EPISODE 617： THE SINGAPORE OPTION
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Summary
The Singapore Option is a new way to deal with violent criminals in Singapore. It's based on the case of Michael Fay, an American teenager who was sentenced to six strokes with a bamboo cane for vandalizing cars in the late 1990s. He claims he was tortured into confessing to a crime he didn't commit.
Transcript
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This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
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A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
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This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
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Today's episode is a very special episode that we title The Singapore Option.
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Will Chamberlain joins me, and I got to tell you, folks, when you look out about all the
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crime that's going on, and then you also talk about, you know, the problems of our prisons,
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We also don't want these overcrowded, overstuffed prisons.
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Why not, instead of incarcerating people for all of these years, you take violent criminals
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We'll be going through how Singapore deals with violent crime, and we'll also dissect
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He was an American teenager who got caught up in this.
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He had to be caned in Singapore, but guess what?
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I think that you might find this information important.
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In March, news, a Singapore court had sentenced an 18-year-old American to six strokes with
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This is the first I've heard of and I'll look into it.
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And Michael Fay, who insists he was tortured into confessing that he spray-faded cars, was
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instantly caught in the middle of a raging debate.
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If anybody just put themselves in this position, I don't think anybody would want their kid or
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someone close to them to be beaten with a cane.
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After President Clinton personally appealed for leniency, Singapore reduced the sentence
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But that wasn't much consolation for Michael Fay.
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I mean, my back was bent in a 90 degree, and I was cuffed, buckled like this.
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And on the third step, he strikes, and he cuts open your buttocks.
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Throughout the incident, Singapore insisted its strict laws made it one of the safest
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Why does Singapore, and certainly many other Asian countries, but definitely Singapore,
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seems to have these luxurious airports, incredible infrastructure, amazing downtowns, just an
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And the question is, why don't we have those things?
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Well, a lot of people, including conservative commentator Matt Walsh, a friend of mine,
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decided to say that it's because Singapore beats their criminals, and Singapore executes
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And of course, most famously, we remember the case of Michael Fay back in the 1990s,
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who was caned four times, not six, sentenced to six, reduced to four, for vandalizing over
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He was spray painting, doing all sorts of things, which, by the way, you're told not to
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So we went and looked up what happened to Michael Fay.
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And he now runs a successful food and beverage business, all thanks to caning.
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And so to talk through these issues and go through it, I want to bring on a former colleague
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of mine at Human Events, and currently the senior counsel at the Internet Accountability
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Will, thanks so much for finally joining the show that you, by the way, helped create.
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So the behind the scenes of this is that when Will was publisher over at Human Events,
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he gave me a ringy ding ding one time and said, hey, Jack, you should start this like
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And here we are, what, a year and a half later.
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But, you know, well, you know, things, things and things have a way of changing, too, sometimes.
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Um, when we see the success of something like Singapore, I mean, I remember if you go back
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to the 60s, Singapore, it's like a backwater port.
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It's it's just sort of like a little dollop just kind of hung off the edge of Malaysia.
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You know, it's a city that, you know, nothing necessarily wrong with it.
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But it certainly isn't this worldwide phenomenon that we talk about now.
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I mean, you really have incredible statesmanship.
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I mean, Singapore is a testament to the value of having really, really talented statesmen.
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Basically, Lee Kuan Yew, who was the founder, effectively, of Singapore as an independent
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country and president for a very long time, I think, or prime minister, rather, he's prime
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And his son is currently prime minister of the country, was one of the most talented and
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And as a result, he took a very, very tiny postage stamp of a country that was, as you
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And through his leadership and wise policy in the town industry, the Singaporean people
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turned it into one of the places that one has one of the highest GDP per capita in the
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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.
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It's a it's a number of different sound policies.
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But one of them includes being very, very tough on crime.
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Was it done through improving everyone's economic standing?
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Because, of course, you know, Singapore is a diverse country.
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It is certainly a multicultural country in a sense.
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They have and then and then predominantly Han Chinese.
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But, you know, it's certainly not a homogenous society.
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So was it done through diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory and handouts
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Yeah, I wouldn't say that's exactly how they did it.
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I mean, there is Singapore is a very, very diverse place and was during when Lee Kuan Yew
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And part of his skill was managing the various diverse coalitions to form a very, very stable
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government, incorporating them all into his government.
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But that was done not necessarily as a, you know, based on the buzzwords of diversity makes
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It's sort of that's a way to tamp down ethnic strife.
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He always saw that as how do we keep this place as peaceful and safe, as strong as possible
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and simply excluding one large faction from the government was always going to create a
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But I think, you know, it is to be fair, to be fair, I mean, Lee Kuan Yew was not some
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There's plenty of social welfare in Singapore, but there's also an enormous amount of economic
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And there is, as I said before, extreme, you know, toughness when it comes to crime, vandalism,
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harsh punishments and punishing things that we wouldn't think to punish, like spinning
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And of course, that's I think most people do think of that.
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The first for a first time offense, longer, larger.
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If you throw a bottle on the ground that you're drinking, that's considered defiance against
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Singaporean law and requires a court appearance.
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Penalties, penalties include corrective work orders where the offenders clean up a specified
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area while while wearing bright green luminous vests.
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Of course, the chewing gum is the famous one, ultimately began their operations of their
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MRT, which is a five five billion dollar project.
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And vandals started putting gum on door sensors.
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Will, can you walk us through some of the drug laws of Singapore?
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I can tell you off the top of my head, the drug laws in Singapore are extremely punitive
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in the sense that if you are caught possessing an extreme, even a very, very small amount
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of heroin, for example, within Singapore, you get the death penalty.
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And there's a few minor exceptions, but they're they're trivial.
