5 Bonkers Uses of Humiliation to Fight Crime

5 Colombia Dispatches Mimes to Shame Traffic Violators

Unless you actually are one, chances are you find mimes annoying as shit. Any actual artistic merit they once had is long gone, and all that's left is a shell of a caricature, a failed clown without the verbal skills required to excitedly ask kids if they're ready for a Bozo-riffic good time.

Ooooorrrr ... maybe not.

So it would stand to reason that being scolded by such an annoying, useless creature would be a good way to ensure that you stopped doing whatever caused the scolding. That's what the mayor of Bogota, Colombia was anticipating, anyway. Back in 1998, the city was suffering through a jaywalking epidemic. Unlike most places, where they pretend to care about jaywalking laws but never enforce them because otherwise everybody on the planet would be drowning in tickets, Bogota actually wanted to quell the problem. And they did so by publicly mocking and humiliating offenders via the power of mime.

When a pedestrian would jaywalk or commit some similar offense, a mime would appear and hold up a sign that said, "INCORRECTO," which, despite being an actual word, sounds exactly like a fake Spanish sound that people use when breaking out their award-winning Speedy Gonzales impression.

That bus driver is staring down more temptation than any man in history.

But a big pink sign wasn't enough; the mime would then go into full Mime Mode, mocking the jaywalkers by walking behind them and mirroring their movements, like the world's most punchable shadow. And as you might have already assumed, this asinine plan totally ... succeeded? Yes, it actually worked, without one mime so much as getting slapped in the dick. Turns out, traffic tickets mean nothing to the average jaywalker, since they're almost never large enough to matter. But everyone hates being humiliated, and so people started going to great lengths to cross the street correctly, lest they get laughed at by somebody whose basic job description does not allow for actual laughing.

It was so successful, in fact, that the initial platoon of 20 mimes was soon backed up by 400 more, meaning 420 goddamned mimes were running around Bogota, laughing at people who dared walk outside the lines. Thanks to them, traffic fatalities quickly dropped by half, only picking back up once the mayor left office and the mime program was discontinued. This proves that most cities, when given the choice of risking everyone getting hit by buses, or having their city overrun by one of the least popular forms of entertainment around, will take their chances with the bus, thank you very much.

And steamrollers.

4 Hello Kitty Armbands for Corrupt Police

Bangkok, Thailand, had an issue with police officers who played by their own rules. And by that, we mean littering, mouthing off to superiors, being dicks to random citizens, and just generally being assholes. None of these offenses was egregious enough for an actual arrest, and firing the officers wouldn't have worked, since then Bangkok would have had, like, three cops left. And that's not nearly enough to quell the sea of drunk American tourists who keep walking up to random Thai girls and asking them if they secretly have dicks "like in the movies."

The big bosses clearly had to do something about this, and so they settled on public shaming, via shit like plaid armbands, signifying that the cop had done wrong. Problem was, many of these guys weren't all that capable of shame. The bands were marking a crime that they committed, and they were proud of it, turning the mark into a badge of honor. So the bosses needed to find a way to find something so shameful there was no way the cop could strut around proud of his accomplishments. That something was a sugary-sweet cartoon marketed toward little girls.

Ever had your ass kicked by a man in a Hello Kitty armband? Keep laughing.

Yes, the Bangkok police forced their errant officers to wear special armbands featuring the likeness of Hello Kitty, the mouthless cartoon cat that survives on a diet of love, hearts, and pink everything. She became part of the official Thai police fuckup uniform.

For a while, anyway; the armbands actually didn't last very long. As a tool of humiliation, they must have worked pretty well, since officers forced to wear them were absolutely furious. They hated it so much that they actually caused a rebellion, forcing the higher-ups to cancel the program. We can find no flaw in that logic whatsoever.

"Officer, this is the fourth time you've pulled me over this week for a mandatory ass-kicking."

3 Judge Forced to Mail 500 Pictures of Herself in Handcuffs

Joan Orie Melvin used to be a judge in Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, winning election in 2009 -- with a little help. See, Melvin's sister Jane was a state senator, and her office chipped in, money-wise and rig-the-polls-wise. In case you're wondering, that's nothing close to legal. Jane and Joan were arrested and charged with using office resources for Joan's campaign.

Now, it's always awkward when judges face trial themselves. What is the not-in-trouble judge supposed to do when deciding the fate of a former colleague? Should he give a little leeway, in the name of professional courtesy? Or should he throw not just the book, but the entire library at them, since the defendant disgraced their profession and all?

"You remember most of these people, don't you? It's like a family reunion!"

Well, Lester Nauhaus, the judge who decided the case of ex-judge Melvin did neither; he did not let her off scot-free, nor did he throw her into federal prison for 50 years. After Joan was found guilty, she was sentenced to house arrest and probation. Considering that punishment can be summarized as "sit at home and don't kill nobody," she seemingly got off light. Except no, she did not. Judge Nauhaus decided that Jane needed to really atone for her crimes, to the people hurt most by all this -- her colleagues on the bench. Therefore, he ordered Jane to handwrite individual apologies to every judge in Pennsylvania. All 500 of them.

That in itself would be pretty bad, especially once carpal tunnel kicked in. But Nauhaus wasn't done. Melvin was forced to write said apologies on a photo of herself, wearing handcuffs and looking rather mopey and defeated.

"Good, now put on this mascara so we can really see those tears."

