Is Public Shaming More Effective than Prison?
Crime and Punishment- Then and Now
Michel Foucault’s theories address a number of different issues in various area of study such as history, sociology, psychology and philosophy. For the sake of this article, I am going to focus primarily on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault believed that history was an important tool when looking at modern life and that history should not be forgotten or overlooked. In fact, often we may find that people in history had a more superior way of going about certain situations than we do in modern day. Foucault believe that we must dig through the past and pay attention to how things used to be and how they got to where they are today. In this article, I will talk about how punishment used to be treated and how a sudden change in the 18th century changed the way we look at punishment by removing it from the public eye. I will also point out ways that our current systems are unfair and unjust, especially to women in the criminal justice system.
Corporal punishment used to be treated completely different in the past. It used to be done in a businesslike fashion. People used to be punished in front of tons of other people who would gather to watch crucial acts such as amputations, beatings, and bodies being wrenched apart. Blood would be shed at the feet of those who were watching to serve as a lesson of what might happen to them if they committed a crime or misbehaved. In fact, care was taken so that everyone was aware of the punishment and were present for it, but suddenly this all changed in the latter half of the 18th century.
Suddenly, no more bodies were being punished in the public eye. The culprit’s body was hidden in dark rooms with chained doors and everything was now done behind closed doors. The public no longer played a part in these punishments; they no longer knew about what went on in jail cells and prisons. Foucault asked, “What is so astonishing about the fact that our prisons resemble our factories, schools, military bases, hospitals- all of which in turn resemble prisons?” There is a major downside for the citizens when punishment is hidden from the public eye. When citizens were allowed to see the punishments in public, often groups would side with the person who was being tortured, perhaps because they didn’t agree with the punishment that was given, and would rise up in riot, but now that they were no longer aware of what was going on. Citizens suddenly became silenced and riots became a thing of the past. Prisons claimed that this new system was less focused on being violent to the criminals and more nurturing to their minds, because their main goal was to prevent future crimes. Now, let’s shift our focus to look at our prisons systems today to examine if this major change in the past has been effective and if our prisoner’s minds are being nurtured.
In an article by Judith Lichtenberg, three fundamental moral norms are mentioned. She says that punishment should be proportional to the crime, like cases should be treated alike, and criminal punishment should not do more harm than good. Our systems violate each and every one of these moral norms. To focus on one of these three moral norms, we can easily point out that the criminal justice system is definitely not treating all of its cases alike. For example, although white people report using drugs five times as much as black people, they are still not the ones crowding our jail cells. By the time an uneducated African American man has reached his 30s, there is a 70 percent chance that he will spend some time in prison. Certain races are simply profiled, convicted, and arrested more than other, even though other races may be committing just as much crime. Our systems are also more unjust to women than they are to men. Let’s take a look!
Women are treated specially poorly in the American criminal justice system. Women are offered less programs than men, for example, in 2009 it was reported that 27 parenting programs were offered in men’s prisons while only two women’s prisons were offered the same program. Through this same program, men were given video equipment to record messages and tapes for their families, while women, who play an even more crucial role in children’s lives, were only given audio tapes to record bedtime stories for their children. Often, there is no attention paid to prisoners’ backgrounds and individual needs. The American Psychological Association reports that in the last 10 years, the male prison population has increased by 45 percent, while women have increased a whopping 81 percent. About 75 percent of which suffer from mental health problems. Stephanie Covington points out that today, women are fighting for equality, but when it comes to prison systems, we need to acknowledge women’s needs separately from men’s needs. She points out, “many places today are still trying to do everything gender-neutral. There is no gender-neutral. In our society, gender-neutral is male.” She suggests that the Women’s Integrated Treatment program can help women by creating trauma-informed environments that uses multi-dimensional strategies to help women manage their symptoms better. Covington says that our current system is ineffective and does not “nurture minds” or help women reach a brighter future after prison. She says, “if you ask them what they see as their opportunities when they leave jail and prison, women say, ‘there are two employers out there for me: One is the drug dealer and the other is the pimp.”
Public punishment doesn’t sounds so pleasing to our ears today, because we no longer recall a time someone was being punished in the middle of the town with everyone watching. We are no longer comfortable with the idea of seeing something like that, but we also shouldn’t be comfortable with our current systems today. Not only is the criminal justice system not nurturing the minds of the prisoners, it’s actually leaving them worse off than they were before, with unfair treatment, a bleak future, and no opportunities for work after prison. In my opinion, taking punishment away from the public eye has only benefited the system and not the people. By hiding punishment, the system can do whatever it pleases, but now there are no groups to rise in riots, because they are simply unaware of what goes on behind those closed doors.
