isn't for the good of the criminal.
Criminal justice is for the rest of us.
Rehabilitation is something that you sort of, you know, maybe it's something you add on at the end.
And it's like, you know, if the other goals are being met, then sure, help rehabilitate people who are going to get out of jail.
That's again, probably good for the rest of us.
But that's not the focus.
That's not why we have the jails in the first place.
They're not, you know, these aren't therapy sessions.
They're places to incapacitate you and deter others from committing crime.
Right.
And so what people need to understand is that the current system of the penitentiaries that we have today, it's only been around for about 200 years, for thousands of years.
And everyone can say, wait a minute, I've I've seen, you know, Game of Thrones and I've I've seen old old books and they all talk about dungeons and people being held down there, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, the dungeon or which, of course, comes from from French word for keep, which is also the same word as a tower.
You'll be locked in the tower, Tower of London, et cetera.
That we all know what the Tower of London was about.
Most people didn't stay there for far too long.
Especially those princes.
Were awaiting trial, or you had finished trial and you were awaiting your punishment, then you were held in the jail, or the gall.
There was no sense that you would be held there for an indefinite period of time, or that would be your punishment.
It's that you were there while you were waiting for your punishment to begin, or while you were, you know, they just logistically needed a place to hold somebody where they couldn't run away to escape trial.
That was the whole point.
But it's only about 200 years ago, which in terms of human history isn't that long, that they came up with this new idea that what if we take away these this idea of punishment?
What if we take away which which prior to that forced labor?
I mean, forced labor goes all the way back to the Roman Empire.
Oh, they used forced labor.
I mean, build the aqueduct, build the road.
You know, you always need someone to do that.
Paying your debts.
Transport, of course, which of course goes back to the founding of Australia.
Botany Bay.
Punishment by transportation was huge in the British Empire because, well, we have colonies that need building and you're going to be sent down to build those colonies.
Building colonies sucks and it's hard work and nobody likes it.
That's another debate on Twitter right now, the ruralist debate.
You know, just go, go live on a homestead and be a peasant.
I said, why are you glorifying the peasant lifestyle?
That sounds awful.
You know, and, uh, you know, there's a reason we have society the way we do today.
And we've, we've built upon it.
We're trying to fix society.
We're not necessarily trying to return to peasantry and, and husbandry and, and, and hunter gathering.
Not that I have anything against hunter gathering, uh, by all means, but, but, you know, I was about to go hunt somebody on the streets of Arlington.
I was looking for a deer.
Go for it.
I don't know.
Clarendon doesn't really have many deer.
It's too bad.
No, not really.
No.
But, you know, we have this nice thing called supermarkets.
Oh, yeah.
But in venison.
Good.
Excellent.
So it's it's so the the first state prison in England was Milibank Prison.
It was only open in 1816 in prison.
The prison system is not old.
It's not old at all.
And so the question I would have is, you know, and let's go back to Michael Fay and let's go back to Singapore, because that's the overall discussion here is would you or could you even think of anyone?
Who if they were offered the chance between, so he got four lashes, right?
He was sentenced to six.
He ended up getting four.
Would you take four lashes or would you rather sit in prison for four years?
Four years of your life?
I mean, I think any criminal and any person would rather take the lashes, right?
You don't want to lose four years of your life.
Um, I think what Singapore gets right is interesting is it's not an, they don't see it as an either or though they do both.
Right.
And they both have different aspects of effect on the potential criminal, right?
Like maybe some criminals aren't that scared of prison or they, you know, say, OK, whatever the risk of prison isn't that bad, but they're particularly scared of corporal punishment or vice versa.
So they just they don't you know, I think what Singapore gets right is they do both.
They do both.
And it's and it's good and just to do both.
It's it's the right thing to punish truly awful behavior.
Um, it's not, you know, it's not beyond the pale to say, to use as the Singaporeans do caning.
And, and that, that is an interesting piece for us that we as a society, when we do talk about this, and then the fact that America has got, we've got more people in prison right now than we have in our entire military.
