Bring Back Flogging

Kristin Gebel
Jen Moskowitz
7 June 2007
Analysis

Title: Jacoby starts off his essay with an immediate demand to “Bring Back Flogging.” Already within the title, Jacoby is protesting to change the criminal justice system back to the way it used to be during the time of our forefathers.
Thesis: The main point Jacoby is trying to get across is the idea that Boston’s Puritan forefathers did not put up with miscreants and neither should we in this day and age.
Purpose: The purpose of Jacoby’s essay is in no doubt to persuade his audience to believe that something has to be changed in the punishment system and the way to fix it is to bring pack the public humiliation methods.
Method: Jacoby uses a number of different methods, but his most used method is where he cites numerous examples of past happenings. He includes how people were punished back in the 1600’s and for what reasons. He finds the most painful situations to talk about to make a statement that because this happened the crime rates stayed way down.
Something else that Jacoby does to make is point is that he states our way of punishing criminals in this day and age. He mocks the way that no matter what a person has done, they will end up being put behind bars and caged for a certain amount of time. He laughs at the idea that we are not punishing anyone; we are just placing them in areas away from the public.
Another method of Jacoby’s is using rhetorical questions. An example of this is when he says, “Why is it more brutal to flog a wrongdoer than to throw him in prison – where the risk of being beaten, raped or murdered is terrifyingly high?” Jacoby uses the rhetorical questions to twist around and compare the two punishments. By doing this he is able to show he downsides of both and asks the audience to decide which method of punishment is the most suitable.
Of course he has already pointed his finger in the right direction and causes the audience to assume that if the young criminals were whipped in public, fewer of them would become life time felons. These types of assumptions give the audience little time to make up their own minds about how others would react to being publicly humiliated.
The final method that Jacoby uses is the cost issue. No matter the situation there is a cost factor to take in and in this protest he brings out the point that at this time it is costing $30,000 per inmate per year just to keep the criminals behind bars. Knowing this fact it makes it easy to manipulate the readers in believing that they are spending their hard earned money on keeping criminals off the streets. This price seems to be extravagant for felons and therefore makes cheap punishment that much more appealing.
Persona: Jacoby never really describes how he is presented among others. All that can be drawn from his essay is that he is a person with a strong will to defend what he believes, in his right mind, to be the best way fit. He protests strongly and proves himself and his ideas through past examples and factoids.
Closing Paragraph: Jacoby finishes up his essay with a simple fact that the Puritans were more enlightened than we thought and even though their punishments were humiliating and painful, they were also quick and cheap. This last potion of being “quick and cheap” draws in Jacoby’s audience because after explaining how expensive it is to be to keep the felons behind bars the readers begin to look for a better way to punish criminals without having holes burnt in their pockets.