Someone in one of these threads (this one or another one?) mentioned Singapore as a country which supposedly lacks social justice.

Maybe this is because Singapore made news in the US for wanting to cane a US citizen- a 16 year old boy convicted of vandalism.

I've actually been to Singapore. I think it's gotten a bad rap in the US, and in some ways, the uS might be able to learn something from their legal system.

Visiting from Singapore coming from Indoesia is a bit of fresh air. The city reminds me of Honalulu-- a modern city, tropical with a lot of Asian people walking around. Singapore is a very clean city.

In one of the shopping areas, there was a big screen with a speaker playing various ads up over a store. One of the ads said that the crime rate in Singapore was--I forget, really low--2% maybe. It said Be careful, low crime does not mean no crime.

I wish that could be our slogan in the US. "Be careful Low crime does not mean no crime."

On the downside, Singapore is a very litigious society. Don't slander a Singaporian in Singapore or you could end up in court. The sale of chewing gum is against the law. Kids used to put it on the doors of the subway, I heard, and mess up the system. Don't smoke on the bus or you may have to pay a fine of between $500 and $1000 US dollars. Smoke-free buses are nice. Don't smoke or spit on the street either.

I don't know that the Singaporian government does a lot of caning, but apparently there is a law on the books. A Sing friend of mine said the boy who was to be caned spray-painted the wrong judge's car.

In terms of oscial justice, though, wouldn't the US be better off to use hitting someone with a stick instead of some of our own 'cruel and unusual' types of punishment.

Think about it. Someone carjacks a car and wrecks it. He goes to jail for 6 months. If the car was uninsured, the owner of the car may end up with nothing.

In jail, the car theif experiences the proverb Paul said 'bad company corrupts good morals.' He may get to hang out with bank robbers and more violent criminals, and he may be abused in ways that are far beyond what he deserves for stealing a car. When he gets out of jail, he might be a lot more violent than when he went in.

Compare this to 'the caning method.' A man stealsa car. Whack him with a cane 6 times. I think, if I were a car theif, I'd choose the cain. A quick public caning might make the man less likely to repeat the crime than 6 months in jail. A swift punishment that you dread and endure briefly might make him less inclined to commit a crime than slowly spending 6 months in a box with a bunch of hardened criminals who can teach you thei'r ways.

So Singaporian caning may actually be more just and merciful than the American prison system.

If a man did something really nasty, the judge might order him to be beaten up to 40 times. Isn't that more merciful than locking a man into a prison with a bunch of abusive convicts for a couple of years. I think I'd choose the beating (especially if the judge that beat me was a really old fellow) if I were a criminal in this situation, over the time in prison. I'd be able to work and heal my family after I got healed up. Think about it- take 40 stripes, or be locked up in a box with a bunch of dangerous people. Where is the choice?

What kind of laws did God give in the OT? If a man stole an animal, he may have to pay back four animals plus the one he stole. Think about that. The victim gets recompensed and makes something out of the deal. The theif who pays four sheep just might remember what happened and be careful not to do it again.If a man could not pay his debt, he could be sold into slavery--if a Jew for a maximum of 7 years if all the Law were kept.

We could learn a lesson from this. The prison population in the US is huge. Many prisoners just don't know what it's like to work hard. I have a friend, who, decades ago, was a guard in a prison before going to college. The prisoners didn't know the room was bugged. One prisoner was going to try to secretly sell stuff against prison rules. This prisoner ran his mouth all the time. My friend heard about it, and assigned him to scrub the stairs with a toothbrush and not say anything all day. If he said anything, he would have to do it again the next day.

Armed with the microphone system, my friend was always able to find out the man was talking and walk up on him during a conversation. That man kept having to scrub those stairs day after day. He'd yell at peple who walked on the stairs as he scrubbed away.

Eventually, after a long time, he was able to work all day withotu running his mouth. My friend invited himin the office. He tore up the report he was going to give to senior officials about the prisoner trying to sell goods against the rules, as per their agreement.