And so, My question is, is this something where where the right and the left could actually come together a little bit to say, you know, it is kind of silly that we're just shoving people in prison, assuming that's going to help.
And by the way, I've I know people I've and you can read studies about this where people have said that, you know, hitting rock bottom, getting that scared straight experience is actually quite useful for them to say, you know what?
Yeah, I had my brush with with that.
And I definitely don't want any more of that whatsoever.
And so the question, though, is so it works for some people, certainly.
But what about people who are repeat offenders who don't have anything left to lose?
I mean, what what really is prison for them?
Then you also have the problem of who's the guy in, you know, in Shawshank.
He, you know, he comes out after being spending entire his entire adult life in prison.
Then he commits suicide because he doesn't know how to live outside an institution.
Yeah, in a way, prison is a way to sort of take criminal justice and put it out of sight, out of mind.
It's a way to make it something we don't think about and see compared to, you know, other forms of punishment.
I think that the analog is to capital punishment, where we use things like lethal injection to sort of medicalize capital punishment when it's an execution.
I think they're Alex Kaczynski, Judge Alex Kaczynski in California.
You know, he long he's a very libertarian and definitely not somebody who is just a reflexive authoritarian by any means.
But he said we should go back to firing squads.
They're more humane because it happens quicker.
There aren't any mess ups and they don't they stop us from pretending that what we're doing is in capital punishment.
And I think the analog here is when you're we shouldn't pretend that criminal criminal justice isn't really criminal justice.
And that we're better than caning and that that's somehow less humane or more humane than, you know, putting somebody in a cell for 30 years.
Yeah.
And I don't think it's humane at all.
And maybe it makes us feel better.
Maybe it makes people say, oh, I'm not sure.
You know, I hear people, I hear other people say like, oh, the, you know, life sentence is worse than death penalty.
And I don't think so.
I certainly don't think so at all.
No, I think the death penalty is definitely worse.
That's why people are against it.
That's why the reformers hate it so much.
But three hots and a cot for the rest of your life, that's not bad for some people, depending on where they're coming from.
So that is something that I'd like to get back into.
And we're talking about corporal punishment in general, as well as other forms of punishment that aren't necessarily prison, which is what Singapore is doing.
They're saying, look, you have broken our laws.
You've broken our trust.
You've acted in willful defiance of our system.
And our system matters.
And if you have done so, we are going to correct you.
We're going to correct you in a way that's going to make sure to get it across.
And by the way, we don't spank in our house for my two boys.
You know, we don't spank at all, but you know what?
Maybe, just maybe for adults, maybe what they need is a good adult form of spanking through a flogging or a keening.
Because in Singapore, guess what?
It works.
Now, Will, I'd like to read a quote for you from one of the great death penalty advocates in the world.
And that, of course, is Pope Pius XII of the Catholic Church said, whoa, wait a minute, I thought the Catholic Church was against the death penalty.
Well, Pope Francis is against the death penalty, but prior to that, there's a little something called the entire history of the Catholic Church.
And I think it would be kind of silly if you knew anything about the history of the Catholic Church to say that the Church has always been against the death penalty, when I can point to a lot of instances where that's just quite not the case.
But the Church has always stated, and this is something that I will be serious about That that is up to the state, that it's always been up to the state.
And here's what Pope Pius says about this.
He says, even in the case of the death penalty, the state does not dispose the individual's right to life.
Rather, public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.
Will, unpack that for us.
What does that mean?
Well, I mean, it means that, you know, the idea that it's like somehow an immoral or unlawful killing is just wrong.
I think that, you know, people often say, at least to Catholics, that it's like, oh, you're pro-life.
Well, then you can't be for the death penalty then.
It's like, no, the death penalty is appropriate in certain circumstances because it's about respecting the fact that, you know, they have violated someone else.
Generally, it's because somebody killed someone.
or they did something so against the moral order that it was responsible for other people's death.
So it's the idea that you have violated God's law.
