Week 5: The Criminal Justice System

When reading the final pages of our assigned chapter on criminals and our criminal justice system, I found myself coming back to the idea of “shaming.” I think it’s intriguing. It works in other cultures, like Japan, where people are less individualistic than in the U.S.; where more emphasis is put on our individual accomplishments than those successes attained as a group. But I think it could work. In fact, over the past few months in the news, I have read of a couple examples of shaming in the U.S. Parents are sending their children out with sandwich boards alerting the public on the streets that they are failing classes (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/12/bad-grades-sandwich-board_n_1338938.html) and women are announcing their husbands’ indiscretions on front-yard signs (http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/woman-calls-out-cheating-ex-husband-homes-sale-sign-141973).

Would this work in the legal world? As a punishment handed over by a judge in court? I would like to think that it would. I especially believe that shaming would work in the U.S. for smaller crimes, like shoplifting, simple assault, etc. Maybe today’s youth should be the target.  Teenagers are more susceptible to peer-pressure. Feeling shameful about something in front of their peers may be just enough to never commit that crime again. As we’ve learned in our text, the majority of the crimes committed in the U.S. are not homicide or rape, but rather smaller crimes that people may be compelled to repeat over and over.

In some communities, it may not be shameful to commit a crime, and some people don’t have a strong enough familial support system to make shame even relevant. But if cleaning up one small crime at a time can lead to a better environment altogether, as we learned while reading about the broken-window theory, then shaming could be a real answer.

One little wrinkle in my little theory about shaming that has been nagging me is the labeling theory. I wonder if shaming a teenager about shoplifting would compel that person, and those around him/her, to automatically think of that person as a criminal for the rest of his/her life. Because of this, I think the proposed shaming punishment should be imposed only after the first known criminal offense, thus hopefully deterring the possibility of a secondary deviation.