Hrs. English 2
Ms. D. Hernandez
Directions: Read the following two articles on public shaming and create a rhetorical
précis for two of the three articles.
Is Public Shaming Fair Punishment? Pat Morrison
You play the judge: How would you sentence a man who spent 15 years picking on his
neighbor and her handicapped children?
A Cleveland judge sentenced just such a man, Edmond Aviv, to jail, community service,
anger management and mental health counseling — and to spend five hours alongside a
busy street on a Sunday in April with a great big sign branding him an intolerant bully.
The 8th Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. Is this either one? Or can
justice be fairly meted out in something other than years and months behind bars?
In 2012, a different Cleveland judge gave a woman a choice of going to jail or spending
two days standing on a street corner with a sign reading: "Only an idiot would drive on
the sidewalk to avoid a school bus." The woman chose to hold the sign.
Puritan punishments like locking someone's head and hands in the stocks seem like
retribution, not justice. In "The Scarlet Letter," Hester Prynne, was an adulterer, not a
thief. Puritans believed in shame as a behavior corrector. But Prynne flaunted and even
co-opted the "A" she was condemned to wear.
Should shame be a component of punishment? Does taking someone down a peg set a
miscreant straight, any more than locking him up? And should it be at a judge's
discretion?
A California judge thought so nearly 25 years ago. Visalia Superior Court Judge Howard
Broadman made a Prynne analogy when he offered a choice to a Tulare career thief: He
could go back to prison for stealing beer or wear a T-shirt for a year that read: "I'm on
Felony Probation.... My record plus two six-packs equal four years."
"[Regular] probation hasn't worked," the judge told the felon. "And we have sent you to
prison before." So, "if you are willing to be Hester Prynne for the next year, I am going
to give you probation."
Was it a fair punishment? Let's call this the Richard Lovelace sentencing question. That
poet wrote from prison more than 350 years ago that "Stone walls do not a prison
make, / Nor iron bars a cage."
Broadman seems to have taken that to heart. He sentenced an illiterate woman to learn
how to read. Another offender had to donate his car to a battered women's shelter. And
— much ahead of his time — Broadman impounded the cars of repeat drunk drivers.
Yet Broadman triggered a national tripwire in 1991 when a woman came before him
with a long criminal record and a felony child abuse conviction for beating her young
daughters. The woman was pregnant with her fifth child and, to protect her "unconceived" children, Broadman gave her a choice: prison or probation using the birth
control device Norplant for five years. The woman took the deal — but changed her
mind and brought in lawyers.
A confessional T-shirt was one thing; restricting reproduction was another. The ACLU
was outraged on the woman's behalf. Broadman recused himself, and the woman went
to prison anyway for violating probation. (I contacted the now-retired Broadman, but he
didn't want to comment on this.)
Judges have sentenced a La Habra slumlord to live in his own run-down building under
house arrest for two months, and made an Ohio woman who abandoned 33 kittens
spend a night alone in the woods. In a case that made the legal textbooks and withstood
appeal in 2005, a San Francisco mail thief was ordered to stand on the post office steps
with a sign that read: "I stole mail and this is my punishment."
It's hard to track the deterrent effect of such creative punishments because they
happen so rarely. And judges have so much power and discretion that creative
sentencing could mean wildly and unfairly different punishments for the same crime
between one courtroom and the next — one reason that sentencing guidelines and laws
exist in the first place.
Daniel Markel, the D'Alemberte professor of law at Florida State University and an
expert on sentencing, points out that if these punishments didn't have some efficacy,
"there probably wouldn't be much resistance" from miscreants, but "in fact defendants
typically don't want to be publicly shamed because they realize there is something
publicly humiliating about being exposed in the streets."
It's the potential for collateral damage that ought to concern the legal system. "Even the
proponents of shaming punishment are leery of the consequences on innocent third
parties," Markel observed. If a sign reading "A violent felon lives here" was posted in
front of a man's house, the felon's blameless child "might get bullied because of the
exposure and humiliation of the father. For some reason prison doesn't cause the same
kind of vivid denunciation that public shamings do."
