By Kate Shatzkin
BALTIMORE SUN

A drunken driver is ordered to carry in his wallet pictures of the people he killed. A wife-beater must apologize to his victim from the courthouse steps, with cameras rolling. A shoplifter is forced to pace outside the market from which she pilfered, wearing a huge sign that brands her a convicted thief. It is justice by sandwich board, tearful apology and posted placard, the modern versions of the stocks and scarlet letters of colonial times. (One might argue that being locked in a stockade for any duration is substantially different from making a public apology, or wearing a sandwich sign. As embarrassing as these may be, they cannot equal the corporal nature of punishments like being branded with a hot iron, or locked into a medieval torture device. WFI Editor) A small but attention-getting group of judges across the United States, fed up with a revolving cast of drug buyers, drunk drivers, johns and shoplifters who never seem to get the message, has been sentencing criminals to shame. They hope public humiliation succeeds where jail habitually fails.

"I think this type of sentencing is important," says Ted Poe, a Harris County, Texas, district judge who has become nationally known for what he calls "public punishments." "The people I see have too good a self-esteem," he says. "I want them to feel guilty about what they've done. I don't want 'em to leave the courthouse having warm fuzzies inside." Daniel Alvin of Riceboro, GA, didn't. He was convicted of theft for running a bogus fund-raising scheme in 1996. Rather than spend six months in jail, Alvin chose a judge's alternative, which required him to walk through a square next to the Liberty County courthouse wearing a sandwich board that declared: "I AM A CONVICTED THIEF."

It was a choice he may now regret. Alvin was so frustrated by the attention his sentence drew that he recently hung up on a reporter who called to ask about it. "You don't know how many reporters have harassed me over this," Alvin said when called a second time. "It's over. I just put it behind me." Poe says that of the 59 shaming sentences he's given out in the past three years, he knows of only two offenders who have been arrested again. Poe's interest in humiliating criminals started when he sentenced a man who had beaten his wife. "It was obvious she was embarrassed by his conduct and he was not embarrassed by his conduct," says the judge. He forced the man both to serve jail time and to apologize to his wife in public. "After he did that," says Poe, "he was humiliated, and he didn't like it at all."

After Poe ordered a shoplifter to advertise his crime outside the store from which he'd stolen, the judge got calls from the store manager saying theft had gone down. Mothers brought their children to see the pacing criminal as an example. And the offender himself, who has since moved to another state, wrote to the judge to say the shaming, in the long run, was the best thing that ever happened to him. "In the right cases, it does work," Poe says. In Texas, where judges have no sentencing guidelines, Poe's sentences have not been challenged. The Illinois Supreme Court, however, overturned a judge's requirement that a farmer convicted of battery post a sign on his property that said: "Warning! A violent felon lives here. Enter at your own risk!"

The court found that the sign was "unreasonable" and "may be counterproductive to defendant's rehabilitative potential." Courts in Tennessee and New York have made similar rulings. The feelings of the judges who like to shame offenders contrast markedly with those of some academicians, who find shaming irrelevant at best and repugnant at worst. (Of course, if it was the academician up on charges, he might take a second look at shaming, before risking his Ivy League rosey-cheeked flesh in state prison, or county jail. WFI Editor) R. Dean Wright, a Drake University sociology professor who has studied public perceptions of crime and punishment, says shaming tends to work only for the diminishing number of criminals who still care what their community thinks of them - older, middle-class shoplifters, for example. (HELLO! Most criminals start out as middle-class suburbanites. WFI Editor) Among young people in some urban communities, he says, the opposite is true: "One gains a lot of status for having been in prison. I just can't see it making any real difference. What you'd have to do is find those things that mean something to the kid, to see the world through their eyes." (And that's why the Establishment pays Wright the big bucks, studying the obvious. WFI Editor)

Still, Wright admits to scanning the lists of suspects arrested for drunken driving that are published weekly in his local newspaper. (Did it ever occur to the Drake University Brahmin that he should actually go to the courthouse, and then follow up on actual cases? WFI Editor) Yale Law School professor James Q. Whitman says there's a different problem with shaming - not what it does to the offender, but what it may inspire in the rest of us.

Historically, shaming punishments have included violence to the criminal - flogging, branding and dunking, Whitman wrote in a recent essay for the Yale Law Journal. While today's sanctions are much milder, without any express violence, they can provoke violent attitudes, the professor says. "I would call it a variety of lynch justice. As people used to say in the 19^th century, it brutalizes the public," he says. "I think it's not right in a modern civilized state that you encourage people to act that way. We must in the long run ask ourselves why these things were so prominent in the world of Mao and the Nazis." (Of course, it's okay for a "civilized state" to hold 1.6 million of its own people in penal servitude; and it's okay to unleash the IRS on people like a massive secret police, capable of discovering the most private aspects of the individual's affairs; and it's okay to prosecute and incarcerate, at public expense, people who use "illegal" drugs. When this period is over, historians will forget all about Hitler and Mao, because what the U.S. Federal republic is doing outranks them hands-down in crimes against humanity. WFI Editor)

Indeed, laws requiring sex offenders to notify authorities of their whereabouts - and allowing police departments to distribute fliers warning a neighborhood of a resident who had committed such crimes - have been passed in a number of states and at times have sparked violence. (Precedents have also been set, using the most vile criminals as a pretext, that enable the penal system to lengthen the sentence of criminals without appeal, and outside of the normal sentencing procedures that have been legal for millenia. WFI Editor)

In Washington, one of the first states to enact such a law, a sex offender's home was set ablaze a few hours after a community meeting protesting his release from prison. In another neighborhood, eggs were thrown at the home of a grandmother of the ex-convict. Poe, the "shaming judge," says his sentences have created no such problems, and opines that those who worry about the long-term effects of shaming don't have much experience with the flood of offenders streaming through America's courtrooms. "I think those comments are spoken by someone who doesn't deal in the criminal justice area," Poe said.

SOURCE: Reprinted from the 26 April, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

Shaming can work for middle class people who have not been hardened by the attitudes of the Street Culture, that has values that derive from the "prison counter-culture." The prison counter-culture is a male-dominance hierarchical universe based on violence and power. On the street the gangsters are bound by oaths of allegiance to prison gangs, the chiefs of which are usually in prison for life [for crimes like murder]. Very often, middle class individuals commit a crime for a thrill, get caught, and get thrown in prison, and then they become acculturated to the prisoner's view of life, which perceives the United States Government as its mortal enemy. The best way to stop the inevitable defection of these individuals is to STOP throwing them in prison for minor crimes, and such punishments as "shaming," might be a sufficient deterrent. The old idea of balance is essential to law enforcement, if the people are not going to feel preyed upon by the system of justice, and that is that the punishment MUST FIT the crime.)