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Public Shame Synthesis Essay Topic

Directions: The following prompt is based on the accompanying five sources.

This question requires you to synthesize a variety of sources into a coherent, well written
essay. When you synthesize sources, you refer to them to develop your position and cite
them accurately. Your argument should be central; the sources should support the argument. Avoid
merely summarizing sources.

Indicate clearly which sources you are drawing from, whether through direct quotation,
paraphrase, or summary. You may cite sources as Source A, Source B, etc., or by using the
descriptions in parentheses.

Introduction

From Americas inception, public shaming has been used to punish individuals who
transgress societys moral or religious codes. There have been vociferous critics of these
types of punishment, but others argue that public shaming is more effective in deterring
crime and uses fewer resources to administer.

Assignment:

Read the following sources (including the introductory information) carefully. Then
synthesize at least three of the sources into an essay that argues a clear position
supporting, refuting, or qualifying the use of public shaming as a legal punishment for
crimes.

Source A (Hoffman)
Source B (Rodriguez)
Source C (Strauss)
Source D (Smith)
Source E (Stryker)









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Source A

Crime and Punishment: Shame Gains Popularity
By JAN HOFFMAN
Published: January 16, 1997
The New York Times

In the gray winter light, the views along the road into this small town in western Illinois are
severe but serene -- stretches of brown, stubbled cornfields interrupted only by the
occasional farmhouse. Abruptly a driver's reverie is jolted by the green plywood and white-
lettered sign at the end of Glenn Meyer's driveway. ''Warning,'' it reads. ''A Violent Felon
Lives Here. Travel At Your Own Risk.''
The sign is a condition of the probation sentence given to Mr. Meyer, a 62-year-old farmer,
for having bashed another farmer in the face with a truck fuel pump. The judge intended the
sign to alert people about Mr. Meyer's dangerous streak and to shame him into behaving.
But Mr. Meyer is unrepentant. (On Tuesday, he went before the Illinois Supreme Court to
challenge the imposition of the sign.)

Judicially created public humiliations like this are being introduced in courtrooms across the
country, usually as alternatives to incarceration. Known as shaming penalties -- after
punishments like the stocks favored by 17th-century Puritans -- they usually take the form of
a mea culpa message to the community.

Drunk drivers have to put special license plates on their cars. Convicted shoplifters must
take out advertisements in their local newspapers, running their photographs and
announcing their crimes. And men in cities around the country who are convicted of
soliciting prostitutes are identified on newspapers, radio shows and billboards.

In November, a judge in Port St. Lucie, Fla., ordered a woman to place an advertisement in
her local paper saying she had bought drugs in front of her children. This summer, at the
behest of a judge in Houston, a man who pleaded guilty to domestic violence stood on the
steps of City Hall, facing lunchtime workers, reporters and battered women's advocates, and
apologized for hitting his estranged wife.

Proponents of shaming penalties say they address the needs of a public weary of crime,
frustrated by the failures of the criminal justice system and yet unwilling to pay for prison
expansion.
''The penalties can satisfy the public's need for dramatic moral condemnation in a way that's
effective and just,'' said Prof. Dan Kahan of the University of Chicago law school. ''And
they result in the outcome you want: less imprisonment.''

Critics say the penalties have a bread-and-circuses quality that blunts whatever rehabilitative
function they may have and often cross the line into ridicule. Judith Libby, Mr. Meyer's
lawyer, offered her bottom-line critique. ''Mostly,'' Ms. Libby said, ''they're just mean.''

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When it came time to sentence Mr. Meyer, whom a jury convicted of aggravated battery in
June
1995, Judge Thomas L. Brownfield had a difficult decision. Mr. Meyer had a previous
conviction for aggravated battery for stomping an insurance adjuster on his farm and an
acquittal for scuffling with a collection agent.

In the 1995 episode, Gary Mason, a farmer from nearby Beardstown, had tried to return a
truck fuel pump to Mr. Meyer, who runs a modest salvage yard. In the ensuing argument,
Mr. Meyer swung the metal-encased pump at Mr. Mason, smashing his nose and eye
socket.

The state's attorney urged incarceration. By law, Mr. Meyer could have received a sentence
ranging from 2 to 10 years. But many in Pittsfield, with a population of 4,500, saw Mr.
Meyer as a good-hearted, thoughtful neighbor. Dozens wrote letters to the judge on his
behalf.