The element of choice that comes up in some kinds of creative sentencing might also
give us pause. In California and elsewhere, convicted sex offenders have requested
castration — chemical and actual — to get out of prison. Civil libertarians object on
"cruel and unusual" constitutional grounds, because it amounts to no choice, and
because it gets dangerously close to the medieval notion of cutting off a thief's hands.
Markel adds another objection to asking the guilty to pick their poison: "We punish to
communicate censure and condemnation. It's for a democracy to make those decisions.
We ought not empower defendants to be deciding their punishments."
Edmond Aviv apparently wasn't given a choice. Will public humiliation change his
behavior? He had been convicted of harassment before, so it's hard to fault the judge
for trying something different. And even though we don't live in Hester Prynne's world
anymore, I'll cautiously side with the slice of democracy that told a Cleveland.com
reporter they approved the sentence.
After all, it "communicated censure and condemnation." In this case, it seems, a bad guy
got his just deserts.
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
The Problem With Public Shaming
Cole Stryker | April 24, 2013
Today most people would tell you that the stocks, pillory and other tools of public
punishment are barbaric. We’ve moved passed them, having figured out more humane
ways to deal with crime. Why, then, the resurgence of public shaming [1], namely the
mainstream acceptance of the “dox,” which, in its purest form, is the digging up of a
target’s personal information—name, phone number, address, Social Security number,
familial relationships, financial history—and exposing it online to encourage harassment
from others? This practice has gradually been popularized by Anonymous, the
amorphous collective of trolls and “hacktivists” that alternately terrorize tween girls and
disable government websites.
In 2012, this practice was broadly adopted by media outlets. In October, Gawker
unmasked a creep [2], notorious for facilitating the sharing sexualized images of women
(underage and otherwise) taken without their consent. Gawker declared him “the
biggest troll on the web.” Its sister blog Jezebel called for the naming of names [3] of
such creeps, and later exposed a bunch of teenage Twitter users making racist remarks
about Obama, going so far as to personally alert the administrators of their schools by
phone.
This trend runs silly, as well—Buzzfeed ridiculed spoiled teens [4] whining about their
Christmas presents, while every media outlet covered [5] Nice Guys of OK Cupid, a blog
that ridicules clueless misogyny by sharing photos of hapless bros with regrettable
stances on gender politics. Prepare to see a lot more of this sort of thing now that
Facebook has released its Graph Search tool, which makes it possible to search for a
controversial keyword or phrase (say, “I hate n-----ers”), find people who’ve used that
phrase on their profiles and grab some screenshots—you’ve got a readymade outragebaiting trend piece.
The dox phenomenon played out with unfortunate results last month, when on March
17, development evangelist Adria Richards tweeted a photo [6] of two men who’d been
making sophomoric jokes at a tech conference, leading to the removal of the offenders,
and then the firing of one. A wave of backlash ensued against Richards; strangers sent
her abusive, threatening messages, and Internet trolls conspired to get her fired [7],
attacking her employer’s website with dummy traffic. Her employer eventually did
terminate her contract [8], citing Richards’s divisive tactics.
The First Amendment protects a lot of abhorrent speech, but societies have always
resorted to some form of vigilante justice to preserve widely known and observed rules
of social conduct that don’t result in a crime when they’re broken. So we turn instead to
public humiliation, an organic form of social control that never really went away
completely, as evidenced by the occasional signboard-bearing ne’re-do-well [9] on the
nightly news. Publicity-seeking judges occasionally will expose deadbeat dads, public
urinators, drunk drivers and repeat drug offenders. But these are outliers. We don’t
prop people up in public, brand them with scarlet letters or hurl spoiled produce.
We didn’t cease these punishments because we began to see them as barbaric. They
simply stopped working. Historians point to the urbanization of impersonal cities with
mobile, transient populations. It’s difficult to encourage shame if they can easily
disappear into the crowd or escape to the next town. Shame works in closed, small
communities that share similar norms. As the New World opened up and expanded,
public humiliation ceased to be an effective means of norm reinforcement.