You've deprived yourself of your own right to life.
And that's the state is just ensuring that you don't get something you don't deserve.
I've seen you you use on Twitter and I've definitely adopted it, but all credit to where it's due that you've used on Twitter that the death penalty is pro-life.
Yeah, I think I think the death penalty Yeah, the death penalty is pro-life.
I think there's another borrowing from Kaczynski again when he talked about that he had something very, very interesting to say about the death penalty, which is that, you know, people say it's like, oh, how could you?
That's so inhumane.
And it's like if you actually read the briefing, he says like you could hear the piercing cries of the victims in between the lines of the dry legal text.
Like, the cases where the death penalty is brought up, you know, involves such incredibly appalling and horrifying behavior that it's like there's no other worthy punishment.
And by the way, we're talking about horrific rapes.
We're talking about the violation of young children.
We're talking about just cold-blooded murders in many, many instances.
Walk me through a little bit, you know, the question of what about when the state gets it wrong?
So and I always hear that argument come up.
What about when the state gets it wrong?
What about DNA?
What about when people are exonerated?
Absolutely, people should have access to DNA evidence to prove their innocence or to overturn prior convictions that may have been wrongful.
But that doesn't mean that the death penalty isn't still called for when somebody is clearly guilty of the crime.
That's kind of a double edged sword, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, yes, it means that on occasion the state will execute someone that is innocent.
I mean, you know, but that's I mean, I don't think that's an indictment of every form of criminal justice that there is.
I mean, it's basically saying any, you know, there's always the possibility of wrongful punishment when you're running a criminal justice system.
But I guess the thing is that with the technology that we have, that everyone should have access to it to prove their innocence.
But the state also has greater access to highly advanced technology to prove guilt.
And that is the type of evidence that comes out on appeal after appeal in court
After court, after court, that in, even in our system, we don't, you know, and I think we all know this, that because we don't really, even in states with the death penalty in the United States, I suppose with the exception of Texas, even though Texas has gotten a little wobbly on this, if you look at the Rodney Reed case, which I've been covering for years, where it's a guy that, I mean, they got him dead to rights, they've got, they've got semen, they've got blood, they've got saliva, they've got everything.
And yet they keep trying, and Kim Kardashian gets involved, to find a way to, you know, to get this guy off.
Meanwhile, they've just got him dead to rights.
Yeah.
That's actually, I mean, if anything, the problem with our system is that it's a little bit too, there's a little bit too many opportunities for appeal.
And as a result, the process for getting through, and death penalty law has been made very convoluted by the Supreme Court.
And as a result, you end up with people on death row for something like 30 years.
And that's not justice for the victims and also those extraordinarily expensive and and arbitrary.
And it also leads to very perverse outcomes where it's like it really does suddenly depend on the quality of your legal counsel, whether or not they actually go through the conviction.
Because if you have quality legal counsel, you can just delay, delay, delay, delay and avoid it.
So that's not just on an economic grounds either.
So there's there's all sorts of problems with The way our system works in reality.
But I think people, you know, liberals often use the troubles, the difficulties of our legal system in reality to make objections to the death penalty in total.
And I don't think they undermine the basic moral case for the death penalty, which I feel is fairly strong.
It seems as though the primary deterrent is that death row is just is such a worse form of imprisonment in the sense of the way you're treated by prison guards on death row and the type of amenities you get as a prisoner are much, much, much worse.
And so that that almost is the deterrent.
It's like almost you don't have to you don't expect to be executed.
You expect to have a much worse experience when you are in prison.
That's not quite what we're going for.
I think I think the idea of the death penalty is that some crimes deserve the ultimate punishment.
And we're not really getting that out of our current system.
And it is about respect for the society.
And as you said, the respect for the life of the individual who was either, I mean, there's this case, this horrific case that Mia Cahill over at Town Hall has been discussing in and reporting on and really revealing down in Atlanta, Georgia, where two pedophiles were able to adopt two boys and repeatedly raped them over a period of several years.
