
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 7, 1994                   TAG: 9406070076
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FLOGGINGS

THE BLIGHT of graffiti, often the work of the young armed with spray-paint cans, can't be dismissed as trivial. Not when it costs businesses and governments hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean. But the movement afoot in some sections of this country to impose violent punishment for this nonviolent crime is amiss.

Inspired by the Singapore government's recent caning of an American teen-ager who spray-painted two cars and threw eggs at other vehicles - or, perhaps more accurately, by polls showing considerable American support for the Singapore sentence - a California legislator has introduced a bill requiring parents to publicly paddle juvenile graffiti artists. If parents appeared to be overly tender in meting out the punishment, a judge could order a bailiff to take over. In Sacramento, Calif., and St. Louis, Mo., similar measure have been pushed at the local-government level.

Calls for corporal punishment are a sum of Americans' rightful disgust and frustration with crime, and our lack of consensus as to effective ways to fight it. Weary of irresponsible young punks and "gangsta" children who inflict damage, violence and terror, and who don't seem at all dissuaded by the threat of jail sentences or fines, we want to raise cane.

But are public whippings the answer?

This is not about the occasional spanking by parents out of love and a desire to teach their children right from wrong, nor about getting an unruly kid's attention with a quick swack of a ruler to the hind side. What are proposed are beatings intended to badly hurt more than the recipient's pride.

If not intended to hurt, what's the point? Young people of serious troublemaking bent aren't easily embarrassed into good behavior. They will likely treat corporal penalties as a joke, a rite of passage into gangsta-hood, like a fraternity initiation's paddling.

If intended to hurt, what will it teach youngsters? That causing pain is the appropriate response when things don't go the way you think they should? That violence is OK, especially when done by the those in power to younger and smaller people?

Such lessons are already taught too often to America's young - via violence on television, in the movies and on the streets. Let's not breed more violence by giving license to violence in the name of civilization.

by CNB