American adjudicators typically look to five goals to justify a punishment: incapacitation,
restitution, deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution. Neither incapacitation nor
restitution apply to doxxing, since there are no legal enforcement mechanisms. To the
extent that those who engage in public shaming think they are satisfying one of the
remaining three, they faultily assume that deeply rooted social ills like racism, sexism
and homophobia are personal failings that can be remedied through vicious public
blowback and a permanent stain on their character.
It’s common to argue that a perpetrator “deserves” to be shamed, but in fact human
psychology doesn’t work this way. Many pedophiles, for instance, recognize that that
they are inexorably—even biologically—bound to impulses that they themselves loathe.
Does the shaming—through public registries for example—cause the pedophile to
reform? Unlikely. Does it deter others from engaging in pedophilic acts, or does it drive
them to darker corners and sneakier tactics?
Racism is not as tied to biology [10], but environment can be a powerful antibody to
shame. Imagine you are a teenager living with white supremacist parents surrounded by
white supremacist neighbors and you get suspended from school because you said
something racist. Do you turn inward and examine your sense of shared humanity with
brown people, or do you simply become resentful toward those who’ve punished you,
perhaps even more sure of your sundry prejudices? Does it even deter you from
vocalizing your racism or do you simply channel it through a different medium where
you’re less likely to be caught? In March, a racist New York City EMT employee was
outed by the New York Post [11] for posting vile tweets. His online supporters countered
with by violently threatening the reporter who broke the story, sometimes
anonymously, sometimes not. These behaviors are symptoms of a systemic ideological
cancer that is highly resistant to shaming because racists are typically proud of their
hate.
Which leaves tit-for-tat as the lone valid criterion for public humiliation. But retribution
too, is problematic. Consider the announcement of the Sandy Hook episode and the
ensuing media frenzy to name the shooter. He was first incorrectly identified as Ryan
Lanza, who turned out to be the killer’s brother. Other “Ryan Lanzas” and their friends
and families were harassed during the confusion [12]. Reporters are notoriously bad at
getting the facts straight during the frenzied moments following a big story, let alone
amateur detectives or doxxers. Things get especially hairy when big media publish the
identity of alleged aggressors [13] based on unverified claims from untrustworthy
sources. Amateur detectives raced against the FBI to uncover the perpetrators behind
the Boston bombings on social news site Reddit. They fingered the wrong person,
resulting in a misguided witch hunt that prompted Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin
to publicly apologize [14]. Such exposure can lead to misguided counterattacks from a
faceless troll army. On an Internet where people can so deftly conceal their identities
and impersonate strangers, we must be mindful of our propensity for error.
Then there is the permanence problem. Once embarrassing information about a person
is online, it’s never going to go away. Imagine, thirty years from now, some potential
employer evaluating a candidate based on a thoughtless remark she made as a
teenager. The permanence of uploaded information ensures that modern shamings,
while obviously milder in severity, can far exceed the scope of the scarlet letter, the
most extreme manifestation of which was at least branded on the chest, where it could
be covered. Every modern system of punishment attempts to deal in proportionalities.
Put simply, the punishment must fit the crime.
Finally, the angry mob problem. Unlike institutionalized forms of punishment, public
shaming can spiral out of control, far beyond the imaginations of the media outlets who
performed the initial exposure. Vigilante justice is a tricky thing, with online anonymity
leading to harsher consequences from a host of far-flung strangers exercising
psychopathic levels of schadenfreude. Whose norms are we to enforce? Would
Jezebel’s writers be comfortable knowing that the tactics it employed against racist
teenagers have been used against abortion doctors [15]?
The rise of the social web may be perceived as a re-villaging, where the permanence of
one’s digital footprint behaves as a deterrent, making it seem to some like an ideal time
to reintroduce public shaming to reinforce norms. But considered through a historical
lens, public shaming begins to look like a tool designed not to humanely punish the perp
but rather to satisfy the crowd.