''He's as mild a mannered man you'd ever want to meet,'' said Bruce Lightle, the former
chairman of the Pike County board. ''We've been friends for more than 40 years and I've
never seen him angry.''
A social worker testified at a hearing that Mr. Meyer, who was taking antidepressant
medication, seemed capable of controlling his temper.

Judge Seeks Balance In the Punishment
Judge Brownfield said that if Mr. Meyer had not had an elderly mother at home, he would
have sentenced him to the maximum. In trying to balance retribution with compassion, the
judge gave Mr. Meyer probation but confined him to his home for a year, allowing him to
leave only to keep doctors' appointments and to attend church.

In addition, he had to pay a $7,500 fine and Mr. Mason's medical bills, which reached
nearly $10,000. And Mr. Meyer had to make and post the warning sign for 30 months, of
which about 16 remain.

''I try to take rehabilitation into consideration as well as protecting the public,'' the judge
said. ''I certainly feel more comfortable knowing that someone who may not know Mr.
Meyer will have some warning.''

The judge added that since the sign went up, there have been no other incidents of violence.
If the setting for a modern shaming penalty could approximate that of the early American
colonists, Pittsfield might qualify. With something of the intimacy of 17th-century rural
towns like Salem, Mass., Pittsfield is a church-going farming community with a village
green and coffee shop waitresses who serve the regulars scrambled eggs with a side of fresh
gossip.

But Colonial towns were bound even more tightly than Pittsfield: an offender would be put
in stocks in front of neighbors who shared a church, a leader and iron-clad values. The most
frequently prosecuted offense was fornication.
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Jail as punishment was relatively unknown in America. A penalty was intentionally exacted
in full view of the community, which represented an ideal of behavior that the shamed one
should emulate.
Penalties That Shame Reflect Nostalgic Urges

''The point of the punishment was to teach them a lesson and also make it possible to
reintegrate themselves into the community,'' said Lawrence Friedman, a Stanford law
professor.

By the 19th century, public punishment was looked down upon as undignified spectacle.
The community was no longer a paragon of morality, and now understood to have
corrupting influence as well. Prisons were established, and offenders were sent there for
their own good.
In modern times, Americans no longer associate prison with rehabilitation; its purpose is
strictly punitive. Still, the public complains about defendants serving short sentences in
prisons that offer television, weight rooms and the opportunity to learn advanced criminal
skills.

The return to shaming penalties, which began in the 1980's with mortified Wall Street
traders appearing on the nightly news in handcuffs, is to some extent a nostalgic longing for
an era when a community and its principles were so uniform that people could police
themselves.

''The penalties bring the community back into sentencing and punishing policies,'' said
Robert Teir of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a public-interest group
that filed a brief supporting Mr. Meyer's warning sign. ''And they give the community a
sense of empowerment that jailing or letting someone go without a punishment does not
do.''

Shaming Is Popular Among Local Judges
Local judges, many of whom are elected, have seized on shaming penalties as an alternative
to prison. Judges in Arkansas and Wisconsin have ordered shoplifters to parade in front of
the stores they have robbed, carrying placards admitting their guilt.

A Memphis judge has given thieves probation if they permit victims to pluck something
from the thief's home. An Ohio judge ordered a man convicted of harassing his ex-wife to
let her spit in his face.

In recent months, the judge in Port St. Lucie, Fla., Larry Schack, has structured many
sentences to include a public confession.

In October, Judge Schack ordered a man who had admitted molesting prepubescent girls to
put a warning sign on his front door that had to be printed in block print capitals, large
enough to fill the entire sign and at the height of five feet from the floor.

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The judge also recently announced plans to sentence defendants to apologize to victims in
speeches of at least a minute on the courthouse steps at noon, and to give the news media 48
hours notice.
Appellate courts rarely review such sentences, because they usually come as a result of a
guilty plea. Florida and Oregon appellate courts have upheld isolated shaming penalties.
But in 1995, New York's Court of Appeals rejected a Nassau County judge's efforts to
compel a drunk driver to carry special license plates. And last May, the Tennessee Supreme
Court struck down the requirement that a man who pleaded guilty to molesting teen-age
boys post a warning at his Memphis home.
Professor Kahan of the University of Chicago said such punishments were preferable to
fines, which make a defendant appear as if he is buying his way out of an offense, or
community service, which, he said, sends an ambiguous message.

