Corporal Punishment

Re Assemblyman Mickey Conroy's proposal to implement corporal punishment in dealing with taggers (May 13): This type of legislation is long overdue. Corporal punishment is not unconstitutional. It has been practiced in the U.S. in the past. Compare Los Angeles to Singapore: L.A. has a horrible graffiti problem which is destroying our neighborhoods. Singapore is sparkling clean and graffiti-free. L.A.'s gangs and drug dealers are literally devastating inner-city areas of our community.

Saudi Arabia denied reports that a young man had been sentenced to paralysis, a punishment that human rights groups had excoriated as a form of torture. “This is untrue,” the Justice Ministry said Monday on its Twitter account, according to a translation by blogger Ahmed Omran . The judge “dismissed the request of such punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last month that if Ali Khawahir could not pay roughly $270,000 to the friend he allegedly stabbed and paralyzed a decade ago, he in turn would be paralyzed.

Los Angeles Unified School District administrators are considering the fate of a third-grade teacher who pleaded guilty to battering students at a Wilshire District school. Robert Linn McEwen, 50, was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days on a Caltrans work crew, fined $1,450 and ordered to undergo a year of anger-control counseling, said Mike Qualls, spokesman for the Los Angeles city attorney's office.

An adult male forces a teenage girl to bend over and take a paddling on her buttocks, and nobody is calling the cops? No, because in this case it's at a Texas school and involves an administrator and a girl who cheated. The mother in Springtown, Texas, complained -- as did another mother whose daughter spoke  disrespectfully to the assistant principal, who then spanked her with a paddle -- saying that this was against school rules. Kids are only supposed to be hit by an authority figure of the same sex, they say. Men hit too hard, they say. Other than that, the paddling appears to have been OK with them.

Nothing prompts Assemblyman Mickey Conroy and many other Republicans here to wax nostalgic like memories of a childhood paddling. These days, they've got a good political reason to reminisce. Embracing the age-old notion that sparing the rod almost certainly spoils the child, Conroy and the GOP are pushing a pair of bills that could make paddling a staple in California's juvenile courtrooms and classrooms.

Moderate Republicans in the Assembly broke ranks Tuesday with their conservative colleagues and helped administer a stinging rebuke to a controversial bill repealing the state's decade-old ban on corporal punishment in the classroom. Capping an hour of often emotional debate, the Assembly rejected the bill by Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) on a surprisingly decisive 47-19 vote that saw 10 Republicans join in opposition with 36 Democrats and one independent.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC) Return of the Rod? A bill to reinstitute corporal punishment is moving through the Legislature and causing a good deal of comment. * Bill Particulars * Principal must generally approve punishment, but not each specific instance. * Principle must prepare guidelines to identify punishable offenses. * School personnel must administer punishment with another adult present. * Parents may request a written explanation.

He's back. Orange County Assemblyman Mickey Conroy, who pushed unsuccessfully last year for a law requiring that juvenile graffiti vandals be paddled in court, on Monday introduced a measure to reinstitute corporal punishment in California's public schools. Conroy's measure, designed to reverse a 1986 ban on corporal punishment in the state's schools, would allow individual districts to craft their own paddling policies.

When Michael Fay, an 18-year-old American, was sentenced to a "caning" for vandalism in Singapore, the initial reaction in this country was one of outrage; even President Clinton criticized the sentence as excessive and reportedly is seeking to have it withdrawn. But almost immediately, there was a backlash of Americans asking: If severe corporal punishment helps to maintain public order in Singapore, would it not be good policy here?

They're calling it the swat heard 'round the world -- and its echo is still reverberating. On Monday night, the school board in Springtown, Texas, voted to allow students to be paddled by employees of the opposite gender if their parents give written permission. The board's previous policy permitted only same-gender paddling. No one really argued with the idea of corporal punishment; at issue was the question of who gets to administer it, specifically can an adult male swat young girls?

Unfortunately your browser does not support IFrames. On Monday night, officials at one Texas high school are meeting to discuss changing a rule that would allow male administrators to spank female students. That's right, spank. Nineteen states reportedly allow corporal punishment in schools, according to the Center for Effective Discipline, and Springtown High School is in one of those states. Further, at the school near Fort Worth, administrators are considering loosening their spanking rules because they believe the current rules have created a problem.

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details. I completely agree that spanking, or any form of physical discipline, should never be employed ["How Kids Feel the Swats of Spanking," Dec 26]. Hitting (swatting, slapping or any other euphemism for it, "open hand" or not, or even threatening to do so) stops the learning process and replaces it with fear and anger. As soon as the child is hit, he or she cries. No discussion, no learning. Also, when parents hit their children, they are angry and under the least self-control, which makes Robert Larzelere's comment of "two swats," followed by "love for the child afterward" completely unrealistic.

A man accused of striking a 15-year-old Irvine boy with a metal pole after the boy's parents asked him to discipline the youth on their behalf has been booked on suspicion of felony willful cruelty to a child, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. According to investigators, the parents found a lighter in the boy's possession and suspected that he had been smoking. The boy, who was not identified because of his age, was taken to the home of Paul Kim, 39, of Chino Hills, who attended the same La Habra church the family attended.

Adolescence is a time of brutally dashed hopes in Peter Mullan's "NEDS," whose title is shorthand for "non-educated delinquents" -- not a term of endearment. The fundamentals of this tough coming-of-age drama are familiar: financial struggle and emotional abuse on the home front, corporal punishment at school, raging testosterone finding expression in violence. But the telling is fresh; set in the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow, the film is a deft fusion of period detail, kitchen-sink grit and heightened cinematic reality.

Spend any time out and about in Los Angeles and you'll see Gary Leonard. More importantly, he'll see you. Probably through the lens of a camera. Whether he's working for a publication or for the sheer satisfaction of recording a moment in history, it doesn't feel like a real L.A. event unless Leonard is there, decked out in his old-school photographer's marsupial vest and slung about with cameras. When you've been taking pictures for 50 years, as Leonard has, a camera pretty much feels like another appendage, and without that camera, how many people would recognize Leonard?

Parliament passed a measure that tightens New Zealand's laws against child abuse but still lets parents spank or otherwise discipline their children using "inconsequential" methods. The new rule outlaws child beating, closing a legal loophole that the measure's supporters said had led to recent acquittals of parents who had beaten children with lumber, electrical cables and a riding crop.

A Bay Area lawmaker retreated from her proposed ban on spanking and instead offered a bill Thursday that would criminalize parental discipline involving a closed fist, belt, electrical cord, shoe or other objects. Additionally, the legislation by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) would make it easier to prosecute anyone who throws, kicks, burns, chokes or cuts a child younger than 18.