shaming and detterence
...ociated with them, he/she may become insecure. If that is the case, the offender may feel the need to adjust their behavior or personality to that that is socially acceptable. One can be heavily influenced by their significant other such as family, peers, and even Smith 2 society as a whole. The offender may receive humiliation, shame, and embarrassment from these significant others and members of the society which will in turn cause them to put a halt to their deviant behavior. Usually the wrongdoer will improve if they feel as if they will be readmitted into society. In contrast, disintegrative shaming is not as effective as reintegraitve shaming. Disintegrative shaming involves no attempt to reconcile the shamed offender with the community. One form of disintegrative shaming would be to place a sign in an offender’s yard reading “An offender lives here.” The sign would be where everyone who passed could see. Society would probably reject that person and not want he/she readmitted back into that community. The offender might in turn “reject their rejecters” and form a deviant a subculture with others that have been rejected as well. This is because people fall into the groups where they feel like they belong and criminals feel like they do not belong in mainstream society. Many times society will label and stigmatize the offender. Stigmatization is an ongoing process of degradation in which the offender is branded as an evil person and cast out of society (Criminology 134). Stigma and degradation can have a general deterrent effect. As a general deterrent, it makes people afraid of social rejection and public humiliation so they may think twice before departing from the norm. In this case, shaming may help control the amount of people who commit deviant acts for fear of being stigmatized and labeled. Stigmatizing and labeling may also have a negative effect. As a specific deterrent, stigma’s fate is failure because people who suffer humiliation at the hands of Smith 3 the justice system “reject their rejecters” just as they reject the society that rejects them. As previously mentioned, the offender may do so by joining a deviant subculture of like-minded people who collectively resist social control. Also, stigma may break the community apart and creates offenders as outcast which will cause social disorganization. “According to Braithwaite individuals who live ‘with a great deal of stigma; their reaction to further shame was rage and vindictive escalation of violence rather than remorse’” (t...