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Some prison inmates are incorrigibly violent and must be kept apart from society, but most are not. They are there to be punished, hence the maxim, “We build prisons for people we’re afraid of and fill them with people we’re mad at.” Flogging, Mr Moskos argues, would at least let society punish people swiftly and efficiently. Brutal and archaic it may be, but Mr Moskos convincingly argues that America’s prison system is at least as inhumane. “If we really wanted to punish people,” Mr Moskos writes, “we could sentence drug offenders to join gangs and fear for their lives we could punish child abusers to torture followed by death we could force straight men to have semiconsensual prison-gay sex…All these things already happen, but we just sweep them under the rug and look the other way.”
The system is also broken: entities that profit from incarceration—prison-guard unions and private-prison builders—lobby for longer sentences, while politicians build prisons in poor rural areas. “The cynical among us,” Mr Moskos writes, “might even say we’re spending billions of dollars to pay poor rural unemployed whites to guard poor urban unemployed blacks.” And indeed prisons tend to be filled with poor minorities: more than half of all black men without a high-school diploma spend time in jail. Though in recent years a few states have started to roll back against the trend of ever longer, ever harsher sentencing, these efforts amount to little more than bailing out a sinking supertanker with a teacup.
Mr Moskos’s proposal begins as a provocation and ends bleakly plausible. But flogging is still flogging. There may exist little political will to legalise drugs or rethink how and why criminals are punished, but America is not about to start whipping people again anytime soon. Perhaps the most damning evidence of the broken American prison system is that it makes a proposal to reinstate flogging appear almost reasonable. Almost.

A. 어휘
inmates 在監者(재감자), 피수용자. incorrigibly 矯正(교정) 불가능할 정도로.
maxim 格言(격언), 금언, 公理(공리). mad 화난.
Flogging 매질, 笞刑(태형). efficiently 효율적으로. Brutal 잔인한.
archaic 낡은, 古風(고풍)의. convincingly 설득력 있게, 납득이 되도록.
offenders 범법자. abusers 학대하는 사람, 남용자. torture 拷問(고문), 고통.
straight 마약을 맞고 흥분한. semiconsensual 반쯤 합의한.
sweep them under the rug 수치스러운 일을 숨기다.
entities 실재, 실재하는 사람이나 사물. incarceration 투옥, 拘禁(구금).
The cynical 냉소주의자들. diploma 졸업증명서. roll back 역전시키다, 격퇴하다.
amount to 총계...에 달하다. bailing out 위기에서 구하다.
sinking 침몰하는. supertanker 超大型(초대형) 油槽船(유조선).
provocation 挑發(도발), 도전. bleakly 쓸쓸하게, 풀이 죽은.
plausible 그럴듯한. legalise 합법화하다. whipping 채찍질하다.
damning 유죄를 증명하는, 저주의. damning evidence 확실한 증거.
reinstate 복권(복위)시키다.