Weird Punishments Handed Out Instead of Prison

Sometimes, the course of justice takes some unusual forms. It makes sense after all, not every slightly unpleasant deed deserves to be met with a harsh sentence or a hefty fine. In some cases, something a little more creative is much more effective at teaching someone a lesson about right and wrong. With a hilarious mixture ranging from court ordered chicken costumes to the funniest solution to a disagreement, let’s explore some weird punishments handed out instead of prison.

Taste of Your Own Tenement

An unpleasant landlord is never fun to deal with, but it’s even worse when they flat out refuse to carry out essential clean ups and repairs that are entirely their responsibility. But that’s exactly the kind of landlord the tenants of some terribly dilapidated houses in Cleveland, Ohio were dealing with in 2008.

Thankfully, though, they saw him get his comeuppance that year in a delightfully suitable manner after he was charged with several building code violations in his properties. On assessing the shoddy conditions of the homes, which the landlord had refused to repair whenever his tenants asked him to, the judge decided an unconventional punishment was in order.

On top of a $100,000 fine, the judge ordered the landlord to move into one of his rundown properties for no less than 6 months, as a taster of what his tenants had to put up with. Under house arrest, he’d be monitored 24/7 to ensure that beside certain special family events, the only times he’d leave the lousy house would be to fix up his other properties.

What’s more, he was ordered to only spend the income from his tenants on repairs and clean ups, as well as being prohibited from buying more properties without the court’s permission.

Needless to say, after that forcibly uncomfortable 6 months, the landlord would certainly be a little more attentive to the needs of his tenants. After all, there’s no better way to learn what it’s like living rough than to do it in a shoddy property you own!

Paddling Punishment

When flood conditions caused the Grand River in northern Ohio to overflow in 2011, police officials were sent in to patrol its banks to ensure nobody was in danger. When one ranger spotted a young man and woman in their early twenties rafting for fun on the treacherous waters, without any life jackets, he could barely believe his eyes!

Unfortunately, they sailed out of sight before the official could reach them, and as a result, local emergency services spent hours trying to locate the pair downstream. A Coast Guard helicopter was even called to find the couple, who were assumed to be in grave danger.

When the reckless pair were eventually spotted back on solid ground, they denied they’d been on the water, which of course was a lie. Fast forward a month or so, and the couple appeared in court for their reckless act, where a judge laid down an unconventional punishment in lieu of jail time or a fine.

For triggering a time and resource wasting rescue effort, and lying to officials, the pair were given a suitably aquatic punishment. They were ordered to spend a day standing in a kiddie-pool at a day festival in their local town, handing out water safety leaflets while wearing life jackets. It may have been safer than the water activities the couple were used to, but it was considerably more embarrassing, too.

Flute of Shame

In Medieval Europe, it wasn’t just criminals who were punished for wrongdoings. Merely annoying your fellow citizens was sometimes enough to earn you an unpleasant serving of personally customized justice. One such punishment involved being forced to walk around town wearing something known as the Flute of Shame, which was used to publicly humiliate terrible musicians.

That heavy iron flute, which had no musical function was worn around the neck of people whose musicianship or general showmanship brought nothing but irritation to the public who’d experienced it.

With their fingers shackled to the device, the shamed wearer would be taunted by the public, who occasionally even threw rotten vegetables. It was a sure fire method of making sure the wearer didn’t perform publicly again before training a little harder.

How Emperor Gallienus Punished A Greedy Merchant

Our next tale of peculiar punishment takes us all the way back to the height of the Roman empire, during the reign of Emperor Gallienus in the 3rd century A.D. In that period, a popular pastime in Rome was taking a trip down to the Colosseum to see the empire’s greatest gladiators duking it out against men and animals alike.

But not everyone was sent out to fight in the arena by choice. For instance, one jeweler, who’d been found guilty of fraudulently selling glass jewels to the emperor’s wife instead of authentic gemstones, was ordered into the arena as punishment.

He was told beforehand that he’d be fighting a lion, and was understandably terrified as he was walked out to a roaring crowd of thousands. However, when the large animal cage awaiting him was finally opened, instead of a lion, a chicken walked out!