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If you come in with even possession, if you have a possession above a certain amount of
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Honestly, I think the total amount of heroin needed to trigger the death penalty is a little
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Other drugs, it's bigger because they they do acknowledge that for things like cannabis,
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they they want to get the traffickers, not necessarily the users with this kind of punishment.
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But in general, I mean, the law, the drug laws in Singapore are extraordinarily strict
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Like if you fly into Singapore, you'll be given a card before you even land that says
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if you come into the country with drugs, you will get the death penalty.
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Which and they would consider that drug trafficking.
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Brittany Griner going into Russia was was considered drug trafficking, even though she
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had like a couple edibles or something for exactly what it was.
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But it's some what we would consider in the U.S.
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It's minuscule or in Washington, D.C., by the way, is completely legal.
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You know, anyone can go buy some great movies about this, by the way, because Singapore is
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not the only country down there in in Southeast Asia that has strict drug laws.
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But Thailand, Malaysia actually have similar laws.
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You can watch Broke Down Palace with Claire Danes or Return to Paradise, great Joaquin Phoenix
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film that actually do deal with a lot of these things.
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It's just it seems that in the West, we've gotten totally away from that.
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Now, of course, President Trump's come out a few times and stated that, you know, when
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it comes to these opium, opioid dealers or fentanyl dealers, just straight up death penalty.
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And we should throw them, you know, Duterte, of course, did this in the Philippines for a
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long time and was extremely popular for doing so.
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Will, why and I want to break this down in the next segment.
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But, you know, why did Lee Kuan Yew decide to take this two track approach to revamp and
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Well, I think on the one hand, he wanted to maintain social cohesion.
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So he didn't want, you know, a lot of people who were struggling in the in the streets that
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And remember, again, how incredibly diverse Singapore was.
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There had to be some form of social welfare just to ensure you didn't have that constant
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factional strife and civil effectively civil war in such a tiny place.
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But I think when it comes to why he was so draconian about the drug laws, his his view
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But you've got to think about not just how many lives does a single drug dealer destroy?
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How many families do they destroy in the act of dealing large amounts of heroin or cocaine?
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They destroy hundreds of families, hundreds of lives.
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And so from from the perspective of the Singaporeans, of course, drug dealing should be met with the
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Um, you may not intentionally murder someone in the same way, but you're responsible for
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so much death, so much sickness, so much harm, um, so much destruction.
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By the way, this, by the way, is why, uh, Maurice Hall in the George Floyd case refused to take
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the stand and took the fifth because his lawyer rightfully pointed out that in the state of
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Minnesota, if you sell someone a lethal dose of fentanyl and it kills them, then you can
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Um, and I think that the, you know, Singapore just takes it much more seriously.
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I think Lee Kuan Yew in a famous interview once said that if we could, if we could hang
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these drug dealers a hundred times, we would, um, that they take it that seriously.
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Uh, and, and, and it seems like they have a very good reason to a very good moral reason,
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um, for saying, sorry, no, no, no, this is what you're doing.
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The activity you're engaged in is causing so much trauma and so much death and destruction
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And we need to deter this behavior as much as possible.
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What you're saying is it's, it's pragmatism, pragmatism, pragmatism, that our values are
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We're not necessarily taking this from a holy book or a philosophy book.
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Now, well, one thing that I want to, to stress, and this is something that I saw getting totally
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lost in that Twitter debate is that it's not just harsh on crime policies that made Singapore
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They dealt with the intercultural strife as best they could, right?
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Give everyone sort of a way in, but then also that they totally superheated their economy
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and they were considered one of the four Asian tigers in the nineties.
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Um, it was Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.
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And so this idea of, Hey, how about instead of everybody getting upset that, uh, you know,
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that somebody has got more than me or that this is going on or that's going on.
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Yeah, there's an enormous amount of economic freedom, um, and, and a complete, you know,
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a very, very serious focus on free trade, getting, getting people to come in and start
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up companies there, like inviting foreign corporations in soliciting them.
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Um, there was a huge amount of focus on a workforce development from the perspective of Lee Kuan
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So for example, uh, the, the first language in the national language of Singapore is English.
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And that did not have to be the case, uh, after the, the United Kingdom left.
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And I mean, first it was part of the Malaysian federation and then an independent country.
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There's not a whole bunch of English people, um, of English, of origin from the United Kingdom
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So that easily could have been, you know, it could have adopted Mandarin as their primary
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They could have adopted Indian or, or men, one of the Indian languages as their, their, uh,
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primary language, but they adopted English because they knew that it would give them an advantage,
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And so you have a slew of very, very wise and sound policies economically that really
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made the country very wealthy, rewarded, um, you know, economic industry, kept taxes reasonably
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low and allowed for you to build, you know, really build Singapore into this economic powerhouse
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that then when combined with their seriously tough on crime policies has made the place a
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And, and, and that's something that I think we should also get into in the United States.
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So obviously we have the tension between left and right when it comes to economic policy.
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Um, I think the right is settling into a place where, okay, we don't want to be full on, um,
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uh, libs when it comes to, oh, we're going to just hand out everything and we're going
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to raise carbon credits and somehow that's going to make the planet cooler or stop global warming
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or whatever. But at the same time, we're also not going to be full on. This is where the new right
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kind of comes in where we're not going to be, uh, uh, present Trump came out and I've seen a lot of,
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uh, conservatives coming out saying recently about, no, we're not going to go Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney
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and, and shut down or, or cut or privatize Medicare, Medicaid, social security, that we're just not going
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to touch these things. We're just going to leave them where they are. Obviously it's, it's smart
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politics. And, and I think really there's the country's just not ready for that. Um, I think
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in a lot of reasons. And so finding this better, this better middle ground, whereas Romney and Paul
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Ryan, we're trying to go full, like, um, get rid of all the entitlement programs right away. Even
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these ones that people have paid into their entire lives, which I think rightfully so, um, made people
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lose their minds. But at the same time, you are also seeing, you know, uh, conservatives and the new
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right, I think. And, and as I wanted to get into the criminal section of it, because it's, it's sort
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of like, which, which one are we, are we the people that are saying that we want to be tough on crime?
