Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
For the last few decades a British child's introduction to judicial history has universally been through Mr Terry Deary & co's "Horrible Histories" series, with its gruesome tales of torture, unfair trials and cruel executions. Particularly fascinating examples I remember reading about in my youth were the red-hot poker of Edward II, the contradictory cruelties of the witch trials, and the terrifying reign of Madame Guillotine: all of which to me felt as disconnected from the modern justice system as can be. But in reality a direct line of tradition sits between this inconceivable age of barbaric "justice" and our own system, especially in a country like England where our judicial framework has remained almost wholly intact for a millennium. In fact there were still vestiges of this old system of punishment around me at the time, since amazingly corporal punishment was only fully banned in schools across the UK in 2003. There was still a willow cane used for such punishments hanging up in one of the classrooms at my school, and I remember staring at it during a detention I was serving wishing they would bring it back: I'd have much preferred a moment of pain than an hour of supplementary arithmetic after school. But the thought of adults hitting children under any circumstance nowadays seems totally beyond the pale. And even in countries where corporal punishment is still legal (like America) its use is coming under stricter and stricter scrutiny and will likely be done away with sooner or later, whether that is within schools or within the criminal legal system itself.
But is this trend to say that justice itself has become more lenient? As I anecdotally alluded to before I don't think that modern forms of punishment are necessarily less harsh: I think anyone would take a lashing over a lifetime behind bars after all. But there has also been a great change in purpose behind punishment, spurred on by an increase in the power of the state. Stealing food, for instance, was punishable by harsh physical reprimand during the middle ages, including humiliation (in the stocks or similar), mutilation (chopping off a finger or hand) or even hanging; whereas today shoplifters only enjoy fines or potentially a couple months imprisonment at most. But an overlooked difference can be found in prosecution rates; while today we have a massive publicly funded and (largely) uncorrupt class of law-enforcers in the police, detective and surveillance forces whose jobs it is to find and bring criminals to justice, in time gone by no such forces existed, the first true police force in Britain famously being the "Peelers" of London in 1829. In a world without policemen, the vast majority of crimes will inevitably go unpunished as the only way criminals can be brought to trial is through the action of the victim or of bystanders through either dangerous individual action or the expensive hiring of mercenary hands. Of course crimes against the state, such as tax-evasion or interference with royal property, would be more readily pursued by the long arms and deep pockets of the royal sheriff, but inter-personal crimes were exceedingly difficult to find justice for, and thus fell into what I like to call "The Train Conductor's Dilemma".
When riding a train you have a choice: do you pay the fare or attempt to flaunt it? Say a ticket costs £5, but the punishment for being caught without one is £50. The calculation is simple: if you can avoid being checked by a conductor 10 times more than 90% of the time, it will be cheaper just to never buy a ticket, and therefore the rational train rider will always ride without a ticket. Now the train company has three options (or maybe four) to deal with this and boost profits:
In the world of criminal justice we have many more options of punishment than just pecuniary however. In fact while fines alone might satisfy my mythical train riders of pure logic, in the real world we place physical pain or prison time far above its pure monetary value. And so in a system without any real method of enforcement, the justice systems of yore set out on a combined implementation of options 3 & 4. Increasing the punishments for those they did manage to catch to levels extreme for the crime, and having these punishments be made public events: to show the populace the consequences for crime and the potential of being caught, an incitement of fear. But soon these officials reached a crooked ceiling: death. How can there exist a punishment more harsh than death? In our train experiment its as if there were a maximum fine of £500 or something: once you've hit that limit you can no longer rely on the easy option 3 and will need to actually start employing some conductors. But luckily there is much more space for innovation in the realm of murder than that of fines: this is where those strange and unusual punishments of Horrible Histories come in. A race to the bottom to inflict the most pain, suffering, humiliation, dishonour and demonisation on the convict as possible. And even once they are dead, their corpse can still be mutilated: hung, drawn and quartered and their head impaled on a cane. These acts of extreme cruelty were (generally speaking) not just wanton whims of cruelty, but calculated moves to keep order and the rule of law. The fact they are still read about today by children across the country are testimony to their effectiveness. Without any other option the system naturally developed into a gothic terror, but all contradictingly for the noble purpose of maintaining the peace and safety of normal people.
So is our modern version of justice and punishment more lenient? Or is it really an equal system? One that deals out lesser punishments but to a much larger number of people. Such things are always in balance: if everyone who drove 80 on the M25 was disembowelled and their body strung across the central reservation, there might quite possibly be some grievances to be had. But due to the oftentimes unavoidable nature of the "Bus Conductor's Dilemma", sometimes crimes must go overpunished for the few in order to maintain peace for the innocent masses. And in the end, I would like to think, these things equalise themselves out into something that can be described as "fair".
