Public Humiliation: A Punitive Measure Then and Now

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Within the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a puritan woman is sentenced by local authorities to undergo public shaming for committing what was seen as a grave crime. During puritanical times, public humiliation was often used as retribution for criminals and delinquents to repent the crime they committed and to send a message to the surrounding community; moreover, such a punishment is still carried out by judges to this day. Today public humiliation may not take on the identical forms, techniques, and methods that were used in the past, but it still exists and plays a huge role in modern society. Publicly humiliating a person is an uncivilized practice for the present-day courts and federal system to participate in, especially …show more content…

Social media allows family, friends, and the family’s friends, and so on to be informed of the criminal’s crime. To make matters even worse, those people could get a warped version of the actual offence. This results in a usually negative change in how a person is seen within their own community and can have cause serious issues because “by taking punishment out of the hands of law enforcement and placing it in the hands of the public, whose emotions and reactions lie beyond their control, shaming campaigns can… be messy and unpredictable” (Khimm 20). The concept of mob mentality will be a prominent factor in how the community will see a person and if they are seen in a negative light then the collective community mind will shift to a mutual dislike of that person. Leading to the next problem, which would be how the criminal would be subjected to ostracization and alienation by the general public. This would be an unjust punishment because the criminal had already served their sentence. Even if the criminal lived in a more forgiving community that was more lenient regarding the criminal’s punishment, the criminal would still be subjected to constant ridicule caused by the punishment for the rest of their lives. Being remembered as the person who did something scandalous and the stigma would not disappear easily, …show more content…

Disregarding the fact that public humiliation has such a negative backlash which includes an unintentional sentence extension and could cause negative community reactions. The most important reason why humiliation as a punishment should cease to exist is because that a criminal’s punishment does not only affect them, it also reaches their immediate family and close loyal friends. So not only is the criminal being punished for their crimes, but the people who are close to them are subjected to either ridicule or ostracization as well. The people who were still loyal to the criminal as they were be being punished by the community would definitely have to deal with negative effects towards their own lifestyles Nobody would want to see the people they care about punished for their actions, especially if the criminal had a child. That child would no doubt be on the receiving end of bullying because of the criminal’s

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