DATE: Sunday, March 2, 1997                 TAG: 9702280573

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, staff writer 

                                            LENGTH:  176 lines

SHAME AND PUNISHMENT OUR FOREBEARS PUT SCOUNDRELS IN STOCKS, OR BRANDED THEM WITH THE ``SCARLET LETTER.'' NOW, 300 YEARS LATER, ``SHAME'' SENTENCES ARE BACK IN VOGUE.

A favorite pastime for tourists at Williamsburg is to pose for snapshots with their arms and legs stuck through the frame of heavy wooden stocks.

Public punishment for those who dared disobey the strict moral codes was common in colonial days, when miscreants were clamped into stocks in the public square, sweating out their punishment for all to see.

Joseph Gatchell, according to the Boston Globe, was convicted of blasphemy in 1684 and ordered ``to stand in pillory, have his head and hand put in & have his toung drawne forth out of his mouth, & peirct through with a hott iron.''

When Hannah Newell pleaded guilty to adultery in 1694, the court ordered ``fifteen stripes Severally to be laid on upon her naked back at the Common Whipping post.'' Her consort, Lambert Despair, fared worse, the Globe reported: 25 lashes, ``and that on the next Thursday Immediately after Lecture he stand upon the Pillory for ... a full hower with Adultery in Capitall letters written upon his brest.''

Today, remnants of that past are circling back, insinuating their way into courtrooms across the country in the form of ``shame'' penalties - sentences that demand the offender face up to his or her crime in some public way.

It might take the form of a bumper sticker acknowledging a conviction for drunk driving.

It might mean a sign by your home admitting to a violent crime, as it did recently for a farmer in Illinois, who was ordered to post this warning at his driveway: ``A violent felon lives here. Travel at your own risk.''

For a Houston man it meant standing on the steps of city hall in the middle of the day to apologize for hitting his estranged wife. In the audience were news reporters and advocates for battered women.

Just how often shame penalties are imposed in Virginia is unclear. The Sentencing Commission and the Office of the Supreme Court do not keep track. But there are hints that ``shaming'' may regain popularity as a legal tool in Virginia.

During the recent legislative session, a bill was debated that would have required offenders with more than one drunk-driving conviction to slap a sticker on their license plate calling attention to their crimes.

At one point, Fairfax officials broadcast over the local cable-television channel the names of people who were behind on their personal property taxes.

Nationally, alternative sentences are on the rise. And swirling in the debate is the basic question about whether shame penalties work. Do they violate offenders' civil rights? Are they just some nostalgic attempt to get back to simpler, more orderly times?

Those who favor shame penalties say they offer an inexpensive and effective way to relieve overcrowded jails and prisons. But critics say any benefits are outweighed by the circus atmosphere that results.

And experts are quick to point out a fundamental difference between the shaming of today and that of colonial times: Back then, the shaming occurred within a homogenized population. It's more complicated now because the population is diverse. Now, part of the challenge is to make certain that the offender does not see himself as being outside the group that is rejecting him.

Dan Kahan, a law professor at the University of Chicago, has studied shame penalties for about two years and is considered a national expert. His short answer on the success of shame sentencing is that it's too early to tell. No good studies have been completed, he said, and the research likely would take a couple of years.

But the sentences should work, he says.

``Studies show that the reason people obey the law is shame in one form or another. People fear being held in ridicule. So why wouldn't shame work?''

He attributes the return of shame penalties to an urgent need to find alternatives to prison, and the fact that fines and community service have fallen out of political favor because they don't express adequate condemnation of the bad behavior.

``Take these two things, and add random probability that a judge tries it and it works, and I think you have an explanation for the trend,'' Kahan said. ``People experiment. The need is there.''

As many as 20 years ago, you might have seen the printing of the names of ``johns'' in the newspapers to deter solicitation for prostitution, he said. But only in the past 10 years have bumper stickers announcing convictions for crimes caught on.

``This is happening not so much because of legislation but because judges are taking the initiative,'' he said. ``Judges around the country are doing this. It could happen in Virginia at the point that a judge decided to be creative.''

The attempt to pass a law in the General Assembly session that would have forced repeat drunk-drivers to wear a punitive sticker on their license plate was a ``crystal-clear example'' of shame penalties, said Kent Willis, director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The bill failed to make it out of the House Courts of Justice Committee.