The prisoner said that he had tried to get a job before working in restaurants and other places, but always got fired for goofing off. He said, after learning to work now, he thought he might be able to go out there and make it without committing crime. He might be able to work.

If we are going to have prisons, prisoners should have to work. If prisons are really supposed to rehabilitate, they should involve a lot of real work that helps benefit the economy. Profits from prison labor can go to repay victims, as in the OT where the proceeds from the man sold into slavery could recompense a victim.

The prison system saps a lot of hard-earned taxpayer money. Why should prisons be an economic drain? Some American companies are opening up factories in low-wage companies becuase it is hard to stay competitive and pay US minimum wage. Why not lift the minimum wage requirements for prisoners? They already make very little for work they do in prisons. Instead of paying them .40 cents an hour for something that is a drain on the taxpayers, why not let a private company use their labor for a few bucks an hour, below the minimum wage? After the victim gets proper recompense, and the government gets the cost of the prisone's expenses back, excess money can go to the prisoner's family or into a fund for the prisoner when he gets out of prison.

Prison can be a place where a prisoner learns how to work hard.

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

Answers

A side note....imprisonment was not a part of the O.T. law's punishment for the guilty.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Good stuff there Link.

I think Singapore and other places have a Justice system much closer to Biblical standards than our own on the mainland.

It's interesting that you bring up the caning incident. Such public beatings are much more in line with Biblical times than any type of prison. Note that incarceration of any type is never proposed in Scripture. The Old Testament Law dealt with many crimes - murder, attempted murder, theft, fraud, lying (baring false witness), etc......but in the penalty for those crimes, prison is never given as an option. We do see prisons mentioned in the New Testament, but those were of Roman origin, not Jewish.

So what did they do then? History records that public beatings was the method of choice. In non-Capital cases, the proper trial (bringing forth witnesses) was held, judgment given, sentence pronounced, and penalty lashes given immediately in a public forum. Several purposes were served by this:

1) Authorities showed the populace that these crimes were unacceptable & would be punished.

2) It publically humiliated the criminal (hopefully to repentance).

3) Justice was immediate - satisfying the Law, comforting the victim, and serving as a deterant to further criminal behavior.

People today say this is barbaric and extremely cruel. Is It Really?

What happens in today's prisons (even as soft as they are these days)? Well........

1) Men are sodomized by the resident perverts.........if they weren't really messed up in the head before incarceration, they will be after this. Not to mention the sexually transmitted diseases they might contract.

2) People learn to be Better Criminals by having the time to compare notes with each other.

3) Most become bitter while "doing time" and come out with a worse attitude than what they came in with. This is not always the case, as some definitely "learn their lesson" in prison & work to straighten themselves out, but those are the exceptions...not the rule.

SO.....which system is worse?

Obviously the current prison system isn't working as planned, since we fill prisons faster than we can build them - and that is even with the early release programs now in effect. Maybe we oughts to be looking to the East for some better ideas in this area.

By the way, the fellow who was caned in Singapore is now (at last report)living in Central Florida, has an honest job at the Universal Studios ThemePark, and I also believe he is married, with children as well. Sometimes a good "WHAP" or 2 can work wonders!

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

Did he ever collect that two million dollars from a porno magzine for pictures of his caned backside?

I guess he was able to walk again afterall. I'm glad to hear he's okay. I wonder if the other kids in the neighborhood are going to tease his kids that their daddy was the guy who got his behind spanked by the Singaporian government.

A few other comments:

Many of the punishments under the Old Testament involved restitution of damage, rather than prison or beatings. If a man did somethign particularly cruel, maybe the judges would add a beating to the punishment. The Torah seems pretty flexible about it.

There does seem to be some references to somethign similar to prison in the OT. There were to be cities of refuge. If someone committed manslaughter, he could stay in one of these cities until the death of the High Priest. (Is there a picture of the atonment in Christ's death in this law?) This wasn't a prison exactly. It was a city, but the man was not free to travel about.

The kings in Jeremiah's day had some sort of Dungeon. A jail is one way of keeping someone from causing trouble without getting his blood on your hands. The Torah itself doesn't teach the Israelites to have prisons.

