RESEARCH STARTER

Corporal punishment

Corporal punishment refers to the physical punishment of individuals, historically used as a method of enforcing societal rules and norms. Its roots can be traced back to practices in early modern Europe and colonial America, where physical punishments such as whipping, branding, and dismemberment were common for various offenses. Over time, particularly during the Enlightenment, there was a shift towards rehabilitative approaches in criminal justice, leading to a gradual decline in the use of corporal punishment in formal legal settings. In the United States, by the late 20th century, such practices were largely abolished in the criminal justice system, although incidents of police brutality and informal corporal punishment persisted for some time.

Despite its decline in legal contexts, corporal punishment remains a contentious issue in schools and homes. While several states have banned it in educational institutions, others still permit it, with debates ongoing about its effectiveness and impact on children. Research indicates that physical punishment can have long-term negative consequences on children’s behavior and mental health. Despite a general decline in support for corporal punishment over recent decades, cultural perspectives significantly influence opinions, particularly within certain communities. As discussions surrounding corporal punishment continue, they reflect broader societal views on discipline and child-rearing practices.

Full Article

SIGNIFICANCE: Although corporal punishment was once commonly applied, it has been eliminated from the American justice system as the United States moved toward exclusive reliance on fines and restrictions on freedom, such as probation and incarceration, as methods of criminal punishment.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and colonial America, people routinely received physical punishment for violating society’s rules. Corporal punishment included branding; whipping; flogging; cutting off ears, fingers, hands, or tongues; and placing people in stocks—wooden structures in a town square into which a person’s head, arms, or legs could be locked. Such punishments were legacies of religious beliefs that had also encouraged torture, burning people at the stake, and public executions for offenses both serious and minor. A basic belief that underlay these physical punishments of people’s bodies was an assumption that people who misbehaved were possessed by the devil and therefore unable to conform their behavior to God’s rules for society.

During the Enlightenment period of the late eighteenth century, the emphasis on corporal punishment in Europe began to be displaced by reforms intended to rehabilitate offenders. Instead of branding or whipping them, various localities began to incarcerate them with a Bible or make them work in prison shops in the hope that they would discover God and self-discipline and thereby become good people.

Punishment in the United States

During the colonial and postrevolutionary periods, the United States employed many of the corporal punishments that had been brought from Europe, including whipping, branding, and placing in stocks. The movement away from corporal punishments in favor of incarceration occurred during the nineteenth century.

In the southern United States, corporal punishments of the most vicious kinds, particularly whipping, branding, and dismemberment, were applied against African American enslaved people as punishment for escapes or any other infractions as defined by enslavers. Local law enforcement officials and courts reinforced the institution of slavery by actively supporting these forms of punishment.

After the Civil War, corporal punishments began disappearing as formal punishments for crimes, but their use still flourished on an informal basis. Police in many localities throughout the country utilized beatings and even torture to punish people informally and to obtain confessions. While corporal punishment was used successfully to obtain many confessions, these confessions often came from innocent people who had simply been selected for victimization by unethical police officers. Such abusive behavior by police officers became less common in the twentieth century as policing began to become a profession with training, and as judges scrutinized the activities of police.

Corporal punishment was used in prisons and jails until the 1960s. Prisoners in some states were beaten, locked in small compartments, and otherwise physically coerced into obeying orders. Officials sometimes permitted inmates to abuse other inmates in order to force prisoners to perform labor under harsh conditions. These practices were outlawed by federal judges as a result of lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s.

Corporal Punishment and the Law

By 1969, all but two states had abolished whipping as a punishment for prison inmates. The final two states were effectively barred from further use of corporal punishment when a US court of appeals decision said that Arkansas’s continuing use on prisoners of the “strap”—a leather whip attached to a wooden handle—violated the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments (Jackson v. Bishop, 1969).

Beginning in the 1970s, prison officials, like police officers, could not use corporal punishment. They could, however, use physical force for self-defense and for gaining control over people who were fighting, threatening, or disruptive. Despite the prohibition on corporal punishment, occasional lawsuits are still filed against police officers and corrections officials who have beaten criminal defendants and inmates.

