What is the baseline sort of punishment for this sort of offence? Either a fine or community service or at the very worst a brief suspended sentence. Public humiliation is not and has not been used as an alternative to imprisonment.
Which is why I find it premature to call it effective, setting aside all the reasons why I think it wouldn't be. To restate a point, I could be wrong about all this and it's very hard to tell a priori without statistics. And you could make the argument that the way to get those statistics is to let judges get creative with sentencing and see what happens, and I'd agree with that argument. Social experimentation is an undervalued practice. For very good reasons, but still.
As for deterrence, that's suspect at best. Intuitively you might think it would, but then intuitively lots of people think the death penalty is a great deterrent and it doesn't quite work out that way.
The death penalty is an effective deterrent. No reasonable person in their right mind would commit a capital offence in the US. It's no more effective than life in a US prison, but it's more of a deterrent than no punishment.
Fair enough. Allow me to restate: Intuitively, lots of people think the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than imprisonment, but in fact the reverse is true. Therefore, there is reason to believe people's ability to determine the effectiveness of a deterrent without looking at hard data is suspect.
Before you leap to the suggestion that this is an illegitimate goal - stopping reasonable people from committing crimes - I'd like to point out that it has in fact been by far the most successful achievement of law. Almost all law is based primarily on preventing them, because it is possible to do so.
Mostly agreed.
How many people will look at this case and think "Oh, that guy was a huge asshole and got a horrible punishment. Perhaps I should stop being a huge asshole, or something similar might happen to me"? Answer, I don't know, but I would expect it to be close to zero.
There are two groups of people:
1) People who can be deterred
2) The people you describe
The people I describe are the sort of people who
need to be deterred by the law, because they are the ones for whom social norms were not enough to stop them from abusing and bullying children. As for your partition, I would not assume a priori that none of them can be deterred, but I would not be too surprised if that was the case.
Do you believe that this punishment is more effective at deterring Group 1 than a fine? I do. I think that public humiliation is far more effective than modest financial punishment.
I disagree. Public humiliation is unusual enough as a punishment that there is low expectation that the next judge will use it. Fines are more common and thus more likely to be considered something that can actually happen. Also, and aside from the point of deterrence, I think this kind of punishment has a greater potential for negative side-effects, whereas fining the guy money and then awarding it to the family he hurt has the upside of guaranteeing at least some good will come of it.
Also, just in case some of the posts above were directed at me:
1) My argument is not that this is cruel and unusual punishment. I have no idea what counts as cruel and unusual for the purposes of American law, and don't particularly care anyway. I was making the pragmatic argument as to whether this was an effective way to deter people and whether the side-effects from it did not outweigh any potential benefits.
2) My argument is also not that he shouldn't be harmed (not harming people would negate just about the entirety of the justice system). I only mentioned harm because Fred said there had been none and I disagreed.