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Or are we the people who are saying that we support the first step deck? Because it seems like we're
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trying to do both at the same time right now. And I don't think that makes sense.
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Yeah. No, I look back at some of my old tweets about the first step back and I'm, I kind of cringe.
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Honestly, I, I, I think that they were, I ultimately think that was the wrong policy and that we should,
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that we need to be stricter on crime and that we, we, we went in the totally wrong direction.
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Um, like the problem, as I said before, that there, we do need criminal justice reform in this
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country. We need more people to go to jail and for the penalties to be more severe. Uh, I mean,
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you know, whether it's like people not getting severe enough penalties for serious crimes,
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like armed robbery and assault, or whether people aren't getting serious enough punishment for sort
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of these, you know, crimes of, you know, choice and convenience, the sort of protest crimes where people
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stand in the middle of highways or destroy public patrimony and throw paint on throw or throw
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tomato soup on paintings. All that stuff should be punished more heavily. And it's the kind of stuff
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that Singapore would never tolerate in a million years. I mean, they, again, they would give you a
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thousand dollar fine for spitting out gum on the sidewalk. Imagine what they do if you, uh,
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threw tomato soup on a painting. Yeah. There was Helen Andrews in DC was counting fair jumpers. She
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just went down to the Metro and was counting fair jumpers one morning in the DC Metro. She counted 40.
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And she even asked somebody, she said, well, why do you do this every day? He said, well,
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it's, it's cheaper. And, and, and someone else said, I don't think I've ever paid for the Metro in
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my entire life. Just never done that. And this gets into the broken windows theory. And I've
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interviewed, um, mayor Giuliani on this. And I've always said that in, you know, in addition to his
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nine 11 response, it's one of the greatest things he did as mayor was to clean up the city of New York
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and the broken windows policy, the growth windows theory to break it down for people. I have, um,
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I have like sort of the textbook definition here. And that was something that Giuliani put in practice.
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The broken windows theory stems from the work of two criminologists, George Kelling and James
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Wilson, who suggested that minor disorder like vandalism acts as a gateway to more serious crime
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by focusing on small offenses, often referred to as quality of life crimes. Kelling and Wilson
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thought violent crime and other undesirable activity would decrease. Well, when Giuliani
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attempted or put enacted this policy, put it into practice, did it work?
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Yeah, it worked really well. Um, worked in Singapore when it was done to, uh, there's,
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I think there's sort of this. Yeah, it's wildly successful. And I mean, there, there is sort of
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an, there are really good art reasons to think that there's a causal relationship between punishing
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low level crime and reducing higher level crime. Um, you end up with nicer places that people are
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happier to be in. That's a, that's, let's start there that seem much safer and cleaner in general.
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I think people's environment, uh, has some impact on the likelihood that they will want to commit
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crime in the first place. Um, and then, you know, once you, you also create a culture of,
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you know, abiding by the law and expecting to be punished, even if you break the law in small ways,
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which leads to further, you know, a kind of culture grows where people just start abiding,
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you know, you know, abiding by the law on their own. And then once you get there,
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then you get to the situation where you've freed up your police officers to track down serious crime
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and make sure that's gets punished too. Um, but it's the idea here is that you shouldn't be letting
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go of the rope, that you should be punishing these low level crimes in order to make people
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understand that this is a place where you're going to be expected to abide by the law. Um, and I think,
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I think the idea of a gateway to, you know, once you start breaking the law,
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maybe you'll start breaking it in, in different ways, or you'll, you create a social expectation
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that breaking the law won't end up getting punished. And I think, I think we see that you
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look at the places where they talk about, Oh, we need to stop prosecuting these little offenses
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and they're, they're nightmares to live in now. And they're disgusting too. San Francisco,
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we're essentially right to get to just explain for folks, what you're saying is that what we've
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enacted or the Soros prosecutors or the woke process, whatever you call it, we're doing the
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opposite. We're doing the exact opposite right now in, you know, I'm from the Philadelphia area.
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You're originally from the Bay area, but our home areas, right. And we're in hometowns essentially
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are experimenting with the opposite of this. And it's a free for all. It's a free for all of death
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and murder and blood, uh, of, of, of people, of children in many cases. And it seems like we're
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not even allowed to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, it creates a, it creates a really terrible culture.
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I mean, I think about, you know, that, that store owner who sprayed the homeless woman with water,
00:23:03.340
like that, that shouldn't happen in the first place. He called the police on that woman 20 times.
