A decent proposal: Introduce public punishment

There is a notorious man who boards taxis from and to Nyamirambo to pickpocket from unfortunate commuters. Aboard the taxi, he picks money and cell-phones from unsuspecting travellers, disembarks at the next taxi stage and then walks back to the initial stage. There is another habitual thief at the taxi stage located after the roundabout at Sonatube on your way to city centre. Every morning, the man comes to steal, and travellers have got used to him so they simply kick him off the bus so he waits for the next one. And of course there are many thieves jostling with passengers at Rubangura taxi stage as they pickpocket. Under Shariah law, these criminals would be visible from a distance courtesy of stamps where their arms once were; besides they would have been whipped at the Amahoro stadium for all to see. Instead they are arrested, taken to court but there are no witnesses (because they were commuters from outside the city or are busy earning a living). So they are set free to resume their crimes. In some cases, the victim is instructed to supply food to the criminal or else he/she is set free; “a legally official double jeopardy”. It seems during their detention, they acquire new skills and brazen disregard for punishment. The Prison system is a relatively new mode of punishment, even for people in the Western world who introduced it to most parts of the globe. It was a result of their societies’ revulsion against officially sanctioned violence and infliction of pain. Forget Biblical Joseph’s imprisonment in Egypt and Prophet Jeremiah’s incarceration before Nebuchadnezzar’s attack. Public punishment of offenders was the norm until quite recently. The types of punishment were varied; corporal punishments such as pillorying, flogging, being put in stocks and branding; some were tortured to death, broken at the wheel or burned at the stake. During the Spanish inquisition, people who were convicted of having read part of the Bible that was not included in the Index (parts of the Bible ordinary people were permitted to read) were rounded up together with their families and killed under supervision of the Catholic prelates, in many cases a Bishop. Such people would watch as their families were decapitated and then thrown in the fire before they themselves followed suit. In the case of one victim according to Michel Faucet, the man’s “belly was opened up, his entrails quickly ripped out, so that he could see them, with his own eyes, being thrown on the fire; in which he was finally decapitated and his body quartered”. The French revolutionaries, after taking over power, had the deposed king Louis XVI and his Queen Antoinette publicly guillotined (a form of punishment where the offender was tied while standing up and a heavy sharpened machine chopped off his/her head) to the applause of cheering multitudes of ordinary citizens. It is only centuries ago, that the British discovered an ingenuous way of punishing their criminals; banishing them to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. The prison system was meant to serve five major functions; retribution by the state on behalf of the victim, specific deterrent to the offender, general deterrent to other would be offenders, preventing crime for the duration the criminal is incarcerated and finally to rehabilitate the offender and turn him/her into a decent person fit to live among other people. The extent to which the system serves the stated objectives is debatable just like other forms of dispensing justice. There is a dark instinct in people to desire to see justice for example the execution of Timothy McVeigh, a man who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma bombing was caught on closed circuit monitors, so the victims and survivors could see him die or punished. There is a form of justice that serves all the above functions save the last and that is the Shariah law minus the extremist version practiced by criminal radicals. “If the punitive laws of Islam were applied for only one year, all the devastating injustices would be uprooted”, argued the late Ayatollah Khomeini. “Misdeeds must be punished by the law of retaliation: cut off the hands of the thief; kill the murderers; flog the adulterous man or woman. Your concerns, your ‘humanitarian’ scruples are more childish than reasonable”. Shariah stipulates two types of punishment: Ta’zir or flogging which is applied generally to offences that do not carry an explicit Koranic penalty and Hadd under which varied forms of punishment may be meted out such as scourging for illicit sex and alcoholic drinking and amputation of the hand for theft. Adultery, murder and abandoning Islam carry the automatic death penalty, where possible by stoning in public where the public is invited to take part in the macabre activity. In one reported case, 10,000 smartly dressed Pakistanis turned up to witness the public flogging of 26 persons nabbed in prostitution. It was reported thus, “the convicts were stripped down to a pair of white shorts, which were painted with a red stripe across the buttocks (the target). Then he was shackled up an easel, pads thoughtfully placed over the kidney to prevent injury. The floggers were muscular, fierce-looking sorts –convicted murderers who paraded around the flogging platform in colourful loincloths…each of the 26 received from five to fifteen lashes. One had to be carried off the (whipping) stage unconscious”. Talk about deterrence! Just last month a young female artist in Iran was killed as punishment for the murder of a young man whose family refused compensation as required by the law in that part of the world. Should we say that that is justice? Death is definitely to the extreme. However, a public flogging for persistent offenders would come in handy sometimes! Ends