The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,91

referred to his being partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated, and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.

Even the less flamboyant penalties that we remember with the euphemism “corporal punishment” were forms of hideous torture. Today many historical tourist traps have stocks and pillories in which children can pose for pictures. Here is a description of an actual pillorying of two men in 18th-century England:One of them being of short stature could not reach the hole made for the admission of the head. The officers of justice nevertheless forced his head through the hole and the poor wretch hung rather than stood. He soon grew black in the face and blood issued from his nostrils, his eyes and his ears. The mob nevertheless attacked him with great fury. The officers opened the pillory and the poor wretch fell down dead on the stand of the instrument. The other man was so maimed and hurt by what was thrown at him that he lay there without hope of recovery.50

Another kind of “corporal punishment” was flogging, the common penalty for insolence or dawdling by British sailors and African American slaves. Whips were engineered in countless models that could flay skin, pulverize flesh into mincemeat, or slice through muscle to the bone. Charles Napier recounted that in the late-18th-century British armed forces, sentences of a thousand lashes were not uncommon:I have often seen victims brought out of the hospital three or four times to receive the remainder of the punishment, too severe to be borne without danger of death at one flogging. It was terrible to see the new, tender skin of the scarcely healed back laid bare again to receive the lash. I have seen hundreds of men flogged and have always observed that when the skin is thoroughly cut up or flayed off, the great pain subsides. Men are frequently convulsed and screaming during the time they receive from one lash to three hundred and then they bear the remainder, even to 800 or a thousand without a groan. They will often lie as without life and the drummers appear to be flogging a lump of dead, raw flesh.51

The word keelhaul is sometimes used to refer to a verbal reprimanding. Its literal sense comes from another punishment in the British navy. A sailor was tied to a rope and pulled around the bottom of the ship’s hull. If he didn’t drown, he would be slashed to ribbons by the encrusted barnacles.

By the end of the 16th century in England and the Netherlands, imprisonment began to replace torture and mutilation as the penalty for minor crimes. It was not much of an improvement. Prisoners had to pay for food, clothing, and straw, and if they or their families couldn’t pay they did without. Sometimes they had to pay for “easement of irons,” namely being released from spiked iron collars or from bars that pinned their legs to the floor. Vermin, heat and cold, human waste, and scanty and putrid food not only added to the misery but fostered diseases that made prisons de facto death camps. Many prisons were workhouses in which underfed prisoners were forced to rasp wood, break rocks, or climb moving treadwheels for most of their waking hours.52

The 18th century marked a turning point in the use of institutionalized cruelty in the West. In England reformers and committees criticized the “cruelty, barbarity, and extortion” they found in the country’s prisons.53 Graphic reports of torture-executions began to sear the public’s conscience. According to a description of the execution of Catherine Hayes in 1726, “As soon as the flames reached her, she tried to push away the faggots with her hands but scattered them. The executioner got hold of the rope around her neck and tried to strangle her but the fire reached his hand and burned it so he had to let it go. More faggots were immediately thrown on the fire and in three or four hours she was reduced to ashes.”54

The bland phrase broken on the wheel cannot come close to capturing the horror of that form of punishment. According to one chronicler, the victim was transformed into a “huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones.”55 In 1762 a sixty-four-year-old French Protestant named Jean Calas was accused of killing his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism; in fact, he had tried to conceal the