00:23:07.000
She was breaking the law, but when the police do nothing, you get, not only do you get like
00:23:12.020
increased law ranking, you get vigilantism. I mean, the, the entire point of having a justice,
00:23:16.380
criminal justice system in the first place is to prevent vigilante justice and the sort of,
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you know, vendetta type reciprocal murders. That's, that's, that's how,
00:23:25.080
why justice systems came to be in the first place. One of the things, you know, liberals fail
00:23:30.380
the sort of Chesterton's fence argument where they, they destroy something without understanding
00:23:34.780
why it was built in the first place and what problems it solved. Um, what is really for the
00:23:39.980
audience? So Chesterton's Chesterton had a saying about, uh, his fence or Chesterton had a saying,
00:23:46.220
it went something like this. If you see a fence and you don't know why it was put up,
00:23:49.960
you shouldn't take it down. Right. You should be able to answer the question of why it was put up
00:23:53.860
first. Um, and if you don't have a good answer to that, then that you don't understand the problem
00:23:59.500
it's solving. It's a good border policy, by the way. Yeah, it's good border policy, right? You
00:24:03.440
shouldn't, shouldn't take down fences unless you fully or thoroughly understand why they were put
00:24:06.500
up in the first place. To get into your, to get into that further, it's by the way, you know,
00:24:10.340
there's somebody else who, who understood this same issue. And that person was Karl Marx,
00:24:15.480
because if you actually read, uh, Marx's theory that it isn't, he doesn't just believe in the,
00:24:22.220
you know, joie and the proletariat, because he also understood something called the lumpen
00:24:27.540
proletariat known as, you know, I would say in English, the criminal class, that there are groups
00:24:32.900
of people who could essentially be just, just geared towards criminal activity or, uh, for a variety of
00:24:39.380
reasons, or you're always going to have criminals in any society. We just know that, um, we can get into
00:24:43.680
the issues why, but also the maker issue, I think is that if you're catching those criminals,
00:24:49.520
when they're committing the minor crimes, if you've, uh, caught the person who is dealing drugs
00:24:55.980
at 14, then maybe they won't become a high level drug dealer at 16. If you've caught them when
00:25:01.320
they're smashing windows, when they're doing vandalism, we've seen this time and time again,
00:25:05.180
and any criminologist will show you that no one starts out, uh, with, with, you know, no serial
00:25:10.900
killer starts out with serial killing. They start out with smaller, uh, and they move their way up
00:25:15.880
through the spectrum of this, the broken windows policy. Guess what? It catches that.
00:25:21.420
Yeah. I mean, it does, uh, it does a lot of good. It helps with rehabilitation. As you say,
00:25:26.480
um, it helps with deterrence. Uh, I mean, I, one of the things there, there's a criminologist. I think
00:25:31.920
there was a study in Hawaii where they were looking at how to ensure that, um, people comply with a
00:25:36.780
drunk driving program. And essentially one of the ways they did it is they made people,
00:25:40.860
they had a system that wasn't super punitive necessarily, but was almost always enforced,
00:25:46.020
right? There was never any getting out of it. Um, and so you could, you just, people knew that if
00:25:51.200
they didn't show up on, you know, to, for their, uh, alcohol test, if they didn't do something,
00:25:56.540
police would be there within hours and they would be taken away. And that was different from other
00:26:00.480
places that didn't have as consistent enforcement. And that was what, you know, that was what was
00:26:04.180
really necessary for something like that. You need, you need, you need punitive laws that effectively
00:26:08.680
deter the behavior and you need, you need consistency of enforcement for illegal behavior
00:26:12.120
too. Now you certainly need consistency of behavior and we're coming up on our second break
00:26:16.700
right here, but on the next one, I want to get into this question of what is the best punishment
00:26:23.780
for crime are prisons, what we need for what we need to do. Should we have more prisons? Should we
00:26:29.180
have less prison? Why do we have prisons? Where did prisons come from? Where did this idea come from
00:26:33.340
that if you do, if you commit crimes against society, that you have to go sit in a room for
00:26:38.540
a certain period of time? Uh, we're going to get into that because what's interesting for
00:26:42.920
people that they may not understand is that the history of prisons isn't quite as old as they
00:26:48.260
might think. Well, did you know that they censored Aladdin? Remember Aladdin, the movie, the Disney
00:26:53.300
movie? I watched Aladdin all the time. I used to watch that used to be the movie that I would annoy my
00:26:58.780
parents by watching over and over and over again when I was like six years old. So I'm sure you
00:27:02.180
remember, you remember the line, um, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face
00:27:09.180
is the original songs, the traitor who at the end or whatever is, is singing that song. You know,
00:27:16.480
that line was changed. It was, why is that? It was. And then they say it's, it's barbaric,
00:27:22.240
but Hey, it's home. Um, so this line was considered racist even in the 1990s by 90 standards,
00:27:28.560
sort of like when America had our first dabble with political correctness and like the OJ case
00:27:32.540
came up, um, which was the first time America just decided to let someone off of, uh, off from,
00:27:37.900
from punishment for murder because of the color of the skin and because he was famous, um, that they
00:27:43.300
changed it to it's, it's hot and intense rather the land is flat and hot and intense. It's barbaric,
00:27:51.420
but there are tones. Of course the line doesn't make any sense. And then the Will Smith version,
00:27:54.460
it's further changed for 2019. And they also took away the line of what I actually, I don't know why
00:28:01.400
I went down this rabbit hole, but I absolutely had to. Um, because it's like, wait a minute,
00:28:04.880
this was in like an Aladdin movie, right? If you know, when he says, I'll have your hand,
00:28:09.100
street rat, you know, and it's the great voice actor, Jim Cummings, who's screaming that because
00:28:13.120
he's referring to the practice of chopping a thieves handoff. Um, that line is totally gone from the
00:28:19.100
Will Smith version that came out in 2019. Just gone completely. And it is too bad. And so when I
00:28:24.720
wanted to mention the, the history of prisons, because I found an interesting, an, an interesting
00:28:32.240
article, uh, about this when I was just doing research and, and, and show prep for this.
00:28:39.540
And, and that article was called in defense of flogging. And, and it said, and, and to go through,
00:28:47.520
it was, it was written by, by a prison reformer, a guy who had been a former police officer in the
00:28:51.300
city of Baltimore, which, you know, just a paragon of safety and peace, Baltimore. Um, you know,
00:28:56.860
if anyone has seen the wire, we just know how, how wonderful and utopian, I mean, you know,
00:29:00.820
Baltimore is probably the American city that's closest to Singapore, as far as I'm concerned.
00:29:06.520
Yeah. Yeah. Very sick sarcasm there. Um, that he writes, so here's what's interesting.
