I was reading a bit about punishment in the 1800s and learned about public shaming.
Just wondering what motivated the movement from public shaming to strictly being jailed.
Jon Ronson recently published a really good book on the subject of public shaming called 'So You've Been Publicy Shamed' where he talks about modern shaming but also the history of it. He says that basically people decided it was too harsh, and that it would turn petty offenders into actual criminals by making them resent society or by dehumanising them. Interestingly public shaming was still a viable punishment in Delaware until the mid 1900s.
This is a great question, but one that's tremendously difficult to succinctly answer, as it's subsumed under a whole panoply of scholarship in criminological history. (I’m sorry in advance for the confused structure of this post, but I typed a full response before the page accidentally refreshed, so I've had to rewrite this again.)
As a brief bibliographical aside, see Pieter Spierenburg's now-classic The Spectacle of Suffering for an overview on spectacular punishment. Although a little dated, it holds its place firm as a go-to in this historical field of public punishment in early modern to modern Europe, and deals with the decline in capital and other visual corporeal punishments, drawing on Foucault's seminal Discipline and Punish -- which charted the 18th- to 19th-century transition from the physical infliction of pain upon the criminal's body to judicial reforms increasingly preoccupied with rehabilitation via incarceration -- and Elias' state-centred Civilizing Process, with a few revisions. (His introduction has a good summary and criticisms on these two 'giants' of the topic.) On the pillory itself, there are too many to list, and it depends what your geographical interests are: John Beattie’s Crime and the Courts in England (1985) is frequently quoted for his descriptions of the pillory as the ‘paradigm’ of the era’s penal practice. A lot of other publications are journal articles behind paywalls, but if you do have access, see as just two examples McGowen, ‘From Pillory to Gallows: The Punishment of Forgery’ (1999) or Greene, ‘Public Secrets: Sodomy and the Pillory in the 18th Century’ (2003). (Those are completely arbitrary suggestions, by the way; there are many others, needless to say.)
To return to public penalties in general, there have been many possible answers proposed by historians and criminologists alike as to the causes of this growing antipathy to spectacular punishment. Squeamishness is one; others include the mounting control of the state, legal reformers' awareness of deterrence's failings, growing concerns for bodily integrity, and so forth. Some of these are problematic in their own respects. Shifts in elite sensibilities were not always concomitant with those of the lower classes when measured against continued popular attendance at executions during the 18th century, for instance. Others, like Foucault's narrative, have been found wanting; while discourses of pain and the body are important, for one, their dominance as causal factors might be reduced in favour of the sensibilities argument, since, as many have pointed out, hiding punishment did not necessitate its abolition. The death penalty is a notorious example of that, and I don't just mean in terms of the USA. (France's last guillotining was in 1977, for example.)
It becomes clear, then, that shame sanctions come under many similar if not always identical elements. But cultural aspects are also crucial: Ruth Benedict's shame cultures like Confucian-enshrouded China, as one example, or else Japan, might see these punishments extended simply because they hold more weight there than elsewhere -- although I hasten to add that I am not an expert on those societies, and they likely have substantially diverged in the cultural understandings of penalties, vis-à-vis European societies, over the past few centuries. And I've already mentioned how the focus on physically punishing the body, as opposed to other aspects of the penal system, has significantly altered over the years. In other words, the pillory was an interactive penalty: it allowed and indeed encouraged crowd participation more than most spectacular punishments. Yet it has to be read as part of a larger overarching narrative of punitive reform, whether interpreted through Foucault or otherwise, a process in which forms of punishment mutated as much as juridical aims did.
Lest we think the punitive value of shaming rituals has decreased, finally, it would be wise to remind of how much they've survived. As copious publications in law and criminological reviews point out, they persist today: see James Whitman on shame sanctions, notably (a free access version is available at http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1651&context=fss_papers), while media-shaming in the digital age is rampant, too, as others haven’t hesitated to note (http://theconversation.com/media-as-pillory-the-power-to-name-and-shame-in-digital-times-15914). To that end, you might also be interested in more philosophical accounts of shame, e.g. Velleman’s ‘Genesis of Shame’ in Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2001 (public access at http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/72979/j.1088-4963.2001.00027.x.pdf?sequence).
This is all rather disorganised, for which I apologise again, but hopefully it gives you a good idea of the general shift (to recap, around the mid 18th-beginning of the 19th centuries) in at least elite attitudes towards public punishment, as explained in various ways by different theorists; that shame is still very prevalent today as a method of punishment, and that its presentation has simply moved away from the corporeally-centred artefacts of the pillory and gallows of the past. Not that physicality is ever absent from our modern world: the Nazis frequently employed humiliation both in public and in concentration camps, including parading Jews through the streets with abusive signs hung from the necks, continuing a tradition prevalent almost everywhere in the world. And you don’t even have to look into such a radical example of 20th-century persecution to find instances of public shaming -- last year alone, in fact, Ukrainian soldiers were publically shamed by pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk via processions in front of mocking crowds (http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/08/ukraine-rebels-parade-captured-soldiers-2014824192242339167.html).
During the 18th and 19th centuries, corporal punishment and other shame-based punishments came under increasing fire (in the United States, at least) for their perceived incompatibility with democratic principles. The American Revolution spurred criticism, for example, that these punishments reinforced social hierarchies antithetical to a democracy of free and equal citizens. English law, for example, reserved flogging for commoners—proper gentlemen were spared such punishments. Inflicting pain "was the way that sovereigns disciplined their subjects, husbands their waves, parents their children, and masters their servants or slaves."
These perceptions were strengthened during and following the Civil War, especially as an anti-slavery perspective of the conflict began to coalesce. In the public's eye, corporal punishment became inextricably entangled with the institution of slavery—thereby recalling a hierarchy deeply incompatible with the Reconstruction Constitution. As Robert G. Ingersoll, the attorney general of Illinois during Reconstruction, stated:
[T]he fact is that we, citizens of the Republic, feel that certain domestic brutalities are the children of monarchies and despotisms; that they were produced by superstition, ignorance, and savagery; and that they are not in accord with the free and superb spirit that founded and preserves the Great Republic.
At the same time, the public came to view incarceration as a better way to condemn offenders within the framework of individual liberty. Depriving citizens of their liberty was "naturally suited to an egalitarian social order; imprisonment expressed what citizens of a republic shared—their liberty—rather than what set the punisher and the punished apart."
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