This explains its resurgence. When has the crowd ever been bigger, or more thirsty for
vengeance? The faceless Internet, with its shadowy cyberbullies and infinite display of
every social ill is scary. And when it slithers its tentacles in a person’s life, we become
desperate for some way to fight back—to shine light into the darkness and
counterattack those who would victimize behind the veil of anonymity. But doxing, even
just naming publicly-available names [17] to channel outrage (or worse) at someone
who has violated your norms, is not only an ineffective way to deal, it risks causing more
harm than the initial offense. Last year’s trendy rise of media-sponsored shaming is selfrighteousness masquerading as social justice. In many cases the targets deserve to be
exposed and more, but public shaming does not drive social progress. It might make us
feel better, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking we’ve made a positive
difference.
Can We Bring Back the Stockade s?
The constitutionality of public shaming.
By Brian Palmer
The Scarlet Letter,
Cleveland resident Shena Hardin was caught driving her SUV on the sidewalk to avoid
stopping for a school bus. On Tuesday and Wednesday, she served her sentence for the
crime: standing on a street corner with a sign that read, “Only an idiot would drive on
the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.” Is public shaming a constitutional punishment?
Usually, yes. Public shaming is an integral part of our criminal justice system, although its
prominence rises and falls periodically. Many cities have posted the names of drug
offenders, deadbeat dads, or public urinators on billboards. Some have required people
convicted of drunk driving to affix fluorescent license plates to their cars once they start
driving again. Kansas City experimented with broadcasting on a government-owned
television channel the names and addresses of men arrested for solicitation. The “perp
walk” is a pre-conviction public shaming ritual. Individual judges have ordered offenders
to wear signs and shirts, or go door-to-door apologizing to victims of their crimes. Legal
challenges to such shaming sanctions typically fail. In 2003, for example, a San Francisco
mail thief was ordered to spend eight hours standing in front of a post office wearing a
sandwich board that read, “I stole mail. This is my punishment." An appeals court
upheld the sentence, arguing that shaming is an unlawful punishment only when
imposed for the sole purpose of humiliation. It is acceptable, and even useful, according
to the court, as a tool to prevent recidivism. When criminals succeed in overturning their
shaming sanctions, it’s often because the judge was too flippant in designing the
punishment. A California court in 1993 released a shoplifter from the requirement to
wear a T-shirt that read, “Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.” on the front and “I am
on felony probation for theft” on the back.
Public shaming sanctions can get much harsher than the “idiot” sign that Hardin was
forced to hold. Before the widespread adoption of sex offender registries, a Seattle-area
criminal was required to walk around wearing a T-shirt that read, “I am a convicted child
molester.” Others had to post signs on their property warning parents to keep their
children away. Memphis Judge Joe Brown allowed victims of theft to take anything they
wanted from the robber’s home in full view of the neighbors. (His signature punishment
helped get him a television show.) In 1989, the city of Dermott, Ark., ordered parents of
children who violated the town’s 11 p.m. curfew to spend two days in a stockade.
The stockade was a popular punishment in the Colonial era, the heyday of public
shaming in America. At the time, imprisonment was reserved mostly for debtors and
those awaiting trial. Once a suspect was convicted, the judge usually ordered him
executed, flogged, or shamed. (Flogging itself involved a shaming element, as the public
was invited to watch and often hurled stale eggs and dead animals at the criminal.)
Some criminals spent days in the stocks, and Colonial judges sometimes got creative. A
Virginia servant convicted of stealing pants was ordered to sit in the stocks with “a pair
of breeches about his necke.” Around the time of the Revolution, public shaming began
to fade. Most historians believe that urbanization and migration undermined the power
of shaming, because people no longer feared the condemnation of their communities.
Imprisonment slowly became the punishment of choice, although shaming held on for a
time. In the early days of the Republic, states like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts
admitted members of the public to prisons to watch the inmates “as if in a zoo.”
Rhetorical Précis – description and examples
In order to help us quickly and effectively describe the argument an author is making in a
text, we will be utilizing a method of description called the rhetorical précis. Developed by
Margaret Woodworth, 1 this method is designed to highlight key elements of the rhetorical
situation, and help students with reading comprehension and treatment of source materials
in their writing. We will use it often over the course of the semester.