00:29:12.180
He writes that it was the progressive reformers of the past two centuries,
00:29:17.180
are responsible for the fact that we have the prison system today. And the prison system
00:29:23.160
originally came about in the 1800s, early 1800s, uh, around this idea of their penitentiaries and
00:29:31.400
reformatories. One of the reasons for this, uh, Michelle Foucault, of course, is a huge proponent
00:29:36.740
of, of this type of the rehabilitative act. And it's a very progressive, um, idea that you can take
00:29:44.240
someone and rehabilitate them through, through prison, through the use of, of holding someone
00:29:50.900
in a cell for an indefinite period of time, or, or even a definite period of time that you will
00:29:55.300
somehow change their nature. And he writes, he goes, this in the, this in the, uh, Chronicle of
00:29:59.520
Higher Learning prisons today have all but abandoned rehabilitative ideals, which isn't such a bad thing.
00:30:05.120
If one sees the notion as nothing more than paternalistic hogwash. And he wrote, he then wrote
00:30:10.400
for those who are, who are opposed to the penitentiary system, all that's left then is
00:30:15.420
punishment. And we certainly could punish in a way that is much cheaper, honest, and even more humane.
00:30:21.660
We could flog. We could flog. That's an amazing article. I think, I think he's onto something there.
00:30:27.500
You know, there are a lot of different purposes to punishment. Um, and there's deterrence, the idea
00:30:32.420
of deterring other people from committing crimes. Uh, there's re there's, uh, in incapacitation,
00:30:37.900
namely just taking someone who's just can't help, but engage in criminal activity and keeping them
00:30:42.680
away from the public. Um, there's about a statement of values about the value of victims and the rights
00:30:48.520
of victims, because, you know, if a victim's life is taken away, it's not, you're almost saying as a
00:30:53.160
society that that life wasn't meaningful, if you don't inflict severe punishment on the perpetrator.
00:30:57.700
And then there's rehabilitation. And it really is like the least important thing when it comes to
00:31:02.080
criminal justice, criminal justice, isn't for the good of the criminal criminal justice is for the rest of
00:31:07.140
us. And rehabilitation is something that you sort of, you know, maybe it's something you add on at
00:31:13.700
the end. And it's like, you know, if the other goals are being met, then sure, help rehabilitate
00:31:17.500
people who are going to get out of jail. That's again, probably good for the rest of us, but
00:31:21.920
that's not the focus. That's not why we have the jails in the first place. They're not,
00:31:26.580
you know, this, these aren't therapy sessions. Um, they're places to incapacitate you and deter
00:31:31.380
others from committing crime. Right. And so what people need to understand is that the current system
00:31:36.180
of the penitentiaries that we have today, it's only been around for about 200 years,
00:31:40.000
uh, for thousands of years that, and everyone can say, well, wait a minute, I've, I've seen,
00:31:44.340
you know, game of Thrones and I've, I've seen old, old books and they all talk about dungeons and
00:31:49.320
people being held down there, et cetera, et cetera. Well, the dungeon or, which of course comes from,
00:31:54.280
from French word for keep, uh, which, which is also the same word as a tower. You'll be locked in
00:31:59.020
the tower, you know, tower of London, et cetera, that, uh, we all know what the tower of London was
00:32:03.380
about. And most people didn't say that for far too long. Um, especially those princes, um, that
00:32:09.380
if you were awaiting trial or you had finished trial and you're awaiting your punishment,
00:32:16.960
then you were held in the jail or the gal. Uh, this was not, there was no sense that you would
00:32:23.660
be held there for an indefinite period of time, uh, or that would be your punishment. It's that you
00:32:28.860
were, you were there while you were waiting for your punishment to begin or while you were, you
00:32:33.740
know, that logistically needed a place to hold somebody where they couldn't run away to escape
00:32:37.320
trial. That was the whole point, but it's only about 200 years ago, which in, in terms of human
00:32:42.740
history, isn't that long that they came up with this new idea that what if we take away these,
00:32:48.660
this idea of punishment, what if we take away, which, which prior to that, uh, forced labor, I mean,
00:32:53.220
forced labor goes all the way back to the Roman empire. Um, you know, home, they used forced labor. I
00:32:57.860
mean, build the aqueduct, build the road, you know, you always need someone to do that. Um,
00:33:03.080
paying your debts, uh, transport, of course, which of course is, as it goes back to the,
00:33:07.340
the founding of Australia, Botany Bay, uh, punishment by transportation was, uh, huge in
00:33:12.720
the British empire because, well, we have colonies that need building and you're going to be sent down
00:33:16.080
to build those colonies. This building colony sucks and it's hard work and nobody likes it. Um,
00:33:22.920
you, you hear the, the, it's kind of, that's another debate on Twitter right now, the ruralist
00:33:26.720
debate and say, Oh, just, you know, just go, go live on a homestead and be a peasant. I said,
00:33:30.820
why are you glorifying the peasant lifestyle? That sounds awful, you know? And, uh, you know,
00:33:35.680
there's a reason we have society the way we do today. And we've, we've built upon it. We're
00:33:38.780
trying to fix society. We're not necessarily trying to return to peasantry and, and husbandry
00:33:43.780
and, and, and hunter gathering that, that, not that I have anything against hunter gathering,
00:33:47.520
uh, by me, but, but, you know, I was about to go hunt somebody on the streets of Arlington.
00:33:52.840
I was looking for a deer. I don't know. Clarendon doesn't really have many deer. It's too bad.
00:33:57.720
No, not really. No. But you know, we have this nice thing called supermarkets. Um, yeah,
00:34:02.740
but venison good. Excellent. So it's, it's, so the, the first state prison in England was
00:34:07.740
Millibank prison. It was only opened in 1816 and prison, the prison system is not old. It's not old at
00:34:14.640
all. And so the question I would have is, you know, and then let's go back to Michael Fay and
00:34:18.520
let's go back to Singapore because that's the overall discussion here is would you, or could
00:34:23.300
you even think of anyone who, if they were offered the chance between, so he got four lashes, right?
