Can Public Shaming Be Good Criminal Punishment?

For a few hours every day last week, a 58-year-old man in Cleveland with a gray goatee, a ratty AC/DC T-shirt, and a backwards hat wore a sign around his neck that clearly labeled him as an idiot. “I apologize to officer Simone & all police officers for being an idiot calling 911 threatening to kill you,” it read. “I’m sorry and it will never happen again.”

The man, Richard Dameron, didn’t wear the sign by choice: It was part of his punishment—along with 180 days in jail—ordered by municipal Judge Pinkey Carr.

The practice is called public shaming, and it’s the kind of creative punishment that is being ordered by judges around the country, from court-mandated dinners at Red Lobster to wearing a chicken suit on the side of a road. And it could actually work to not only cut down on low-level crime, but to help slash ballooning state and local budgets as well.

Jessica Eaglin, the counsel for the justice program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, sees public shaming as forward-looking compared with more retributive punishments. Forward-looking public shaming is more deterrence-based, says Eaglin, and can have an impact on an entire community instead of just one person. For low-level crimes in small towns, “that’s where the public shaming comes in,” Eaglin says. “It’s reflecting on your life, people are watching you, and that’s going to affect your behavior more than just paying a fine.”

Not everyone agrees. “This kind of public shaming has no record of efficacy in turning someone away from crime,” Peggy McGarry, director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice, said in an e-mail. McGarry thinks this is especially true for small-town, low-level offenders…

Read more from this story HERE.