Abruptly a driver's reverie is jolted by the green plywood and white-lettered sign at the end of Glenn Meyer's driveway. "Warning," it reads. "A Violent Felon Lives Here. Travel at Your Own Risk." The sign is a condition of the probation sentence given to Meyer, a 62-year-old farmer, for having bashed another farmer in the face with a truck fuel pump. The Pittsfield, Illinois judge intended the sign to alert people about Meyer's dangerous streak and to shame him into behaving. But Meyer is unrepentant. This week, he went before the Illinois Supreme Court to challenge the imposition of the sign.
Judicially created public humiliations like this are being introduced in courtrooms across the country, usually as alternatives to incarceration. Known as shaming penalties -- after punishments like the stockades favored by 17th-century Puritans -- they usually take the form of a mea culpa message to the community. Drunk drivers have to put special license plates on their cars. Convicted shoplifters must take out advertisements in their local newspapers, running their photographs and announcing their crimes. Men convicted of soliciting prostitutes are identified on newspapers, radio shows and billboards. In Florida a judge ordered a woman to place an advertisement in her local paper saying she had bought drugs in front of her children. In Houston, after pleading guilty to domestic violence, a man stood on the steps of City Hall, facing lunchtime workers, reporters and battered women's advocates, and apologized for hitting his estranged wife.

In modern times, Americans no longer associate prison with rehabilitation; its purpose is strictly punitive. Still, the public complains about defendants serving short sentences in prisons that offer television, weight rooms and the opportunity to learn advanced criminal skills. The return to shaming penalties, which began in the 1980s with mortified Wall Street traders appearing on the nightly news in handcuffs, is to some extent a nostalgic longing for an era when a community and its principles were so uniform that people could police themselves.

"The penalties bring the community back into sentencing and punishing policies," said Robert Teir of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a public-interest group that filed a brief supporting Meyer's warning sign. "And they give the community a sense of empowerment that jailing or letting someone go without a punishment does not do."

Local Illinois judges, many of whom are elected, have seized on shaming penalties as an alternative to prison. Judges in Arkansas and Wisconsin have ordered shoplifters to parade in front of the stores they have robbed, carrying placards admitting their guilt. A Memphis, Tenn., judge has given thieves probation if they permit victims to pluck something from the thief's home. An Ohio judge ordered a man convicted of harassing his ex-wife to let her spit in his face.

What do you think? And, why not let your legislators know?