The Scarlet Letter 20th Century Style

When:  I have used this article both before and after reading The Scarlet Letter.  Both has worked equally well.  It makes for great discussion.  You might want, as a pre-reading exercise, discuss the punishments Puritan times. 

How: Check this web site, Seventeenth Century Punishments  for background for you or as a good site to send your students for research. 

This site on American Punishments is taken from a book written in 1896 by social historian Alice Morse Earle and illustrated by Franz Hazenplug. It covers British and Colonial Punishments. Chapters include The Bilboes, The Ducking Stool, The Stocks, The Pillory, Punishments of Authors and Books, The Whipping Post, The Scarlet Letter, Branks and Gags, Public Penance, Military Punishments, and Branding and Maiming. The full text and illustrations are presented here. Chapter 7: The Scarlet Letter, shows us that Hawthorne's "Scarlet A" was not a unique concept for crimes at this time in history.

Reading: 

• As a reading exercise, I have the students read the article and then do a few simple exercises.  I have purposely left off the title of the article.  The original title wasn't that good and I actually think my students have come up with better ones.   If you want to know the original title, e-mail me. Next have the students write out the main idea of this article in the space provided and support that main idea by highlighting several supporting statements and/or details.
• After finishing the article, discussion will come easy.  Every student has an opinion on this topic.

• Have students write a letter to the editor of the Los Angles Times  explaining why they either agree or disagree with Judge Poe's methods.

• For humor: Have students pretend that their board of education going to pass a resolution for "public student punishment" for school related infractions.  Have students write to the BOE describing their ideas for the crimes that should be punished and describe the punishment.

• Have them write to the school board explaining why they think this is a good or bad idea.

1. Come up with a suitable title for this article.
2. In a sentence or two, sum up the main idea of this article.  Write your final draft of these sentences in the space provided.
3. Underline or highlight at least three references in this article that support what you have delineated as the theme.
    

Title: ____________________________________________________________________________

Kate Shatzkin 
The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Apr 26, 1998 
 

Theme: ____________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________________
 

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. 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.

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.

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," he says. "What you'd have to do is find those things that
mean something to the kid, to see the world through their eyes."

Still, Wright admits to scanning the lists of suspects arrested for drunken driving that are published weekly
in his local newspaper.

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 19th 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."

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.

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, and relatives received death threats.

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 says.

Credit: BALTIMORE SUN