This précis is a highly structured four-sentence paragraph that records the essential
rhetorical elements in any spoken or written discourse. The précis includes the name of the
speaker/writer(s), the context or situation in which the text is delivered, the major
assertion, the mode of development for or support of the main idea, the stated and/or
apparent purpose of the text, and the relationship between the speaker/writer(s) and the
audience. The following is a breakdown of the information you should include in each one
of the four sentences.
1. Name of the author, a phrase describing the author, the type and title of the work,
the date (in parenthesis), a rhetorically accurate verb (such as “assert,” “argue,”
“suggest,” “imply,” “claim,” “question,” etc.) that describes what the author is doing
in the text, and a THAT clause in which you state the major assertion (argument
statement) of the author’s text.
2. An explanation of how the author develops and/or supports the argument—the
rhetorical structure of the text (for instance, comparing and contrasting, narrating,
illustrating, defining, etc.). Your explanation is usually presented in the same
chronological order that the items of support are presented in the work.
3. A statement of the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an IN ORDER TO phrase
in which you explain what the author wants the audience to do or feel as a result of
reading the work.
4. A description of the intended audience and/or the relationship the author
establishes with the author.
Example: British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, in his essay “On Nature” (1850), argues
that using nature as a standard for ethical behavior is illogical. He supports this claim by
first giving the common definitions as nature as, “all that exists or all that exists without the
intervention of man” and then supplying extensive examples of the daily brutality of nature
in the real world. His purpose is to call attention to the flaws in the “nature as a standard”
argument in order to convince people to discard this standard and to instead use reason
and logic to determine the appropriate ethical standard of action for mankind. He
establishes a formal, scholarly tone for the reader of “Nature”—an audience of
philosophers, educators, and other interested citizens.
Rhetorical Précis Frame (Must be typed)
1
Woodworth, Margaret K. "The Rhetorical Précis." Rhetoric Review 7 (1988): 156-164. "The Rhetorical
Précis." Rhetoric Review 7 (1988): 156-164. Woodworth article reports significant success with her
students at various levels, particularly in reading comprehension and preparation for using source materials
in their own academic writing. The rhetorical précis is taken up in Reading Rhetorically, Brief Edition,
Bean et al., New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004. p. 63. Helpful additional information can be found on this
site, http://english.ecu.edu/~wpbanks/eng8601/8601precis.html.
1. (Author’s credentials), (author’s first and last name) in his/her (type of text), (title of
text), published in (publishing info) addresses the topic of (topic of text) and argues that
(argument).
2. He/she supports this claim by___________, then___________, then_____________, and
finally____________.
3. (Author’s last name)’s purpose is to (author’s purpose in writing) in order to (change in
reader/society the author wants to achieve).
4. He/she adopts a(n) __________ tone for his/her audience, the readers of (publication)
and others interested in the topic of______________.
SAMPLE RHETORICAL PRECIS
EXAMPLE 1: “Sheridan Baker, in his essay "Attitudes" (1966), asserts that writers' attitudes
toward their subjects, their audiences, and themselves determine to a large extent the quality of
their prose. Baker supports this assertion by showing examples of how inappropriate attitudes can
make writing unclear, pompous, or boring, concluding that a good writer "will be respectful
toward his audience, considerate toward his readers, and somehow amiable toward human
failings" (58). His purpose is to make his readers aware of the dangers of negative attitudes in
order to help them become better writers. He establishes an informal relationship with his
audience of college students who are interested in learning to write "with conviction"
NOTE that the first sentence identifies the author (Baker), the genre (essay), the title and date,
and uses an active verb (asserts) and the relative pronoun that to explain what exactly Baker
asserts. The second sentence explains the first by offering chronological examples from Baker's
essay, while the third sentence suggests the author's purpose and WHY (in order to) he has set
out that purpose (or seems to have set out that purpose -- not all essays are explicit about this
information and readers have to put the pieces together). The final sentence identifies the primary
audience of the essay (college students) and suggests how this audience is brought into/connected
to the essay's purpose. (From http://english.ecu.edu/~wpbanks/eng8601/8601precis.html)