Another negative thing to add to your list of problems with prisons: laziness. Prisoners may have chores or even a join prison, but a lot of prisons require less work than a 40 hour work week, which is the standard on 'the outside.'

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Irian Jaya is the Western half of Irian Jaya. It's controlled by Indonesia.

The Irians feel like their land ahs been colonized. Their is a big gold mining operation owned by the US and people on Java. The Irians get pollution and not the gold. Consumer goods are hard to find. The government hasn't built a lot of roads or helped build up the territory very well. The government doesn't send a lot of their people abroad to study like some of the larger people groups.

The Irianese are ethnically different from most other Indonsesians. They look like Australian Aborigenes. Many of them profess to be Christians as well. In the last century, extensive missionary work has been done in Irian Jaya. The Gospel was brought to various stone-age tribes in Irian. Don Richards wrote a couple of books that tells some things about missions work among the Irianese- Peace Child and Eternity in Their Hearts. Now some Irianese are saying they've evangelized their island, and are wanted to go elsewhere to preach the Gospel. I know an Irianese chruch planter who has planted a church in Bali and plans to start another one.

I know some Irians. I go to chruch with one, and my wife and I hired his cousin to work for us as a live-in maid. This fellow from church introduced us to an Irianese man who had just completed law school who was going back to be a judge. Talk about rapid advancement! From law school to judge!

There are maybe 2 million irians, so the number of highly educated native Irians is small. If I meet an Irian judge again, I think I'll share with him some ideas I was thinking about last night for training their attorneys and judges should they ever become an independant nation.

The Irianese want independance, but the Indonesian government has offered them the status of an autonomous province. If they ever do get autonomy, maybe they can get started with their own legal system.

Indonesian law students must know Dutch, the legal language before independance. If Irian ever becomes independant, law school candidates should know Indonesian. I was thinking of some other requiremetns. Before a man could enter law school, he could be required to be able to quote the entire Torah, the sermon on the mount, some passages on law and grace from the NT, and other Biblcial passages related to law. Under English Common Law, if I am not mistaken, a judge can draw on the Bible for legal precedent.

The Irianese might even be in favor of cporporal punishment. The live-in maid who lives in my house (she's back in Irian because of a death of a relative now, though) tells about how if someone does something bad in Irian, people beat him up. If one person does something that hurts another, their culture requires that certain large fines be paid. It sounds rough. One of her nephews was just alone with an Irianese girl from his village--nothing happened--but since it was against custom, the boy's family had to pay a huge fine.

I don't think these tribal laws have a provision for prisons. Many societies and cultures have managed to get by without having prisons as a part of their legal system. Locking someone up in prison for decades can be very cruel punishment.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Prisons are places where the law incarcerates the guilty against their will. Cities of Refuge were places where the innocent voluntarily went to avoid misguided vengeance.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

"Danny & the BAT" are correct again!

(Sounds like a new Crime-fighting team, doesn't it?)

-- Anonymous, May 22, 2001

Or an Elton John song ;)

-- Anonymous, May 24, 2001

I have a FUNNY story re: Elton John.

Years ago I worked with and studied under Dr. Elton Trueblood at Yokefellows International. One Sunday night I was preaching in a United Methodist Church in ru ral Indiana, and thepastor got tongue tied and introduced me as a student and an associate of Elton John. Many of t he older folks did not even know who Elton John was.

-- Anonymous, May 24, 2001

Bear in mind that receiving the cane in Singapore is not simply a matter of a couple of light smacks on the butt. I read an account by a British SAS (Special Air Service) soldier who was caned for fighting in a bar. This guy who was no sissy received six, I think it was, stokes with a rattan cane. Each lash cut deep into his flesh and according to him, was excruciatingly painful. He could smell the vomit of previous victims on the vinyl padding of the object he was tied to. He spent two weeks lying on his stomach recuperating.

As much as I admire the Singaporean intolerance to crime, I think that caning is a little too barbaric.

-- Anonymous, June 10, 2001