''People have positive associations with community service,'' he said. ''How can you be
condemning a person if you make him fix dilapidated housing? And people who do that for
a living are terribly insulted.''

Even those skeptical of the penalties, whose effectiveness has never been studied, concede
that they have value in cohesive communities. Bar organizations publish lists of lawyers
who have been sanctioned, because peers consider publicity a humiliating deterrent. Some
Native American tribes and the Amish use a form of shaming known as shunning.

''But it's understood in these communities that there is something the shamed one can do to
get back in,'' said Toni Massaro, a law professor at the University of Arizona.

By contrast, Professor Massaro added, most penalties by local judges are whimsical,
coarsely drafted and do not have restorative components.

''They are merely expressions of disgust,'' she said. ''We can get behind it, but it's not likely
to stop the behavior.''

And most communities include diverse groups with different responses to crimes and
punishment. Fine-tuning a punishment to elicit shame can be difficult. During the Vietnam
War, a draft dodger's peers considered him a hero, not a criminal; urban high school
students might applaud a teen-ager for stealing a Mercedes, not condemn him.

Shame itself, say legal philosophers and psychologists, is a volatile, primal and poorly
understood emotion. June Tangney, a professor of psychology at George Mason University
who has studied over 10,000 people to distinguish feelings of shame from guilt, said such
penalties, when crudely applied, could backfire. People made to feel ashamed can react
angrily and blame others. But if defendants can feel guilt, Professor Tangney said, they are
more likely to want to make reparation.
Here in Pittsfield, Mr. Meyer's warning sign has met with strong but mixed reactions.
Friends of the family say it is too harsh. Some people who have tasted his temper say he got
off easy. Mr. Mason, the farmer who caught the fuel pump in his eye, said he was simply
relieved that others were being cautioned about Mr. Meyer.
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Vicki Thayer, a waitress at the Red Dome Inn, said that she did not think that the sign was
unjust but that it was unfair.

''Half the town beats up their wives,'' Ms. Thayer said, ''and gets off with a slap on the wrist.''
Mr. Lightle, the former county board chairman, said his friend was angry and embarrassed
by the sign. The family resented it deeply, he said; Mr. Meyer's wife moved out.

Whether the sign will change Mr. Meyer's behavior remains to be seen. He failed to report
to probation several times and missed some restitution payments, court records show.

Ms. Libby, who spoke on her client's behalf, said he did not feel ashamed about the dust-up
that led to the punishment. On the contrary. ''Mr. Meyer says he feels that the sign is illegal
and that the court knows it's illegal, '' she said. ''He has always professed his innocence and
he still does.''


















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Source B

YouTube vigilantes
Will Internet shaming turn Average Joes into Big Brother?
By Gregory Rodriguez
August 6, 2007

Did you see that YouTube video of an Australian priest hurling abuse at a motley crew of
skateboarders in front of Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral? Well, his superiors did, and
last week the Rev. Mgr. Geoff Baron was placed on indefinite leave.

And what about the famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist's cringe-making "personal" e-
mail about his wife leaving him for Ted Turner? Gawker highlighted it last week with this in
the precede: "insane insane INSANE."
Heck, you might say, they had it coming. But think again. What if one of your worst
moments -- when you've lost your temper or judgment -- wound up on the World Wide
Web for all to ridicule? Even on your best day, how do you feel about people posting your
image or your words without your approval?

When we talk of privacy in the Internet age, we mostly speak of financial information and
the mounds of data that search engines keep on our e-behavior. But more and more, digital
media and the relative anonymity of the Web enable netizens to expose, call out and shame
others in cyberspace.

Once upon a time, we thought that the Internet would usher in a new era of free human
expression, interconnectedness and understanding. But increasingly we're finding that it
actually nurtures our baser instincts and enables social behaviors that date back to when we
lived in caves. Snitching, for example.