And we're pimping them out on Snapchat and other Internet functions, and I I look at that, and I just say death penalty.
Just just death penalty.
I don't even want to you know That's what that's what it exists for horrifying crimes like these the sexual abuse of children like no We don't tolerate that in our society period and stop you do that you die.
That's the proper attitude to have And yeah, it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt the victims are you know the criminal?
Defendants are entitled to due process all that is still true, but after the due process has been had It's, you know, this is something we shouldn't tolerate at all.
A due process is not endless process.
Right.
And I, you know, criminal justice reformers are saying, oh man, the punishments are just too draconian.
It's like, no, they are not.
They need to be more draconian.
You're not talking to anybody outside of your little bubble.
Those, those, by the way, those, those child rapists down in Georgia, uh, you know, they have iPads right now while they're in prison.
Yeah.
They have iPads that are hooked up to the internet.
This is the level of our prisons.
I mean, it's, it's ridiculous.
These are like country clubs.
Yeah, I mean, they haven't been convicted, so I can sort of see their argument like, well, we haven't been convicted yet.
So because the purpose of imprisonment before judgment is to, you know, incapacitate, just prevent you from doing anything in the short term because we think you're dangerous to the public.
But, you know, I think, you know, hopefully those get taken away.
So I haven't mentioned it much here, but my My present experience was spending a year deployed at Guantanamo Bay.
So I've been inside the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
I've interacted with detainees when there were there almost 200 detainees when I was there 2012-2013 under the Obama administration and it was fine.
It was totally fine.
There's these stories about torture and these stories about Uh, you know, calling, calling enteral feeding torture, by the way, which is when they, you know, they, when, when people go on a hunger strike and President Obama ordered us to not allow the prisoners or the detainees to kill themselves.
So what the medics would do, and I got to see one of these, what the medics would do was place a, a catheter, sort of like a lubricated catheter down the nose through the throat into the stomach.
And then, and basically take, you know, those like ensure, um, like the protein shakes.
and then just pour that down.
And this is a basic medical procedure that's done to accident victims in the United States, and a car accidents, trauma, people going through surgery every single day.
And they turned around and called that torture.
They go after DeSantis for this a lot, by the way, because he was a JAG who was stationed down there at one point as a lawyer in all of this.
But I'm sitting there looking at it, say this is a medical procedure.
It's not torture at all.
None of these things are torture.
Yeah, like, why are you entitled to the right to hunger strike yourself to death while you're in prison?
We don't we don't agree with that as a society.
Right.
And when it comes to those guys, by the way, you know, there were some, as an intelligence officer, of course, I did certainly enjoy the perspective of being able to have them available for interrogation and intelligence collection.
But then again, prisoners of war are slightly different than, you know, a domestic prisoner.
Sure.
The argument for a domestic prisoner, like say a domestic prisoner goes on a 100 year strike, you know, does he, does he have the right to, that argument would ultimately justify like applauding the prison guards who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to kill himself, right?
Like, you know, That's that's thank you for surfing for surfing eBay and not not fixing the cameras.
Thank you so much.
Right.
Yeah.
Good.
Good for letting him kill himself.
He had the right to do what he wanted with his own life.
No, wrong.
He did not.
He forfeited that right.
He needed he needed to face justice.
Well, I do think, though, that and as we're about to wind down here, I do think that this is it's a hot debate.
I think that as the new right is kind of defining what it is and what it stands for and what it doesn't stand for, I think this is really something Where the reformers, the criminal reformers, the just us reformers and the Kim Kardashian types of the world, you're just losing.
Because we're trying and it ain't working.
And people are dying.
If we're going to talk about the prison issues, we need to bring back a little something called corporal punishment.
Will Chamberlain, where can people find you?
I am online on Twitter, primarily at Will Chamberlain on Twitter.
Alright, Admiral Chamberlain on Twitter, former colleague here at Human Events, and the Senior Counsel at the Internet Accountability Project.
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