00:34:29.460
He was sentenced to six. He ended up getting four. Would you take four lashes or would you rather
00:34:36.500
sit in prison for four years, four years of your life? I mean, I think any criminal and any person
00:34:40.660
would rather take the lashes, right? You don't want to lose four years of your life.
00:34:44.640
Um, I think what Singapore gets right is interesting is it's not an, they don't see it as an either
00:34:49.560
or though they do both. Right. And they're, and both have different aspects of effects on the
00:34:55.260
potential criminal, right? Like maybe some criminals aren't that scared of prison or they, you know,
00:34:59.840
say, okay, whatever, the risk of prison isn't that bad, but they're particularly scared of
00:35:03.220
corporal punishment, um, or vice versa. So they just, they don't, you know, I think what Singapore
00:35:09.580
gets right is they do both. They, they do both. And, and it's, and it's good and just to do both.
00:35:13.940
It's, it's the right thing to, to punish truly awful behavior. Um, it's not, you know, it's
00:35:19.820
not beyond the pale to say, to use as the Singaporeans do caning.
00:35:24.920
And, and that, that is an interesting piece for us that we, as a society, when we do talk
00:35:29.940
about this and then the fact that America has got, we've got more people in prison right
00:35:33.140
now than we have in our entire, uh, military. And so my question is, is this something where,
00:35:39.840
where the right and the left could actually come together a little bit to say, Hey, no,
00:35:43.640
it is kind of silly that we're just shoving people in prison, assuming that's going to help.
00:35:47.100
And by the way, I've, I know people I've, and you can read studies about this where, uh, people have
00:35:54.180
said that, you know, hitting rock bottom, uh, getting that, you know, scared straight, uh, experience
00:35:59.600
is actually quite useful for them to say, you know what? Yeah, I had my brush with, with that.
00:36:04.300
And I definitely don't want any more of that whatsoever. And so the question though is,
00:36:09.320
so it works for some people certainly, but what about people who are repeat offenders who don't
00:36:14.220
have anything left to lose? I mean, what, what really is prison for them? Then you also have
00:36:19.460
the problem of, um, who's the guy in, uh, you know, uh, uh, in Shawshank, he, you know, he comes
00:36:25.700
out after being spending entire, his entire adult life in prison, then he commits suicide because he
00:36:30.300
doesn't know how to live outside an institution. Yeah. And in a way, prison is, is a way to sort
00:36:35.980
of take criminal justice and put it out of sight, out of mind. Uh, it's a way to make it something
00:36:41.620
we don't think about and see compared to, you know, other forms of punishment. I think that the
00:36:45.820
analog is to capital punishment where we, where we use things like lethal injection to sort of
00:36:50.560
medicalize, um, capital punishment when it's, when it's an execution. And I think there, Alex Kaczynski,
00:36:57.120
Judge Alex Kaczynski in California, um, you know, he, he long, he's a very, a libertarian and,
00:37:02.640
and definitely not somebody who was just a, a reflexive authoritarian by any means, but he said,
00:37:07.040
we should go back to firing squads. Um, they're more humane because it happens quicker. There aren't
00:37:12.660
any mess ups and they don't, they stop us from pretending that what we're doing isn't capital
00:37:16.760
punishment. And I think the, the analog here is, uh, when you're, we shouldn't pretend that criminal
00:37:22.680
justice isn't really criminal justice and that we're better than caning and that that's somehow
00:37:27.760
less humane or more humane than, you know, putting somebody in a, in a cell for 30 years.
00:37:34.760
Yeah. And I don't think it's humane at all. And it, it, it, maybe it makes us feel better. Maybe
00:37:39.000
it makes people say, Oh, I'm not sure. You know, I hear people, I hear other people say like, Oh,
00:37:43.940
the, the, you know, life sentence is worse than death penalty. And I don't think so. I certainly don't
00:37:48.640
think so at all. Um, no, I think the death penalty is definitely worse. That's why people are against
00:37:52.740
it. You know, that's why, that's why the reformers hate it so much. Um, but this, you know, three hots
00:37:58.100
and a cot for the rest of your life. That's not bad for some people depending on where they're coming
00:38:01.360
from. So that is something that I'd like to get back into. And we're talking about corporal punishment
00:38:06.760
in general, as well as other forms of punishment that aren't necessarily prison, which is what Singapore
00:38:11.440
is doing. They're saying, look, we're you, you have broken our laws. You've broken our trust.
00:38:16.240
You've acted in willful defiance of our system and our system matters. And if you have done so,
00:38:22.260
we are going to correct you. We are going to correct you in a way that's going to make sure
00:38:25.740
to get it across. And by the way, we don't spank in our house for my two boys. You know,
00:38:29.780
we don't spank at all, but you know, we, you know what, maybe just maybe for adults, maybe they,
00:38:35.020
what, what they need is a good adult form of spanking through a flogging or a caning.
00:38:40.420
And what cousin Singapore, guess what? It works. Now, Will, I'd like to read a quote for you
00:38:44.460
from one of the, the, the great death penalty advocates in, in the world. And that of course
00:38:51.780
is Pope Pius XII of the Catholic church said, Whoa, wait a minute. I thought the Catholic
00:38:56.980
church was against the death penalty. Well, Pope Francis is against the death penalty. But prior
00:39:01.800
to that, there's a little something called the entire history of the Catholic church. And it's,
00:39:07.080
I think it would be, it would be kind of silly if you know anything about the history of the Catholic
00:39:10.320
church to say that the church has always been against the death penalty. When I can point to a lot
00:39:14.360
of instances where that's just quite not the case. Um, but here's, but, but the church has always
00:39:19.620
stated, and this, this is something with, I will be serious about that, that, that is up to the state
00:39:24.000
that it's always been up to the state. And here's what Pope Pius says about this. He says,
00:39:28.960
even in the case of the death penalty, the state does not dispose the individual's right to life.