The formal abolition of corporal punishment in the criminal justice system did not mean that corporal punishment no longer existed in the United States. Parents are permitted to apply corporal punishment to their children as long as that punishment does not cause injuries or break laws against child abuse. In addition, corporal punishment is permitted in public schools in many states. In 1978, the Supreme Court decided that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments did not apply to disciplinary corporal punishments in schools (Ingraham v. Wright, 1978). Thus many schools continued to use corporal punishments, most frequently paddling with a wooden paddle, as a means to punish misbehaving students.

In 1994, public debates resumed concerning the desirability of corporal punishment when Singapore sentenced Michael Fay, an American teenager, to six lashes with a bamboo cane for committing acts of vandalism. Although the US government protested on Fay’s behalf that the punishment (“caning”) was barbaric, leaders in many American local communities seized on the issue to advocate the reintroduction of corporal punishment as a cheaper and more effective punishment for juvenile offenders. Corporal punishment was not reinitiated, but the debate demonstrated that many Americans still considered corporal punishment to be an effective deterrent to misbehavior by young people.

Although support for corporal punishment of children has declined in the United States since the 1960s, in the 2010s, approximately 70 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking,” according to a 2013 study. However, debate over the effectiveness and appropriateness of corporal punishment on children continued. While studies have shown corporal punishment to be effective in the short term at curtailing undesired behaviors by children, many psychologists have pointed to evidence demonstrating the long-term negative effects on children’s behavior and mental health. The American Psychological Association reported that physical punishment of children is associated in the long term with increased aggression, antisocial behaviors, and other mental health problems. More than two dozen countries have passed laws banning corporal punishment of children in all settings, including in the home. In 2006, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a directive asserting that corporal punishment of children should be eliminated in all settings through “legislative, administrative, social, and educational measures.”

The debate about corporal punishment reentered the American mainstream in 2014 when star running back Adrian Peterson, of the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings, was arrested for child abuse after an incident in which he allegedly used a switch to punish his son. Peterson was put on probation and suspended by the NFL for the remainder of the season. The incident highlighted not only the debate about corporal punishment but also the prevalence of it among different racial and religious groups.

In 2023, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat representing Connecticut, introduced the Protecting Our Students Act, legislation to ban corporal punishment in federally funded schools. That same year, the American Academy of Pediatrics pushed for corporal punishment in schools to be replaced with practices that supported student behavior. By 2024, corporal punishment was legal in seventeen US states, practiced in fourteen, and not expressly prohibited by six other states. Black students were four times more likely than White students to experience corporal punishment.

In 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that an estimated 1.2 billion children each year were subjected to corporal punishment at home. The organization reported that evidence showed corporal punishment was harmful to children, increased behavioral problems, and had no positive outcomes. In response, the WHO advocated for legal interventions to prohibit physical punishment, protect children, and raise awareness, among other interventions and support programs.


Bibliography

Berkson, Larry. The Concept of Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Lexington Books, 1975.

Clark, Jess. “Where Corporal Punishment Is Still Used in Schools, Its Roots Run Deep.” All Things Considered, NPR, 12 Apr. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/04/12/521944429/where-corporal-punishment-is-still-used-its-roots-go-deep. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

"Corporal Punishment of Children and Health." World Health Organization, WHO, 20 Aug. 2025, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/corporal-punishment-and-health. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Cuddy, Emily, and Richard V. Reeves. “Hitting Kids: American Parenting and Physical Punishment.” Brookings Institute, 6 Nov. 2014, www.brookings.edu/research/hitting-kids-american-parenting-and-physical-punishment. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Demby, Gene. “Is Corporal Punishment Abuse? Why That's a Loaded Question.” Code Switch, NPR, 20 Sept. 2014, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/09/19/349668828/a-decision-about-your-children-thats-also-about-your-parents. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1995.

Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society. U of Chicago P, 1990.

Gates, Jay Paul, and Nicole Marafioti. Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. Boydell, 2014.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Pantheon, 1974.

Gershoff, Elizabeth T., Kelly M. Purtell, and Igor Holas. Corporal Punishment in US Public Schools: Legal Precedents, Current Practices, and Future Policy. Springer, 2015.

Greene-Santos, Aniya. “Corporal Punishment in Schools Still Legal in Many States.” NEA Today, 20 May 2024, www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/corporal-punishment-schools-still-legal-many-states. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Hyman, Irwin A., and James H. Wise, editors. Corporal Punishment in American Education: Readings in History, Practice, and Alternatives. Temple UP, 1979.

