Banishment

A few years ago, according to news reports, a trial court judge in Georgia included “banishment” from the area of the judge’s jurisdiction as a term of probation for some minor drug offense. Banishment is one of the oldest known forms of criminal punishment. It has never completely gone away, even in the United State, and now seems to be trying to make a comeback.

Banishment is presumably prehistoric. The idea of expelling an offender from the tribe or group or village is obvious. The practice already existed by the time of the first written legal codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 2100 B.C.). In a modern, cosmopolitan culture it seems pointless since we could live our lives as well in Baltimore, for example, as in Tucson. But it used to have frightening connotations that we no longer perceive.

Less-developed cultures tended to have a high awareness of locality. A people’s traditions and ways of life, and also their gods, spirits, etc., were felt to be somehow intrinsic to – and limited to – their geographical area. Their place had spiritual and protective powers that, for them at least, other places did not. A person who left the area would not, they felt, be able to live his traditional way of life nor worship his gods; the god of his new locale might even be hostile to his old, home god, and therefore hostile to him. Banishment would mean, in a sense, the end of the world as he knew it, and an uncertain fate in an uncertain, new world.

Cultures that retain the attitude can retain the punishment. The Lummi tribe (in Washington state) was reported to have banished a criminal from its reservation in 1992. In 1993 an Alaskan tribe banished a thief to a remote island. Many tribes, including the Navajo, include banishment in their legal code.

The Bronze-Age culture of the ancient Greeks, though it laid the foundations of our own culture, was still parochial in outlook and feared banishment. (Ostracism – the well-known but short-lived practice of expelling unpopular individuals by vote – was a political mechanism, not a criminal punishment. Those ostracized usually maintained contact with their city-state, retained their property, and returned after ten years – sometimes before.)

The Romans were, unlike the Greeks, an outward-looking people. But they retained banishment as a mechanism of punishment. Exilium (“exile”) could also be used voluntarily; a person could escape the death penalty by exiling himself before it was pronounced. (This is why the term “exile” can – and nowadays normally does – refer to a situation self-imposed rather than a punishment, e.g., “political exile.”) The emphasis had now passed from the spiritual to the material: initially, at least, those banished lost their property and legal status. Later, though, exilium came to include variations that did not always involve permanent banishment or loss of property. (These punishments were used for the upper classes; the lower were condemned to forced labor.)

The medieval English equivalent of banishment was outlawry, which I have described in another article. It removed the offender from the village and was feared because outlaws generally would not fare well elsewhere. Strangers were highly suspect and so could have a very difficult time trying to find a job; their choice could be between starving to death and thievery – which, when caught, would also mean death.

That, too, eventually passed, and the sole remaining point of banishment became to remove the offender from society’s midst. With the establishment of colonies such removal became feasible even for a developed society. English criminals were banished to the American colonies until 1776; Australia was their destination thereafter, until the practice was abolished in 1853.

The most famous banishment in American history occurred ten years later. In 1863 Senator Clement Vallandingham was convicted of sedition. President Lincoln, because of the controversial circumstances surrounding the conviction, commuted his sentence of imprisonment to one of banishment to the Confederacy.

Banishment still exists in some countries, even Western ones. The Israeli High Court of Justice decided that in “extreme cases” relatives of Palestinian terrorists can be “banished” to the Gaza Strip. In the United States, outside the Reservations and the State of Georgia, banishment seems no longer to exist. (The word is used to refer to some sort of sanction employed by the folks who have decided that they are “witches” but addled delusion is, I still insist, not what my articles are about.)