As prison overcrowding reaches crisis point, Broadstairs writer and KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd explores the alternatives.

Could the “short, sharp shock” of corporal punishment - as practised throughout history and elsewhere in the world - prove a more effective (and economical) form of retribution?

“We believe the reintroduction of corporal punishment for rioters and citizens who undertake yobbish and anti-social behaviour will provide a deterrent.”

Who said that? Not some retired red-faced colonel, raging against the repulsive violence we saw in Southport and elsewhere this summer. No, it comes from a petition made to Parliament. Parliament rejected it - not because it was nuts, but because they were already reviewing another petition demanding the same thing.

By the start of this month, 1,280 of the summer’s rioters had been arrested and 800 charged. But what are we going to do with them?

Lock ’em up, you might say. And why? Because that’s what we do with criminals.

I have two questions for you.

First, where are we going to put them? We already have 97,800 Britons behind bars, roughly 1 in 700 of us. We’re not nearly as bad as America, with 1 jailbird per 282 people—in Mississippi, it’s 1 per 151—but our own prisons are already overcrowded and violent.

Second, what will it achieve? Penologists (yes, that’s what experts on prisons call themselves) say incarceration has four goals. The first is to punish criminals; the second, to deter further criminality; and the third, to turn them into productive citizens. It’s bad enough that goals 1 and 2 clearly contradict goal 3, but the real problem is that hardly anyone thinks it’s working. The fourth goal, of keeping the rest of us safe while the villains are inside, pretty much admits this.

So it perhaps shouldn’t surprise us that until about 200 years ago, pretty much nobody on earth thought locking up criminals was a good idea. In Iraq, archaeologists have found law codes going back over 4,000 years. They say nothing about jails.

Judges regularly took away criminals’ liberty, but did so by selling them into slavery or reducing them to serfdom, not sticking them in cells. For most crimes, most people paid with their bodies. They could be caned, whipped, and branded. Hands or genitals might be chopped off. Some were disembowelled or crucified. Barbaric stuff.

Why were they so savage? Partly because anything other than slavery or violence was expensive. In England it costs £51,724 to lock someone up for a year; for £125 more, we could send them to Eton. Consequently, we now have a prison-industrial complex. More than one British convict in six sits in a for-profit jail. Ancient societies couldn’t afford this, but we can. Sort of.

But while wealth makes mass incarceration possible, it doesn’t make it necessary. The other thing that’s changed is who we think we are. Until 200 years ago, most societies distinguished different kinds of people. Ancient Romans drew a line. Above it were honestiores, “honourable folk,” whose bodies couldn’t be mistreated; when they broke laws, they paid fines or lost rank. Below the line were humiliores, “humble folk,” who paid for their crimes with their bodies.

Modern democratic societies make honourable folk of us all. We cannot be whipped, caned or even spanked. Fifty-five of the world’s 193 countries allow executions, but only for the wickedest crimes. Even Oklahoma, the American state likeliest to kill you, only executes 1 in 77,160 of its citizens each year. Because lethal injections sometimes hurt, most US states have suspended executions altogether.

Making everybody honourable folk is surely the hallmark of a civilised society—but it’s not just retired red-faced colonels who wonder how well it’s working.

Every government agrees that if your behaviour is bad enough, you lose some of your citizen rights. For 200 years, we’ve taken away criminals’ liberty. But what has that given us except a dysfunctional, wildly expensive prison-industrial complex?

Why not pay your debt to society by briefly giving up the sacredness of your body? Are the welts left by canes really more barbaric than the rotting of body and soul wrought by decades behind bars? Was everyone who ever lived until 200 years ago really wrong to see some sense in a short, sharp shock?

Think Singapore, the safest country in the world according to the Global Law and Order Index. You can be brutally caned there for murder, rape, sexual abuse, drug trafficking and —yes—rioting, but only one person in 1,266 will be a victim of violent crime.

But here’s the thing. The cane is not Singapore’s only crime-fighting tool. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, it’s also the best-educated country on earth. The cane can punish and deter criminals, but it can’t make them productive citizens. Only knowledge can do that.

What we need, perhaps, is to lay the birch alongside the book. A society where vicious crimes bring implacable, terrible punishment, but also one where nearly everyone knows better than to turn to crime in the first place.

If we’re going to spend over 50 grand for each of the rioters arrested this summer, let’s give it to Eton, not Wormwood Scrubs. Or better still, let’s give it to your local comprehensive, where it’ll really make a difference.