Keim, John. "Despite Child Abuse Suspension, Adrian Peterson Uses Belt on Son." ESPN, 21 Nov. 2018, www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/25342741/adrian-peterson-uses-belt-discipline-son. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Rothman, David J. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Little, 1971.

Smith, Brendan L. “The Case against Spanking.” Monitor on Psychology, vol. 43, no. 4, 2012, pp. 60.

Full Article

SIGNIFICANCE: Although corporal punishment was once commonly applied, it has been eliminated from the American justice system as the United States moved toward exclusive reliance on fines and restrictions on freedom, such as probation and incarceration, as methods of criminal punishment.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and colonial America, people routinely received physical punishment for violating society’s rules. Corporal punishment included branding; whipping; flogging; cutting off ears, fingers, hands, or tongues; and placing people in stocks—wooden structures in a town square into which a person’s head, arms, or legs could be locked. Such punishments were legacies of religious beliefs that had also encouraged torture, burning people at the stake, and public executions for offenses both serious and minor. A basic belief that underlay these physical punishments of people’s bodies was an assumption that people who misbehaved were possessed by the devil and therefore unable to conform their behavior to God’s rules for society.

During the Enlightenment period of the late eighteenth century, the emphasis on corporal punishment in Europe began to be displaced by reforms intended to rehabilitate offenders. Instead of branding or whipping them, various localities began to incarcerate them with a Bible or make them work in prison shops in the hope that they would discover God and self-discipline and thereby become good people.

Punishment in the United States

During the colonial and postrevolutionary periods, the United States employed many of the corporal punishments that had been brought from Europe, including whipping, branding, and placing in stocks. The movement away from corporal punishments in favor of incarceration occurred during the nineteenth century.

In the southern United States, corporal punishments of the most vicious kinds, particularly whipping, branding, and dismemberment, were applied against African American enslaved people as punishment for escapes or any other infractions as defined by enslavers. Local law enforcement officials and courts reinforced the institution of slavery by actively supporting these forms of punishment.

After the Civil War, corporal punishments began disappearing as formal punishments for crimes, but their use still flourished on an informal basis. Police in many localities throughout the country utilized beatings and even torture to punish people informally and to obtain confessions. While corporal punishment was used successfully to obtain many confessions, these confessions often came from innocent people who had simply been selected for victimization by unethical police officers. Such abusive behavior by police officers became less common in the twentieth century as policing began to become a profession with training, and as judges scrutinized the activities of police.

Corporal punishment was used in prisons and jails until the 1960s. Prisoners in some states were beaten, locked in small compartments, and otherwise physically coerced into obeying orders. Officials sometimes permitted inmates to abuse other inmates in order to force prisoners to perform labor under harsh conditions. These practices were outlawed by federal judges as a result of lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s.

Corporal Punishment and the Law

By 1969, all but two states had abolished whipping as a punishment for prison inmates. The final two states were effectively barred from further use of corporal punishment when a US court of appeals decision said that Arkansas’s continuing use on prisoners of the “strap”—a leather whip attached to a wooden handle—violated the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments (Jackson v. Bishop, 1969).

Beginning in the 1970s, prison officials, like police officers, could not use corporal punishment. They could, however, use physical force for self-defense and for gaining control over people who were fighting, threatening, or disruptive. Despite the prohibition on corporal punishment, occasional lawsuits are still filed against police officers and corrections officials who have beaten criminal defendants and inmates.

The formal abolition of corporal punishment in the criminal justice system did not mean that corporal punishment no longer existed in the United States. Parents are permitted to apply corporal punishment to their children as long as that punishment does not cause injuries or break laws against child abuse. In addition, corporal punishment is permitted in public schools in many states. In 1978, the Supreme Court decided that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments did not apply to disciplinary corporal punishments in schools (Ingraham v. Wright, 1978). Thus many schools continued to use corporal punishments, most frequently paddling with a wooden paddle, as a means to punish misbehaving students.

