Sadly, since the demise of corporal punishment, society had slid very badly into reverse.
Crime, and petty crime such as befell the RNLI, is rife because the perpetrators know they face little of no consequences.
But that's simply not true. Crime was far worse when punishments were far more severe. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between the increasing severity of punishment and an increase in crime. And Yorkie was talking about examining the penal systems of Sweden and Germany, for instance, but it's those countries that abolished corporal punishment well before we did.
There was a book published last year,
Tough Times and Grisly Crimes: A History of Crime in Northumberland and County Durham by Nigel Green. Extracts from the book give some figures and stories that show a little of what things were like in the past. Newcastle was plagued by juvenile crime in Victorian times; it was dealt with very harshly to little effect. In 1851 alone, 663 children were arrested in Newcastle, when the population was a quarter of what it is now.
One boy, Francis Dixon, was given six lashes at the age of nine for stealing oranges. A year later he was given ten lashes for stealing apples. He went on to become a career criminal. So pain didn't have much effect then.
People still have a strange faith in the idea that a few strokes of the whip is all that's needed to procure law and order and good behaviour. It didn't work in the past and there's no reason to think it would work now.
Those who promote hanging and flogging should also remember that there are inevitable miscarriages of justice, owing to faulty witness statements, poor procedures, inadequate case work, criminal conspiracies by police officers and revenge by those with axes to grind, to name but five of the most common reasons behind sentence rescinding and consequent payouts to those wrongly accused.
It's easy to read "The Police have arrested so-and-so on suspicion..." and assume the worst, but - fortunately - we live in a country which requires reasonable proof of wrongdoing and which asserts that people are innocent until proven guilty.
