The issue of corporal punishment, its benefits and detriments, its morality and violation of human rights, is one that is being examined and probed now, more than ever, in our modern society that is so heavily concentrated on personal civil liberties and respect to the person. Its inherent morality, or lack thereof, to inflict even the most reasonable of physical punishment upon children is a query to be looked into further, yet that is not the central question. One must wonder, however, if it is acceptable to extract the issue of morality entirely when asking whether or not the exercise of reasonable corporal punishment on young adolescents would reduce crime toward the end of their adolescence. Although the two questions are independent, it seems that they are so inextricably linked that it may be both inhumane and illogical to examine one without the other. Whether or not corporal punishment is a useful tactic in future crime reduction may be actually somewhat paradoxical in that in the long-run, corporal punishment seems to give way to an attitude accepting towards violence and crime, only perpetuating the problem further.
Before delving in any further, we must begin by searching for a definition to such a hazardously vague phrase, "reasonable corporal punishment."" We are told that only "reasonable- corporal punishment would be exercised. But one must wonder how such a commonplace definition is reached? Surely it is possible that different people define such an abstraction differently; such discrepancies between peoples' interpretations of the word "reasonable- seem utterly inevitable.
