Fairness is what counts.
My school – where I’ve taught for decades. When I started here, there were problems at times with fairness. Problems that by today’s standards I would say were utterly unacceptable. Even so, I doubt that any boy experienced unfair punishment more than a few time in their years here and most never did. It was still rare enough that I doubt fear of it was a major factor for boys under most cases. But it wasn’t good enough – we could do better. And over time, we’ve done better. And better and better. Creating processes designed to make it fairer. And they’ve worked.