The Feld-Blog

Thieves used to have their hands chopped off, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t common practice anymore. In fact, there is a constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” The recent torture ban says that the US won’t degrade anyone, or treat them inhumanely as a form of punishment or to extract information. This means the United States fines criminals or throws them in jail. Sometimes we now subject transgressors of some more minor crimes to community service, but as a country we officially retain the idealistic view is that criminals can be reformed or at least deterred from committing crimes. Then why has Tennessee passed a law intended to humiliate certain criminals?

Tennessee just passed a law outlining punishment for convicted drunk drivers whereby they are required to clean up trash off the side of the road while wearing a reflective orange jersey that says “I am a drunk driver.” What? Do they seriously think this is going to be more of a deterrent? I mean don’t get me wrong, drunk driving really sucks and I am sure people caught drunk driving would hate to be subjected to that, but that’s just the problem: I don’t think criminals should ever be ‘subjected’ to something like that. The word subjected has this connotation that they are purposely being embarrassed and degraded. Is this really the way to reform someone? Aren’t they just going to be angry about it? That doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.

Maybe more jail time would be a better idea. Maybe heavy fines – people don’t like to lose their money. But merely officially humiliating people probably isn’t the best plan. Drunk driving is a problem and addressing it, trying to come up with a good way to stymie drunk driving is a very good idea, but I don’t think this is the way to do it.