The colonial period may be long gone, but not everyone seems to have noticed. Joseph Gonzalez, for example, appears to yearn for a bygone era when miscreants faced public shaming.
As recounted in a story Wednesday by The Denver Post’s Electra Draper, Gonzalez ordered his 12-year-old son, Jose, to spend part of his spring break standing at 22nd and Larimer in Denver with a sign proclaiming: “I am a thief. I took money from a family member.”
Apparently the boy filched $100 from a cousin’s wallet. But in the 21st century, the resulting punishment — assuming the criminal justice system is not involved — is usually a private family affair, not a community spectacle.
And we think that’s as it should be.
A 12-year-old who lifts money from a wallet should of course apologize to the person who was wronged. Full restitution should be required. Certain privileges and freedoms should be canceled for a given period.
But public shaming?
We’re not going to pose as amateur psychologists and claim that humiliating the boy in this way is likely to traumatize him. We have no idea. For all we know, it might be a more effective deterrent than most other punishments that parents dole out to kids these days.
Nevertheless, there is something unseemly about public shaming — something degrading for the culprit and witnesses alike. We realize that the father’s intentions appear admirable, and that as a single parent he is simply trying to impress upon his son the gravity of what he did so that he never repeats the behavior.
But standing on a street corner with a sign? At age 12?
There was a time, of course, when public viewing of punishment was considered desirable — even essential — and whipping posts and stocks could be found on the central square of nearly every village.
But that was also an era when official sentences for a vast array of crimes were decidedly cruel, and yet often administered as a form of popular entertainment.
Americans may have moved on to only marginally milder amusements in the past 200 years — bounty hunting NFL defenses, anyone? — but we at least now draw the line at the public humiliation of errant kids.
Or that’s what we’d thought until this week.
