Scarlett Letter Essay

Shaming as Intolerable Punishment
In July 2002, Rudy Giuliani was dragged from his home at six in the morning by a squad of police officers. He was shoved into the back of the cab as his children and wife cried desperately after him all the while cameras roll and click, recording the event for public scrutiny. Similarly, In November of 2007, Reshane Lewis is glared at by local pedestrians as she trudges along outside the courthouse, sweat dripping from her face, while being forced to carry a sign reading: “I stole from a local store.” Both are publicly humiliated, without any recognition by enforcers of the harmful psychological consequences they may experience after such intolerable shaming. Giuliani and Lewis’ cases are the apotheosis of intolerable public shaming in which people can be completely dehumanized, hindering their chances to cope from such incidences, and doing little to effectively deter crime. “In Better than jail time? Some Judges try unusual sentences” Peter Miller, a Putnam County Judge, among the many other judges who look towards public shaming as a form of punishment, personally handled Reshane Lewis’ case as well as six-hundred others, granting immoral sentences as part of his standard punishment. “They are unusual, but most of them are not as cruel as sending someone to jail or prison” (Miller.) However, Suzanne Retzinger and Thomas Scheff argue that Judge Miller is dead wrong, in “Shame-Based Punishment May Not Be an Effective Alternative”. Contrary to the
Butler 2 more radical approaches of shaping behavior executed by Judge Miller, Suzanne M. Retzinger, family relations mediator at the Superior Court in Ventura, California and Thomas Scheff, sociologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara believe that “shame is a complex emotion and current shame-based punishments ignore the harmful psychological consequences that an individual may experience after shaming” (Retzinger). In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester is publicly shamed as she is forced to remain on the scaffold of humiliation for two hours all the while townsfolk curse her name, and go as far to say “she ought to die” and have the A “branded on her forehead in hot iron.” (Hawthorne 39). After such grueling humiliation, she is cast out among the others, living with her daughter Pearl, in complete isolation from society, let alone a shred of acceptance or love. As a result of this isolation, “Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought…but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” (Hawthorne 125). Denoting that Hester had lost her sense of compassion as a result of everyone denying her of any sympathy.
Studies of shame based punishment today claim that there may be a better alternative to humiliating offenders that instead allows for their reintegration in the community, known as victim-offender mediation, where the offender confesses his crime and recognizes its consequences for the victim. “Evidence is now available that victim-offender mediation is not only cheaper than court and prison, but also more effective in decreasing recidivism” and “mediation could transform prosecutors attitudes toward their job and toward offenders, since it allows them to see offenders and victims as human beings”(Scheff). This is not to say courts and prisons are not necessary. Their very existence leads to many confessions and plea bargains
Butler 3 because many if not most offenders confess or plea bargain in order to avoid trial and imprisonment. The existing court system serves many necessary functions, but it no longer need be the first line of defense against crime.
For centuries, shaming often rears its ugly head in court cases, literature, and

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