In 1994, public debates resumed concerning the desirability of corporal punishment when Singapore sentenced Michael Fay, an American teenager, to six lashes with a bamboo cane for committing acts of vandalism. Although the US government protested on Fay’s behalf that the punishment (“caning”) was barbaric, leaders in many American local communities seized on the issue to advocate the reintroduction of corporal punishment as a cheaper and more effective punishment for juvenile offenders. Corporal punishment was not reinitiated, but the debate demonstrated that many Americans still considered corporal punishment to be an effective deterrent to misbehavior by young people.

Although support for corporal punishment of children has declined in the United States since the 1960s, in the 2010s, approximately 70 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking,” according to a 2013 study. However, debate over the effectiveness and appropriateness of corporal punishment on children continued. While studies have shown corporal punishment to be effective in the short term at curtailing undesired behaviors by children, many psychologists have pointed to evidence demonstrating the long-term negative effects on children’s behavior and mental health. The American Psychological Association reported that physical punishment of children is associated in the long term with increased aggression, antisocial behaviors, and other mental health problems. More than two dozen countries have passed laws banning corporal punishment of children in all settings, including in the home. In 2006, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a directive asserting that corporal punishment of children should be eliminated in all settings through “legislative, administrative, social, and educational measures.”

The debate about corporal punishment reentered the American mainstream in 2014 when star running back Adrian Peterson, of the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings, was arrested for child abuse after an incident in which he allegedly used a switch to punish his son. Peterson was put on probation and suspended by the NFL for the remainder of the season. The incident highlighted not only the debate about corporal punishment but also the prevalence of it among different racial and religious groups.

In 2023, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat representing Connecticut, introduced the Protecting Our Students Act, legislation to ban corporal punishment in federally funded schools. That same year, the American Academy of Pediatrics pushed for corporal punishment in schools to be replaced with practices that supported student behavior. By 2024, corporal punishment was legal in seventeen US states, practiced in fourteen, and not expressly prohibited by six other states. Black students were four times more likely than White students to experience corporal punishment.

In 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that an estimated 1.2 billion children each year were subjected to corporal punishment at home. The organization reported that evidence showed corporal punishment was harmful to children, increased behavioral problems, and had no positive outcomes. In response, the WHO advocated for legal interventions to prohibit physical punishment, protect children, and raise awareness, among other interventions and support programs.


Bibliography

Berkson, Larry. The Concept of Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Lexington Books, 1975.

Clark, Jess. “Where Corporal Punishment Is Still Used in Schools, Its Roots Run Deep.” All Things Considered, NPR, 12 Apr. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/04/12/521944429/where-corporal-punishment-is-still-used-its-roots-go-deep. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

"Corporal Punishment of Children and Health." World Health Organization, WHO, 20 Aug. 2025, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/corporal-punishment-and-health. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Cuddy, Emily, and Richard V. Reeves. “Hitting Kids: American Parenting and Physical Punishment.” Brookings Institute, 6 Nov. 2014, www.brookings.edu/research/hitting-kids-american-parenting-and-physical-punishment. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Demby, Gene. “Is Corporal Punishment Abuse? Why That's a Loaded Question.” Code Switch, NPR, 20 Sept. 2014, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/09/19/349668828/a-decision-about-your-children-thats-also-about-your-parents. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1995.

Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society. U of Chicago P, 1990.

Gates, Jay Paul, and Nicole Marafioti. Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. Boydell, 2014.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Pantheon, 1974.

Gershoff, Elizabeth T., Kelly M. Purtell, and Igor Holas. Corporal Punishment in US Public Schools: Legal Precedents, Current Practices, and Future Policy. Springer, 2015.

Greene-Santos, Aniya. “Corporal Punishment in Schools Still Legal in Many States.” NEA Today, 20 May 2024, www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/corporal-punishment-schools-still-legal-many-states. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Hyman, Irwin A., and James H. Wise, editors. Corporal Punishment in American Education: Readings in History, Practice, and Alternatives. Temple UP, 1979.

Keim, John. "Despite Child Abuse Suspension, Adrian Peterson Uses Belt on Son." ESPN, 21 Nov. 2018, www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/25342741/adrian-peterson-uses-belt-discipline-son. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Rothman, David J. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Little, 1971.

Smith, Brendan L. “The Case against Spanking.” Monitor on Psychology, vol. 43, no. 4, 2012, pp. 60.

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