Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place.
It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.
This week, The Empathy Punishment A woman hurled a burrito bowl at a Chipotle employee. Then a judge made her walk in the victim’s shoes is a fascinating look at a viral story and its aftermath from different perspectives. I’ve never worked in fast food but I have worked in a busy pub, and it is thankless and exhausting. Add in customers who will never be happy, whatever you do for them, and you deserve to be earning £100 an hour. But you’re not. Then a woman throws a burrito bowl in your face. But when she gets sentenced for it, she’s offered the chance to reduce her prison sentence if she works in fast food for two months to see if she can learn empathy.
Reeves Wiedeman explains:
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, and American judges have a considerable amount of sentencing discretion, especially in misdemeanor cases like Hayne’s. The Cleveland metropolitan area, as it happens, has been a locus of creative sentencing. Judge Michael Cicconetti, who served as a judge for 25 years in a different Cleveland suburb, became known for his unusual sentences: making a woman who abandoned a litter of cats in two local parks spend a night in the woods herself, or, in another fast-food case, making a customer who used pepper spray on a Burger King employee submit to being pepper-sprayed herself. The primary limitation on a judge’s ability to get creative is the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.
But did a sentence to invoke empathy work? Find out here.
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