Sure, there are benefits. Cellphone calls have helped state troopers catch drunk drivers.
Video postings have featured politicians saying stupid things, which I figure is a public
service. Last month, a Washington liquor store owner helped police catch an armed robber
after he posted surveillance video on YouTube. Earlier this year, a YouTube video of high
school students firing weapons and igniting explosives helped police in Connecticut foil an
alleged bomb plot.

But for the most part, "gotcha" moments on the Web have less to do with real crime and
punishment than they do with old-fashioned public shaming. Who needs a scarlet letter
when I can embarrass you digitally on the Internet?

Any netizen with a cell cam -- and a nosy sense of right, wrong, crime and punishment --
can act as a social enforcer, wielding the mass medium of the Internet. Celebs such as
Michael Richards, caught spewing racial epithets, seem like fair game. But in one case in
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South Korea, the Web made an international pariah out of a nobody. After a young
woman's dog pooped inside a subway train, a fellow passenger took photos of her and
posted them on a popular blog. Within hours, she was labeled with a name that's
unprintable in a family newspaper, and within days her identity was revealed.

Given her rude behavior, most observers cheered this incident of Internet vigilantism, but
did the punishment match the offense? Search engines have long memories, and unlike
other, more temporal forms of shaming -- say a misdemeanor ticket or even community
service -- the South Korean dog owner will forever be known as, well, you know.

And individuals aren't the only ones using the Net to bring people into line. States have
launched sites to post the names of people and businesses that owe back taxes. Maryland
calls its site "Caught in the Web"; Wisconsin nails the phenomenon: "Website of Shame."



A few years ago, George Washington University law professor Daniel J. Solove wrote an
essay in which he challenged the idea that the threat to our privacy in the Internet age is
akin to the constant surveillance of Big Brother. Referring primarily to the scores of public
and private agencies collecting data on us all, Solove argued that a better metaphor for life
in cyberspace is Kafka's "The Trial," the story of Joseph K., a man who awakens one
morning to find he is under arrest and then begins a frustrating quest to discover why. As K.
wanders the city, encountering a farrago of lawyers, priests, citizens and functionaries, his
impotence and paranoia expand. In the end, he faces no direct accusers, never has a day in
court, and condemns himself.

I think the same analysis applies to Internet shaming. You never know who's snapping an
illicit picture or video, or when and where your name or face could appear on the Web. It's
not so much a centralized authority we fear but our fellow citizens, who now have the
capacity to grab little pieces of our lives, pass judgment on them and project them across the
globe.

So, just in case anyone's watching, you better behave.

grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com







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Source C
Law Aims to Ease Identifying Teenage Drivers
By ROBERT STRAUSS
April 26, 2009

Princeton

SHE is a high school freshman now, but very soon Susannah Greenblatt will be getting her
drivers permit and then her provisional license. And she is none too happy about the
prospects of having to identify her youth as she drives around her hometown, she said the
other day.

It will just cause the cops to profile teenagers, said Susannah, 15, of the law signed earlier
this month by Gov. Jon S. Corzine that will require some identifying marker on license
plates of cars driven by teenagers in the first year of their provisional licenses.

Its not that I object to the Cinderella laws or limiting friends in my car, but I just think it is
going to cause police to target teens more than they have to, said Susannah, who was
walking along Nassau Street in the downtown here.

New Jersey will be the first state to require such identification on the outside of cars,
according to Pam Fischer, director of the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety. It
is not that New Jersey teenagers, or even New Jersey drivers in general, are more accident
prone than those elsewhere, she said, but that New Jersey wants to stay progressive and in
the lead in driver safety.

We know that in every state, the No. 1 cause of death for teenagers is traffic accidents, Ms.
Fischer said. The more we can do to mitigate that, the better it will be for everyone.

The bill has been referred to as Kyleighs Law after Kyleigh DAlessio, a 16-year-old Long
Valley girl who was killed in a car accident caused by a teenage driver in 2006. Ms. Fischer
said 60 teenagers died last year in car crashes in the state.

A companion bill Mr. Corzine signed tightens up restrictions on drivers with provisional
licenses. Under the law, instead of being allowed to drive until midnight, they would now
have to be off the road by 11 p.m. Also, they would not be allowed to have more than one
passenger under 21 in the car. Previously they could have any number of younger people in
the car if they were family members.

