Could Humiliation Be the Next Weapon in Our War on Crime?

British offenders depressed at the prospect of sweeping out bus stations in a fluorescent jacket identifying them as a criminal, or being shamed in a "conviction poster", can console themselves with the thought that they could be at the cutting edge of a historic revival.

The reforms, suggested in a report by Louise Casey, former head of the government's Respect Unit, hark back to the days of Ancient Rome, where prostitutes were forced to wear a man's toga as a badge of shame, and to China's Cultural Revolution, when class enemies were paraded around with self-condemnatory slogans on their clothes. Originally used in Medieval Europe as a means for the community to punish petty offenses, "degrading treatment" was outlawed in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

According to Amnesty International and Penal Reform International, contemporary examples of "shaming sentences" are rare. If the British measures come into force, we will apparently share honors with China, rural India, Rwanda and a few jurisdictions overseen by particularly imaginative judges in the US.

When police in Shenzhen, southern China, paraded 100 prostitutes and their clients through the streets in yellow tunics in 2006, the practice was the subject of unusual public criticism and was not repeated. Miscreants in some Indian villages have had their heads shaved, and have been made to ride donkeys around the area to the scorn of their neighbors. Meanwhile Rwanda's community courts order anyone convicted of taking part in the genocide there to perform menial tasks wearing pink shirts.

The same color is also a favorite in some American jails, where inmates such as former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson have been forced to don pink socks, pants and suits, sleep on pink sheets and gaze at pink ceilings and walls for 24 hours a day. It is supposed to both soothe and embarrass, though how it can do both at once is something of a mystery.

All that, of course, is in the privacy of a penitentiary.

Examples of public humiliation are harder to find, but there are some American judges out there who have blazed a trail. Judge Mike Cicconetti, of Painesville, Ohio, is something of a market leader on this. He once sentenced three men convicted of soliciting sex to wear bright yellow chicken costumes carrying a sign saying "No Chicken Ranch in Painesville", a reference to a famous Nevada brothel. He also ordered a man and woman convicted of vandalizing a statue of the baby Jesus to walk around town with a donkey. Other local wrongdoers have been made to share a sty with pigs.

Fluorescent yellow jackets could be just the beginning.