00:39:35.820
Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his
00:39:44.220
guilt after he threw his crime deprived himself of his own right to life. We'll unpack that for us.
00:39:53.760
What does that mean? Well, I mean, it, it means that, you know, that the idea that it's like somehow
00:39:59.860
an immoral or unlawful killing is just wrong. I think that, you know, people often say at least
00:40:05.420
to Catholics that it's like, Oh, you're pro-life. Well, then you can't be for the death penalty.
00:40:09.280
It's like, no, the death penalty is, is appropriate in certain circumstances because it's about
00:40:13.820
respecting the fact that, you know, they have violated someone else. Generally it's because
00:40:17.640
somebody killed someone, um, or they did something so against the moral order that it was responsible
00:40:22.480
for other people's deaths. So it's the idea that you have violated, you know, God's law. Um, you've
00:40:28.180
deprived yourself of your own right to life. And, and that's the, the state is just ensuring that you
00:40:34.020
I've seen you, uh, you use on Twitter and I've definitely adopted it, but all credit to where
00:40:39.060
it's due that you've used on Twitter, that the death penalty is pro-life.
00:40:42.980
Yeah, I think, I think the death penalty, yeah, definitely is pro-life. I think there's a great,
00:40:48.520
another borrowing from Kaczynski again, when he talked about, um, that he had something very,
00:40:53.360
very interesting to say about the death penalty, which is that, you know, people say it's like,
00:40:56.460
Oh, how could you? That's so inhumane. And it's like, if you actually read the briefing,
00:41:00.140
he says like, you could hear the piercing cries of the victims in between the lines of the dry
00:41:04.840
legal text, like what the cases where the death penalty is brought up, you know, involves such
00:41:09.300
incredibly appalling and horrifying behavior that it's like, there's no other, there's no,
00:41:17.040
And by the way, we're talking about horrific rapes. We're talking about, uh, the violation of
00:41:21.900
young children. We're talking about, um, just, just cold blooded murders in many, many instances.
00:41:30.420
Walk me through a little bit, you know, the, the question of what, what about when the state gets
00:41:34.240
it wrong? So, and I always hear that argument come up. What about when the state gets it wrong?
00:41:38.320
What about DNA? What about when people are exonerated?
00:41:40.940
Absolutely. People should have access to DNA evidence to prove their innocence or to overturn
00:41:44.880
prior convictions that may have been wrongful, but that doesn't mean that the death penalty isn't
00:41:49.780
still called for when somebody is clearly guilty of the crime.
00:41:54.880
Yeah. I mean, yes, it means that on occasion, the state will execute someone that is innocent.
00:41:59.280
I mean, you, but that's, I mean, I, I don't think that's an indictment of every form of
00:42:04.120
criminal justice that there is. I mean, it's basically saying any, you know, there's always
00:42:07.820
the possibility of wrongful punishment when you're running a criminal justice system.
00:42:11.120
Um, is that with the technology that we have, that everyone should have access to it to prove
00:42:16.620
their innocence, but the state also has greater access to highly advanced technology to prove
00:42:21.600
guilt. And that is the type of evidence that comes out on appeal after appeal in court after court,
00:42:29.560
after court that in, even in our system, we don't know. And I think we all know this,
00:42:35.380
that because we don't really, even in states with the death penalty in the United States,
00:42:39.240
I suppose with the exception of Texas, even though Texas has gotten a little wobbly on this,
00:42:42.860
if you look at the Rodney Reed case, um, which I've been covering for years, um, where it's a guy
00:42:47.860
that, I mean, they got him dead to rights. They've got, they've got semen, they've got blood,
00:42:51.340
they've got saliva, they've got everything. And yet they keep trying and Kim Kardashian gets involved
00:42:56.740
to, uh, find a way to, you know, to, to get this guy off. Meanwhile, these, they've just got him dead
00:43:03.720
to rights. Yeah. Um, that's, I, that's actually the, I mean, if anything, the, the problem with our,
00:43:11.620
our system is that it's, it's a little bit too, there's a little bit too many opportunities for appeal.
00:43:16.940
And, and as a result, the, the process for getting through and death penalty law has been
00:43:21.580
made very convoluted by the Supreme court. Um, and as a result, you end up with people on death
00:43:25.960
row for something like 30 years and that's not justice for the victims. Uh, and also those
00:43:30.280
extraordinarily expensive and, and arbitrary. And it also leads to very perverse outcomes where
00:43:35.320
it's like, it really does suddenly depend on the quality of your legal counsel, whether or not
00:43:38.840
they actually go through the conviction, because if you have quality legal counsel, you can just
00:43:43.280
delay, delay, delay, delay, and avoid it. So that's not just on an economic
00:43:46.820
grounds either. So there's, there's all sorts of problems with the way our system works in,
00:43:51.640
in, in reality. But I think people, you know, liberals often use the troubles, the difficulties
00:43:57.460
of our legal system in reality to make objections to the death penalty in total. And I don't think
00:44:02.920
they undermine the basic moral case for the death penalty, which I feel is fairly, fairly
00:44:06.500
strong. It seems as though the primary deterrent is that death row is just, is such a worse
00:44:11.020
form of imprisonment in the sense of the way you're treated by prison guards on death row,
00:44:15.260
the, and the type of amenities you get as a prisoner are much, much, much worse.
00:44:19.900
And so that, that almost is the deterrent. It's like almost, you don't have to, you don't expect
00:44:24.760
to be executed. You expect to have a much worse experience when you are in prison. That's not
00:44:30.320
quite what we're going for. I think, I think the idea of the death penalty is that some crimes
00:44:35.000
deserve the ultimate punishment. And we're not really getting that out of our current system.