The bills sponsor, Senator Fred H. Madden Jr., Democrat of Camden and Gloucester, and
a former state police officer, said the decals would make law enforcements job easier.

In fact, it will be just the opposite of profiling, he said. Now it wont be an officer trying
to look into a window and trying to figure out who is too young, just stopping people
because of what they look like. This Law is a real issue with a real result. It is about safety
and lives, not just something silly.
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The law will not go into effect for about 13 months, Mr. Madden said, while everything is
put into place, and as yet, it isnt certain what form the decals will take.

We pretty much think they will be something to put on the license plates themselves, he
said, perhaps with Velcro, so they can be taken off and put on just when a younger driver is
behind the wheel.

That concerned Kristina Kulkarni, 18, of Princeton. She now has her drivers license, but in
the future she will no doubt share a car with her younger siblings.

Im going to be older, but still looking young, so what happens when they forget and leave
their stickers on the license? she said. Police will stop me because I have a few friends in
the car or it is after 11.

Marianne Barr, of Haddonfield, who has three teenage daughters, said that the sticker on
the license plate would be like a big signal that a teenage girl would be in the car driving.

My concern is that it could give one of the many scary people out there an idea about
hurting a young girl with little driving experience for instance, targeting them with a
minor accident, telling them something is wrong with the car, and then taking advantage of
them, she said.

Ms. Fischer, the highway traffic safety director, said the new requirement could lead to
more traffic safety.

It really is about making teens aware that they are just inexperienced drivers and need to be
more careful, she said. I dont think parents should object to this. Teen drivers need more
supervision, and we feel this will cut back tragedy for many.




















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Source D

Companies 'Named And Shamed' For Bad Behavior
by Tovia Smith
March 7, 2010


The Rockmore Co., a Massachusetts ferry service, was ordered by a judge to place an ad in the newspaper
publicizing its breaking the law by dumping human waste into coastal waters.

Newspapers are full of apologies these days, from Toyota to Tiger Woods. But papers in the
Boston area are also running a growing number of "mea culpas" that are ordered by the
courts.

Increasingly, companies that plead guilty to crimes that harm the community polluting,
for example are being required to publish an apology as part of their punishment.

"Our company has discharged human waste directly into coastal Massachusetts waters,"
reads an ad in the Boston Herald placed by The Rockmore Co., a local ferry operator.

"That's pretty ... that's bad," says Cindy Cisco, from her spot at a coffee shop in Marblehead,
Mass. "That's terrible."

The ad says the company has paid a "steep fine," but people in the area seem more moved
by the price the company is paying in reputation.

"I think it's great, because they're going to learn their lesson," says hairdresser Danielle
Yocum. "They're probably not going to put human waste in the ocean again."

Retribution Versus Deterrence
Former federal prosecutor Michael Sullivan has helped increase the use of these kinds of
sanctions in Massachusetts, especially with companies that run afoul of environmental laws.

The goal is deterrence, and Sullivan says the high-profile mea culpas also tend to be more
satisfying to a public increasingly frustrated by corporate wrongdoing.

"I think that's what might frustrate the public when it doesn't appear that the company
has been punished sufficiently enough, by simply writing a check," he says. "It's simply the
cost of doing business when you're caught."

There are times when we do want to put the hurt on a corporation especially if its a
corporation who hurt the community, Doug Berman, Ohio State University law professor.

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The "scarlet letter" treatment has long been used to sanction individuals, from shoplifters or
drunken drivers confessing their crimes on sandwich boards to the public shaming used back
in Puritan times.

"You would like to think that sentencing is evolving to move away from these types of
public shaming. We got out of doing that for a reason," says Stellio Sinnis, a federal public
defender.
Sinnis represented a Massachusetts fisherman who purposely sunk an old boat. When he
was caught, the fisherman had to run an ad saying that cutting corners was "not worth it."
He offered to go on a speaking tour to make that point directly to other fishermen, but
prosecutors insisted on the newspaper ad.

Sinnis questions whether the goal was really more about a kind of retribution than
deterrence.
"When you impose a sentence that embarrasses family members and creates hardship
public humiliation and public ridicule and kind of ostracizes someone from the
community, I think it's gratuitous, and that's just counterproductive to what you want to
achieve," he says.

