Public Shaming Research Paper

There has always been a big debate about public shaming. It has been a form of punishment used in the United States for many years. Public shaming is a punishment used on criminals, it is humiliating someone in public rather than sending them to jail. Throughout Tagney’s article she is trying to prove that public shaming would be a good alternative to incarcerations. While she made some very favorable points for public shaming, it would be very challenging to get people, judges, and the court to change the system.
In the article Condemn the Crime, Not the Person June Tagney starts off by saying how the price of incarceration is very high and evidence shows that is not very effective. Instead of imprisoning people judges are sentencing them to public shaming. For example, they would have to make posters of their crimes and carry them or put a sticker on their car that states that they are a drunk driver. They might have to do community service projects that would relate to their offense, such as a drunk driver would have to help clean the site of a car accident.
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Shame usually makes a person feel terrible, and guilt could be constructive. “Recent research has shown that shame and guilt are distant emotions with very different implications for subsequent moral and internal personal behavior.” (Tagney 578). She said this to explain that even though shame and guilt are similar responses, they can lead to opposite responses. She says that putting someone in jail can make them feel shame which could cause them to shut down or avoid the situation or even make it worse. When you make someone feel guilty and make them feel just a little bit of shame then they would be a lot more likely to think about the wrong that they did and try to fix it. When someone is face to face with the harm that they could do to others they might realize that they need to change their