ABSTRACT
Many creative punishments qualify as “shaming penalties.” They require an offender to publicize his offense to an audience that under normal circumstances would be unaware of it; moreover, as a result of this publicity, the penalties may cause the offender to suffer an unpleasant—perhaps even painful—emotional experience, usually described as “shame.” Despite the difficulties shaming penalties face on retributivist, deterrence, and rehabilitative grounds, even critics of shame seem hard-pressed to dismiss such penalties entirely on those grounds alone. Another objection, however, questions whether shame respects the limits that any morally respectable punishment should respect. The shaming model begins with the expressive dimension of punishment and emphasizes shame’s greater power to condemn an offender’s wrongdoing compared with other alternative sanctions. Shame is then justified on the familiar grounds of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation. The alternative to shame is the educating model, which in many ways represents a more appealing approach to the problem of punishment.