Also, Melvin was forced to mail, and pay the postage on, all 500 photos by herself. This might have been the worst punishment of all. Not the spending-hundreds-of-dollars part, but rather the using-the-postal-service part. Did she even remember how? We know if we had to use the mailbox for anything like this, we'd need at least a two-week refresher course on how you don't use dozens of stamps to spell out your email address. Unless that is what you do? We're not sure.

2 The North Korean Football Team Was Publicly Shamed for Hours on End

Citizens of North Korea do not lead easy lives, if for no other reason than their soccer team sucks. The North Korean team has made it to the World Cup exactly two times: 1966, when they actually made the Final 8, and 2010, when they, well, did not. In their three Group Round games, the North Koreans went 0-3 and were outscored 12-1.

Upon return to their home country, no parade was waiting for the team. For one thing, nonmilitary parades are almost certainly illegal there, but also the team was a disgrace. The government was less-than-pleased with this egregious affront to the Little Oppressive Dictatorship That Could, and so they responded the only way they knew how: hours upon hours of finger-wagging and public shaming.

Some family members may have been involved.

On July 2, a week after losing 3-0 to Ivory Coast, the team was put on stage at the People's Palace of Culture, in front of more than 400 spectators, for what the government called a "grand debate." Of course, it was as much a debate as when a mother "debates" her kid on whether or not they should take out the garbage. Pak Myong Chol, the country's Minister Of Sports, kicked off the festivities by giving the entire team an hours-long tongue-lashing, accusing them of failing in their "ideological struggle" against the world. They were accused of betraying their country and committing treason against the country's honorable heir, Kim Jong-Un.

Sports commentators spoke next, and since their job is to take giant steaming pisses all over athletes anyway, doing so one more time must've been a cakewalk. But that wasn't all; other athletes, from other teams that presumably didn't suck as badly as the soccer guys did, were given the opportunity to describe just how badly the team performed. And by "opportunity," the government almost certainly meant "do it or we'll force you to shoot your own children."

"And don't give us puppy dog eyes, either. You deserve this."

Then, after getting verbally beaten up time and again in front of hundreds, the players themselves were made to speak. They weren't allowed to defend themselves or anything, no. They were instead forced to criticize their coach, Kim Jong-Hun, repeatedly telling him off over just how awful of a coach he was. It was like the end of a comedy roast where the guest of honor gets to roast everybody in retaliation, only slightly less funny.

All in all, the public shaming lasted six hours. And not once did anybody address the real problem: Kim Jong-Hun had received coaching tips and tricks directly from Kim Jong-Il during games, through an invisible cell phone that Dear Leader had invented all by himself. Clearly, Jong-Il should have spent less time tinkering with ghost phones and hamburgers, and more time working on the team's striking strategy.

"I invented kicking."

1 A Father Abusing His Child Was Forced to Live in a Doghouse

Obviously, child abuse is no laughing matter. But apparently, punishing a child abuser is very much one, at least in one judge's courtroom.

First, the backstory. In 2001, after receiving complaints from neighbors, child services descended on a home in Vidor, Texas. There, they found 11-year-old Zachary Wiegers, filthy and covered in mosquito bites. Zach's stepfather, Curtis Robin, soon found himself in court facing several accusations of child abuse, namely that he had caned Zach with a car antenna, forced him to chop wood, and made him sleep in a doghouse. And not some fancy mansion-esque doghouse, like the kind rich people give their pooch to remind poor people just how poor they truly are. Nope, just a regular old doghouse that actual dogs could barely fit into, never mind a human being.

Look how sad they are. And they're dogs.

Robin admitted to the antenna and wood-chopping charges, claiming the first was simply spanking, and the second was a fucking chore, like the one many parents assign their kids. It was the third charge -- the doghouse one -- that he denied. However, he almost immediately accepted a plea deal from prosecutors, in order to avoid massive jail time, so it couldn't have been that vehement a denial.

The judge, realizing the potential for pure comedy via massive humiliation, offered Robin his choice of sentencing. He could either spend 30 days in jail, or 30 nights sleeping outside in a doghouse. Robin loudly protested the idea by saying, "If you want a punishment that fits the crime, then the D.A. needs to come over here and spank me because that's all I did to Zachary." Ultimately however, he chose the doghouse, both because he didn't want to lose his job, and because the D.A. wouldn't take him up on his offer to spank him oh-so-hard.

With a doghouse.

So it came to pass that, for four weeks in 2003, a grown-ass man slept in a 2-by-3 plastic doghouse in front of his house. He couldn't fit inside it, and it was mosquito season, so even with netting around him, the noise kept him awake most nights. Pedestrians would pass by, laugh at him, and throw bottles. And in case you think he could have just left the doghouse and slept under the stars every night, think again. The courts had officers patrol his yard every night, to make sure he was uncomfortably slumming it inside his new home.

But hey, at least the state provided the doghouse, so that Robin's actual dog wouldn't be homeless during this time. They're not monsters, after all.

"We left your food in a bowl around the side. Enjoy."

Menezes broke down and set up a Twitter page. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Related Reading: For some crime-fighting tactics that didn't pan out, click this link right here. You'll learn that harsh interrogations actually make innocent people confess. And did you know drug dogs are inaccurate and racist? It's sad but true. If you want to end your reading with some punishments too crazy for human law, read about the worst things superheroes have done to villains.