I disagree that the judicial system should allow any form of shaming to be a penalty for a criminal action. When sentencing someone of a crime and deciding on a punishment all of the effects should be considered in the decision. When shaming techniques are involved too much is up in the air. Judicial officials such as judges simply cannot predict accurately enough how people's lives are affected by this shaming. The punishment may end up grossly not fitting the crime. For example, if a woman uses a lot of mouthwash, if she is breathalyzed it may show up as she is driving while over the legal amount of intoxication. Even though this woman isn't driving drunk she could be publicly shamed for it. This use of shaming also moves away from a previous goal in the judicial system of rehabilitation. If someone has been shamed enough it is impossible for them to be rehabilitated and to become active members of society again. Shaming is thus too dependent on independent people and their situations to have an overarching shaming consequence for crimes.
A less legal example of the unfairness of shaming in punishment, in this case social punishment, is Justine Sacco. While this was not legally mandated, her entire life was still ruined by a single tweet. Whether she meant it in a racist way or not is irrelevant, the punishment did not fit the crime.
I think you take more issue with prematurely or inaccurately determining something to be shame-worthy rather than shaming something that is a legitimate crime. I completely agree with you that a woman who uses lots of mouthwash and doesn’t pass a breathalyzer test does not deserve to be shamed, but this is more of a problem with breathalyzer tests not being an accurate measure of sobriety than with shaming drunk drivers. If someone is genuinely driving drunk, I think they do deserve to wear a “drunk driver” bumper sticker on their car. I believe that if this becomes a commonplace punishment for the crime, then people will be more reluctant to drive drunk for fear of being labeled a “drunk driver.” Whether or not this is for the right reasons, lives would definitely be saved.
ReplyDeleteI acknowledge that people who commit crimes are still people too. Nobody is perfect; people have one too many drinks and think they can make the ride home, pedophiles don’t choose to have a sexual attraction towards kids, and some sex offenders are misunderstood. But labeling them what they are is still important, not as much for shaming them, but for protecting the rest of the community and setting precedents for onlookers that this behavior will result in particular consequences. Parents deserve to know if they are living near a pedophile, women deserve to know if they are living near a rapist, all people deserve to know if they are living near a burglar! Perhaps seeing cars on the road with “drunk driver” stickers can even entice adjacent drivers to drive more defensively around that car. I don’t think labels necessary isolate people from society (or that these people deserve to be isolated from society), but I do think we need to modify our behavior around them, raise our guards, and be more cautious. In a Scanlonian kind of way, their behavior has given us reasonable cause to modify our relationships with them, and we deserve to know about it. Not modifying our relationships out of ignorance could imperil us.
Furthermore, I know there are constraints on our ability to do this, but if we are aware that someone is having even consensual sex while they have an STD, they should also be shamed with some kind of label too so that people do not continue sleeping with this person. I know this is not always possible, but when it is, lives could be saved.
That being said, I don’t think Justine Sacco committed any sort of crime or poses any danger to the community. So I completely agree that shaming her is unnecessary and horrible, but I think Massaro was speaking more to shaming criminals than people who write inappropriate tweets.