But Does It Work?
Some offenders have appealed their sentences as cruel or unusual, but the courts have ruled
that humiliation is within the bounds of fair punishment.

Still, shaming sanctions continue to raise age-old questions about making a punishment fit a
crime.
"Whether we call it vengeance, whether we call it psychic satisfaction, whether we call it
restitution, we are getting at the core of what we as victims can rightfully claim to be entitled
to," says Ohio State University law professor Doug Berman.

Berman says judges must be careful when shaming individuals, but they don't have to worry
the same way about scarring a company.

"Corporations don't feel," he says. "There are times when we do want to put the hurt on a
corporation, especially if it's a corporation who hurt the community."

When it comes to shaming corporations, Berman says, the real question is: Does it work?
Judges ought to be encouraged to try to find out, he says.








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Source E

The Problem With Public Shaming
Unmasking racists and trolls on the Internet may feel like justice, but it does not drive social progress.
Cole Stryker
April 24, 2013
Today most people would tell you that the stocks, pillory and other tools of public
punishment are barbaric. Weve moved passed them, having figured out more humane ways
to deal with crime. Why, then, the resurgence of public shaming, namely the mainstream
acceptance of the dox, which, in its purest form, is the digging up of a targets personal
informationname, phone number, address, Social Security number, familial relationships,
financial historyand exposing it online to encourage harassment from others? This
practice has gradually been popularized by Anonymous, the amorphous collective of trolls
and hacktivists that alternately terrorize tween girls and disable government websites.
In 2012, this practice was broadly adopted by media outlets. In October, Gawker unmasked
a creep, notorious for facilitating the sharing sexualized images of women (underage and
otherwise) taken without their consent. Gawker declared him the biggest troll on the web.
Its sister blog Jezebel called for the naming of names of such creeps, and later exposed a
bunch of teenage Twitter users making racist remarks about Obama, going so far as to
personally alert the administrators of their schools by phone.
This trend runs silly, as wellBuzzfeed ridiculed spoiled teens whining about their
Christmas presents, while every media outlet covered Nice Guys of OK Cupid, a blog that
ridicules clueless misogyny by sharing photos of hapless bros with regrettable stances on
gender politics. Prepare to see a lot more of this sort of thing now that Facebook has
released its Graph Search tool, which makes it possible to search for a controversial
keyword or phrase (say, I hate n-----ers), find people whove used that phrase on their
profiles and grab some screenshotsyouve got a readymade outrage-baiting trend piece.
The dox phenomenon played out with unfortunate results last month, when on March 17,
development evangelist Adria Richards tweeted a photo of two men whod been making
sophomoric jokes at a tech conference, leading to the removal of the offenders, and then the
firing of one. A wave of backlash ensued against Richards; strangers sent her abusive,
threatening messages, and Internet trolls conspired to get her fired, attacking her employers
website with dummy traffic. Her employer eventually did terminate her contract, citing
Richardss divisive tactics.
The First Amendment protects a lot of abhorrent speech, but societies have always resorted
to some form of vigilante justice to preserve widely known and observed rules of social
conduct that dont result in a crime when theyre broken. So we turn instead to public
humiliation, an organic form of social control that never really went away completely, as
evidenced by the occasional signboard-bearing nere-do-well on the nightly news. Publicity-
seeking judges occasionally will expose deadbeat dads, public urinators, drunk drivers and
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repeat drug offenders. But these are outliers. We dont prop people up in public, brand them
with scarlet letters or hurl spoiled produce.
We didnt cease these punishments because we began to see them as barbaric. They simply
stopped working. Historians point to the urbanization of impersonal cities with mobile,
transient populations. Its difficult to encourage shame if they can easily disappear into the
crowd or escape to the next town. Shame works in closed, small communities that share
similar norms. As the New World opened up and expanded, public humiliation ceased to be
an effective means of norm reinforcement.
American adjudicators typically look to five goals to justify a punishment: incapacitation,
restitution, deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution. Neither incapacitation nor restitution
apply to doxxing, since there are no legal enforcement mechanisms. To the extent that those
who engage in public shaming think they are satisfying one of the remaining three, they
faultily assume that deeply rooted social ills like racism, sexism and homophobia are