00:44:39.340
And it is about respect for the society. And as you said, the respect for the life of the
00:44:44.220
individual who was either, I mean, there's this case, this horrific case that Mia Cahill over
00:44:48.920
a town hall has been discussing in and reporting on and really revealing down in Atlanta, Georgia,
00:44:54.680
where two pedophiles were able to adopt two boys and, uh, repeatedly raped them over a period of
00:45:01.100
several years. And we're pimping them out on Snapchat and other, uh, internet functions. And I,
00:45:06.600
I look at that and I just say, death penalty, just, just death penalty. I don't even want to
00:45:11.160
get horrified. You know, that's what, that's what it exists for. Horrifying crimes like these,
00:45:14.880
the sexual abuse of children. Like, no, we don't tolerate that in our society, period.
00:45:19.300
And stop. You do that, you die. That's the proper attitude to have. Um, and yeah, it has to be proven
00:45:24.980
beyond a reasonable doubt. And the victims are, you know, the criminal defendants are entitled to
00:45:28.860
due process. All that is still true. But after the due process has been had, it's, you know,
00:45:34.560
this is something we shouldn't tolerate at all.
00:45:36.480
Due process is not endless process. There's a right. And I, you know, criminal justice reformers
00:45:41.760
are saying, oh man, the punishments are just too draconian. It's like, no, they are not. They need
00:45:46.120
to be more draconian. You're not talking to anybody outside of your little bubble.
00:45:50.360
Those, those, by the way, those, those child rapists down in Georgia, uh, you know, they have
00:45:54.320
iPads right now while they're in prison. Yeah. They have iPads that are hooked up to the internet.
00:45:59.380
Yeah. This is the level of our prisons. I mean, it's, it's ridiculous. These are like country club.
00:46:03.200
Uh, yeah. I mean, they haven't been convicted, so I can sort of see their argument like, well,
00:46:08.840
we haven't been convicted yet. So, cause the purpose of imprisonment before judgment is to,
00:46:13.380
you know, incapacitate, just prevent you from doing anything in the short term because we think
00:46:17.200
you're dangerous to the public. But, you know, I think, you know, hopefully those get taken away.
00:46:22.680
I, so I haven't mentioned it much here, but my, um, my prison experience was spending a year
00:46:29.320
deployed at Guantanamo Bay. So I've been inside the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. I've
00:46:34.680
interacted with detainees, uh, when there were, there were almost 200 detainees when I was there
00:46:39.260
2012, 2013, um, under the Obama administration. And, uh, it was fine. It was totally fine.
00:46:47.200
Yeah. There's these stories about torture and these stories about, um, uh, you know,
00:46:52.880
calling, calling enteral feeding torture, by the way, which is when they, you know, they,
00:46:57.080
when, when people go on a hunger strike and president Obama ordered us to not allow the
00:47:01.620
prisoners to cure the detainees to kill themselves. So what the medics would do, and I got to see one
00:47:06.100
of these, what the medics would do was place a, a catheter, sort of like a lubricated catheter down
00:47:12.040
the nose through the throat into the stomach. And then, and basically take, you know, those like
00:47:16.940
ensure, um, like the protein shakes and then just pour that down. And this is a basic medical
00:47:22.460
procedure that's done to accident victims in the United States, car accidents, trauma,
00:47:27.360
people going through surgery, um, every single day. And they, they turned around and called that
00:47:31.940
torture. Um, they go after DeSantis for this a lot, by the way, because he was a Jag, um, who was
00:47:36.420
stationed down there at one point as a lawyer, you know, you know, in all of this, but you know,
00:47:40.220
I'm sitting there looking at it and say, this is a medical procedure. It's not torture at all.
00:47:43.520
None of these things with torture. Um, yeah. Like why are you, why are you entitled to the right
00:47:47.200
to hunger, strike yourself to death while you're in prison? We don't, we don't agree with that as
00:47:50.640
a society. Like, right. And, and, and when it comes to those guys, by the way, you know,
00:47:54.960
there were some, I know as an intelligence officer, of course I, I did certainly enjoy
00:47:58.560
the perspective of being able to, to have them available for interrogation and intelligence
00:48:04.060
collection. But then again, prisoners of war are slightly different than, you know,
00:48:08.220
a domestic prisoner. Um, sure. The argument for a domestic prisoner, like say a domestic
00:48:13.000
prisoner goes on a hunger strike, you know, does he, does he have the right to that argument would
00:48:17.560
ultimately justify like applauding the prison guards who allowed just Jeffrey Epstein to kill
00:48:22.080
himself. Right. Like, you know, that's, that's, that's, thank you for surfing for surfing eBay
00:48:27.180
and not, uh, not fixing the cameras. Thank you so much. Right. Yeah. Good. Good for letting him kill
00:48:31.920
himself. He had the right to do what he wanted with his own life. No wrong. He did not. He forfeited
00:48:36.660
that right. He needed, he needed to face justice. Well, I do think though that, and as, as we're
00:48:41.380
about to wind down here, I do think that this is, it's a hot debate. I think that as the new right
00:48:46.380
is kind of defining what it is and what it stands for and what it doesn't stand for. I think this is
00:48:52.000
really something where the reformers, the criminal reformers, the just us reformers in the Kim Kardashian
00:48:58.960
types of the world, you're just losing because we're trying to, and it ain't working and people
00:49:03.940
are dying. If we're going to talk about the prison issues, we need to bring back a little
00:49:08.080
something called corporal punishment. Will Chamberlain, where can people find you?
00:49:11.980
I am online on Twitter, primarily at Will Chamberlain on Twitter.
00:49:15.560
All right. At Will Chamberlain on Twitter, former colleague here at human events and the senior
00:49:20.640
counsel at the internet accountability project. Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission