I’m still on vacation, so consider this blog-fill if you insist, but this is something I’ve been meaning to write about.

I’m fascinated by our society’s ever-changing rules for what’s considered acceptable behavior and, also by how we deal with it.

In colonial times, you’ll recall, the guilty and condemned were routinely insulted in addition to being injured: their punishment was carried out in public.

From Newsday’s community profiles section:

Imprisonment made little sense in a society that saw punishment as a community matter, said Eli Faber, a professor of history and criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“Why bother to put people in an expensive institution that they can break out of?” he said. “Picture a person who commits fornication. He’s going to be whipped in front of his mother, his sister. He’s going to have to live with these people . . . If you lock people up, why would there be shame? Nobody would see them.”

Do they still teach this stuff, about our not-so-very-evolved Puritan roots? I wonder.