This is because punishments are discomforting and unpleasant. It hurts the body or mind, depending on the kind of punishment assigned.
When I was a child, I hated punishments, and because of that, I did my best to stay out of trouble. My father was a strict disciplinarian in those days; unless one's offence is minor, you can not escape punishment.
The annoying part is that his punishments for wrongs are mostly floggings. He had a special cane purposely crafted for all his children.
I mostly behaved myself because, honestly, I am not usually comfortable with cane touching my skin. All my siblings were also careful because none of them wanted to be beaten.
I can remember how I used to cry whenever I committed any serious offense, even before I got punished.
Several kids out there are like that, too; they commit an offense, and even without getting punished yet, they begin to cry.
The funny thing is, the tears are not mostly out of remorse but for the fear of what punishment will place them under.
Punishment, no doubt, is good; it is to correct wrongs and sometimes to point them out to people. Every organization, every family, every society has it.
Anywhere there are rules, there must be punishments to protect them. The absence of punishments would result in serious disorder and an increase in crimes because nothing would serve as a scarecrow to people whenever they are about to break a rule.
But is punishment still working? Is it truly transforming lives? Honestly, the answer to this is complicated. For sure, punishment is the reason why many people are not doing certain things.
If restraints are taken off, you would be surprised at what a lot of people would do. But their hands are tied now because they are well aware that they have the law to face if they try anything unlawful.
Nevertheless, there are people who are not scared of punishment. They do anything they want regardless of what the law would do to them. It is as if their hearts are hardened.
They break the law, they get punished, yet nothing has changed. People see what befalls those who commit a crime. They have seen people serve cruel and fierce punishments, yet they are still committing crimes on a daily basis.
Does this mean that punishment has failed us? Well, I don't think so. What we fail to understand about punishment is the fact that it is not meant to change people but to scare them by awakening the consciousness of right and wrong.
One thing with humans is that once we have experienced something over time, the fear of that thing loses its potency on us. Gradually, it begins to decline until it eventually has no place left. The same thing is possible with punishment, the more one gets punished the more the person gets used to it, until it no longer becomes something scary.
Punishments can not deter people from committing offence, it can only limit the rate at which they do it.
However, punishment is not useless; the day you take punishments out of the picture is when you will realize that it has been what has been restricting people all these while.
N.b: All Images Were Generated By Gemini AI
