> … It’s a tantalizing idea: If an angry passenger had to work a bumpy regional flight from Birmingham to Knoxville, would they stop being so mean to their flight attendants? Rehabilitation and accountability have long been goals of criminal-justice reformers seeking alternatives to incarceration,
> … The jury remains out on creative sentences and how effective they can be.
Looking at it through the lens of punishment is itself a kind of controversial view. I don’t have a horse in this race, but I’m glad people are trying out other ways of reducing bad behavior other than the ones we already know are just barely effective.
Personally I'm not a fan of that dichotomy. In my world view, government's reason d'etre is to protect the rights of all individuals within its jurisdiction. That means that the penal system, by extension, serves the same purpose. Within that framework, "punishment" and "rehabilitation" are both non-considerations. It's not really up to the state to be the daddy figure to make a criminal feel bad for doing a naughty, nor is it up the mommy figure to try and shape and mold the criminal into a productive member of society. It's up to the state to remove threats to life, liberty and property.
That doesn't mean that a first-offender should get a life sentence or anything. Of course not. And I'm not even necessarily opposed to the idea of the "forced empathy" remedy since I do think that the end-goal here aligns: which is to prevent this from happening again and given the judge's experiences with sending offenders to prison and her stated reason for offering this remedy, it might work. But do I care if this woman wants to improve herself? Not really. I'm far more concerned with her victim and preventing more.
I'm just offering my thoughts because I think it's an interesting discussion about the role of the penal system and appropriate remedies.
Someone working the counter at a fast food place already knows their job sucks and the worker in the article believed that working a job like hers was even harder [than jail].