I’ve been ill this week and surviving off 2 hours sleep a day and coffee until I can stop my liquid diet. I’m now in the hallucination stage of sleep deprivation and having random thoughts.
Anyway, I saw the local police had charged a motorist for filming paramedics performing CPR on a seriously ill member of the public as they were driving past. ( so using their phone whilst driving as well as not caring that they took away possibly the last bit of privacy and dignity that patient had in their lives for some social media attention ).
Clearly this motorist had no shame, just like people who dine and dash, shoplift just for the fun of it ( rather than to feed themselves ),not pay child maintenance, park badly during the school run, etc. etc.
I thought that a lot of people who commit these ‘low level’ antisocial crimes are unaffected by fines as they are either too rich or too poor to care and with prisons massively overcrowded, even if we wanted to teach them a quick custodial lesson we couldn’t. Humiliation, however would be likely a very effective deterrent and affect all levels of society equally.
I then decided that if I ruled the world, I’d have monthly family fun days where these people would be dunked for charity in one of those American dunking booths. I’d auction the right to press the button and charge entrance fees to see the criminal in person and viewing fees for live streaming, just like modern day village stocks. The charity funds would pay for more community police officers and to reopen community centres to give our teenagers somewhere to go.
As lots of people would try and use a medical note to get away with the dunking, I’d like to know what you’d do to punish these people. Obviously light hearted only. There is a serious discussion to be had about sentencing reform in this country, especially regarding women, but I’m in no fit state to have it and don’t want to end up giving the Daily Mail something to write about.
TLDR: how would you punish low level anti social behaviour as fining doesn’t seem to work? Light hearted only please.