``I'm happy it didn't go anywhere,'' Willis said. ``I haven't seen a lot of this kind of blatant shame sentencing.'' But he sees examples of that sort of thinking.

Within the past few years, Richmond officials published the names of ``johns'' charged with soliciting prostitutes. The ACLU protested.

``It was a matter of punishing someone based on arrests, not convictions,'' Willis said. ``It still has the shaming aspect, but worse.''

He also points to the changes in juvenile justice in Virginia in recent years that have gotten tougher on young offenders.

``One of the cornerstones of juvenile justice was confidentiality, and that's completely tumbled,'' he said. ``The trend toward harsher and more public punishment sets the tone for shame punishment - a reversal of the last 200 years of corrections philosophy, which was to punish but rehabilitate.''

``In our society there's supposed to be a rational relationship between the crime committed and the punishment meted out. There's no indication that there's a relationship between a shaming punishment and society's goals for people who commit crimes. Shaming punishment merely humiliates and stigmatizes, thereby undermining the rehabilitation process.

``It's an idea that was first abandoned a long time ago,'' he said. ``There's no indication that shaming works any more than harsher sentences deter crime. These are punishments out of the imagination of people desperate to do something about crime. . . They don't deter crime, and they're not a rehabilitative tool.''

During the summer, the state Department of Corrections announced that anyone interested could obtain the names and addresses of anyone on parole in their neighborhood, along with basic information about the offender.

Again, Willis is troubled by the trend.

``The purpose of parole is to reintegrate people into society who have committed their crime and paid their punishment,'' he said. ``If you advertise their names, you're telling the people in the system they're supposed to be integrating into that there's something wrong with them.

``Suddenly they're pariahs. You're going to put a scarlet letter on them.''

The case of Lawrence Singleton, though, may well cast a shadow on that argument. Singleton, 69, is the man convicted in California in 1979 of raping a 15-year-old hitchhiker and cutting off her arms with an ax. He was sentenced to 14 years and four months in prison - then the maximum punishment - and was paroled after eight years for good behavior and participation in a work-study program.

Angry townspeople literally shamed Singleton out of the state by staging demonstrations where he tried to settle. He fled to his old neighborhood in Tampa, Fla., and melded into the community. Two weeks ago, he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of a woman at his home.

Even before Lawrence Singleton's latest attack, some experts were saying that shame penalties can, in some cases have a detrimental effect unless they're handled carefully.

Dr. Herbert E. Thomas, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst from Pennsylvania, says the people who could most easily be affected by such sentencing could also be most damaged by it.

``Unless it's done in a caring way,'' he said, ``the potential for increased violence is there.''

Thomas, who has studied the shame response for 14 years, published a paper about a year ago that is getting national attention. In it, he theorizes that when people become violent, they pass through three stages: rejection, a shame response, and then anger.

He contends that if society imposes a shame response as punishment, increased violence could follow rather than the desired response.

Some might argue that Singleton's humiliation after Californians drove him, publicly, from the state is an example of this. He was forced to live in a mobile home on the grounds of San Quentin prison until the end of his parole in 1988, when he returned to Florida.

``The ones who are sensitive to others are the ones who are most likely to be hurt,'' Thomas said.

And a whole other category of people will not be affected by shaming at all.

``There are a lot of people who have built such walls of armor that no one in the world could shame them,'' he said.

Thomas contends that the real benefit comes in cases where the judge, as a parental figure, is willing to stand on the courthouse steps with the offender while the person goes through the humiliating experience of admitting to a crime - for instance, beating up his wife.

``It will depend on the judge's ability to have the person understand that they are respected as individuals,'' he said, ``but they have done wrong and that it must be shared with others.''

Although he is optimistic that shaming alternatives can be used constructively, Thomas has reservations. He warns that shaming will be worthless if it becomes just another ritual.

``My greatest fear,'' he said, ``is that it's just going to be considered as a joke by a lot of hardened criminals and just another rejection in the lives of many people.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

Lawrence Singleton was shamed out of the state of California, where

he had butchered a young girl. But he exploded again in Florida.

An Illinois farmer with a vicious temper was forced by the court to

place this warning sign at the entrance to his driveway.

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