estern style police, but important parts of law enforcement and police jurisdiction were until recently, and to a degree still are entrusted to forces of completely different origin, organization, training, and even appearance: the so called Committees for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, more commonly called the religious police (Lacey, 1982).
Likewise, in the world at large, the typical punishment of relatively serious crime is a jail or prison sentence. Penal discipline and environments may be relatively mild or they may be brutal. Sentences may be long or relatively short. Some countries carry out many death sentences for the most serious
crimes;* some carry out none, but worldwide, the typical sanction for crime is time. In Saudi Arabia, however, the most typical punishment is corporal punishment, ranging from public flogging to the cutting off of hands or other extremities. Capital punishment is administered (literally) by the sword, or for some offenses by stoning to death. Only recently has punishment by imprisonment begun to make substantial inroads (Heper and Israeli, 1984).
These punishments, always carried out in public, are lurid to contemporary Western eyes, as a very visible and very exotic
*Seriousness of a crime may be defined ideologically; thus, for example, Communist countries have often executed people convicted of economic crimes such as black marketeering. In Saudi Arabia, (female) adultery is a death penalty offense. feature of the Saudi justice system. The penalties strike us as "Biblical." They are in fact, scriptural, rooted in specific provisions of the Koran, the Muslim holy book. In recent years, as Islamic fundamentalism has swept through the Muslim world, similar "canonical" punishment have been introduced in a number of other Muslim countries. Saudi Arabia, however, is strikingly untypical even within the Muslim world. In other Muslim countr...