personal failings that can be remedied through vicious public blowback and a permanent
stain on their character.
Its common to argue that a perpetrator deserves to be shamed, but in fact human
psychology doesnt work this way. Many pedophiles, for instance, recognize that that they
are inexorablyeven biologicallybound to impulses that they themselves loathe. Does the
shamingthrough public registries for examplecause the pedophile to reform? Unlikely.
Does it deter others from engaging in pedophilic acts, or does it drive them to darker corners
and sneakier tactics?
Racism is not as tied to biology, but environment can be a powerful antibody to shame.
Imagine you are a teenager living with white supremacist parents surrounded by white
supremacist neighbors and you get suspended from school because you said something
racist. Do you turn inward and examine your sense of shared humanity with brown people,
or do you simply become resentful toward those whove punished you, perhaps even more
sure of your sundry prejudices? Does it even deter you from vocalizing your racism or do
you simply channel it through a different medium where youre less likely to be caught? In
March, a racist New York City EMT employee was outed by the New York Post for posting
vile tweets. His online supporters countered with by violently threatening the reporter who
broke the story, sometimes anonymously, sometimes not. These behaviors are symptoms of
a systemic ideological cancer that is highly resistant to shaming because racists are typically
proud of their hate.
Which leaves tit-for-tat as the lone valid criterion for public humiliation. But retribution too,
is problematic. Consider the announcement of the Sandy Hook episode and the ensuing
media frenzy to name the shooter. He was first incorrectly identified as Ryan Lanza, who
turned out to be the killers brother. Other Ryan Lanzas and their friends and families
were harassed during the confusion. Reporters are notoriously bad at getting the facts
straight during the frenzied moments following a big story, let alone amateur detectives or
doxxers. Things get especially hairy when big media publish the identity of alleged
aggressors based on unverified claims from untrustworthy sources. Amateur detectives
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raced against the FBI to uncover the perpetrators behind the Boston bombings on social
news site Reddit. They fingered the wrong person, resulting in a misguided witch hunt that
prompted Reddits general manager Erik Martin to publicly apologize. Such exposure can
lead to misguided counterattacks from a faceless troll army. On an Internet where people
can so deftly conceal their identities and impersonate strangers, we must be mindful of our
propensity for error.
Then there is the permanence problem. Once embarrassing information about a person is
online, its never going to go away. Imagine, thirty years from now, some potential
employer evaluating a candidate based on a thoughtless remark she made as a teenager. The
permanence of uploaded information ensures that modern shamings, while obviously
milder in severity, can far exceed the scope of the scarlet letter, the most extreme
manifestation of which was at least branded on the chest, where it could be covered. Every
modern system of punishment attempts to deal in proportionalities. Put simply, the
punishment must fit the crime.
Finally, the angry mob problem. Unlike institutionalized forms of punishment, public
shaming can spiral out of control, far beyond the imaginations of the media outlets who
performed the initial exposure. Vigilante justice is a tricky thing, with online anonymity
leading to harsher consequences from a host of far-flung strangers exercising psychopathic
levels of schadenfreude. Whose norms are we to enforce? Would Jezebels writers be
comfortable knowing that the tactics it employed against racist teenagers have been used
against abortion doctors?
The rise of the social web may be perceived as a re-villaging, where the permanence of ones
digital footprint behaves as a deterrent, making it seem to some like an ideal time to
reintroduce public shaming to reinforce norms. But considered through a historical lens,
public shaming begins to look like a tool designed not to humanely punish the perp but
rather to satisfy the crowd.
This explains its resurgence. When has the crowd ever been bigger, or more thirsty for
vengeance? The faceless Internet, with its shadowy cyberbullies and infinite display of every
social ill is scary. And when it slithers its tentacles in a persons life, we become desperate
for some way to fight backto shine light into the darkness and counterattack those who
would victimize behind the veil of anonymity. But doxing, even just naming publicly-
available names to channel outrage (or worse) at someone who has violated your norms, is
not only an ineffective way to deal, it risks causing more harm than the initial offense. Last
years trendy rise of media-sponsored shaming is self-righteousness masquerading as social
justice. In many cases the targets deserve to be exposed and more, but public shaming does
not drive social progress. It might make us feel better, but lets not delude ourselves into
thinking weve made a positive difference.