The crowd erupted in laughter, and the emperor had an assistant proclaim that the jeweler “practiced deceit and then had it practiced on him.” In an act of semi-kindness, the jeweler was allowed to return home, as the fright of expecting to meet his doom was surely punishment enough.

Drunkard’s Cloak

Jumping forward in time now, I introduce you to the drunkard’s cloak used in Britain, as well as parts of Europe and the USA between the 17th and 19th centuries. Coming into popularity after the passing of laws making public drunkenness a civil offense in England, that strange punishment consisted of wearing a hollowed out barrel with neck and leg holes.

Someone guilty of public drunkenness would be ordered to walk through the street for hours wearing the ridiculous outfit as a marker of their bad behavior. As if walking while drunk wasn’t hard enough already!

As drunkenness didn’t warrant a particularly harsh or long term punishment, it was hoped that the embarrassment of the act would be enough to encourage drunkards to only drink inside their own homes.

Judge Sentences Teen To Paint Job Using Toothbrush

One amateur graffiti artist from Painesville, Ohio, got caught in the act in 2019. After being found responsible for some sub-par graffiti left on a railroad car, the young man found himself in court, at the mercy of Judge Michael Cicconetti.

Luckily for the young fellow, Cicconetti has something of a reputation for giving first time offenders on minor charges the choice of a creative punishment fitting their crime, rather than a jail sentence.

In that case, Cicconetti noted the young man’s otherwise clean record and offered him an unusual way to pay back for his crime, that also gave him a chance to work on his painting skills: painting the rusty old railings outside the courthouse.

But what would’ve been a short, quick job with a standard paint brush was made considerably trickier by one little catch. The young offender would have to paint the railings using nothing but a toothbrush. While that task was certainly a grueling one, the young man later stated he was much happier to be doing that than serving a jail sentence.

Teen arrested for vandalism sentenced to unique punishment by ABC13 Houston

So what leads Judge Michael Cicconetti to give out those unusual types of punishments? It’s more than just a good sense of humor. Avoiding passing a sentence for something minor like a graffiti charge not only means one less person in America’s already overcrowded prison system; it also means people’s lives aren’t ruined by a single, small mistake.

In exchange for a little bit of public humiliation, people with first time misdemeanors like Mr. Train-Car Banksy get a second chance. And as any self conscious high schooler knows, a little bit of public embarrassment isn’t something you forget in a hurry.

Judge Orders 25-Year-Old Man To Leave Home And Get A Job

The thought of inadvertently raising a spoiled kid is something that sends shivers down the spine of parents everywhere. But one Spanish family’s 25 year old son took bratty entitlement to never before seen heights in 2011, when he took his parents to court after they cut his pocket money.

The man had a law degree, but despite his parent’s repeated requests, refused to get a job. Instead, he preferred to sponge off his parents, and when they refused to meet his demands for an increased allowance, he took them to court.

Clearly, though, the 25 year old hadn’t studied law quite hard enough, because the judge overseeing the case ruled heavily in his parents’ favor. While the 25 year old had launched the case hoping to secure a regular monthly payment of 400 euros from his parents, the judge instead ordered him to "leave home and get a job".

Under the ruling, he was obliged to leave his parents’ house within 30 days. While his parents did agree to pay their son 200 euros a month for the following two years to help him achieve independence, it was hardly the outcome the obnoxious young fellow had expected. But if you’re going to push the limits of your parents’ generosity that much, don’t be surprised when it runs out entirely!

Disgusting Punishments From History

Sometimes, avoiding the long arm of the law is as simple as making sure you do your job correctly. Unfortunately, though, not everyone is capable of that but that is nothing new. People have been terrible at their occupations since jobs were invented, and historically, those failings have been met with a range of socially enforced comeuppances.

Some of the funniest and most fitting of those punishments for incompetence come from England, between the medieval period and the 17th century. For starters, during the reign of Henry VIII, any public toilet cleaner found guilty of dumping filth in the open streets ran the risk of a disgustingly appropriate punishment. They’d be forced to stand knee deep in a barrel of their collected waste, while wearing a paper hat declaring their wrongdoing.

Similarly, fishmongers and butchers caught selling rotten products often found themselves in the stocks, with their pungent expired products secured beneath their noses. With the horrific stench those rotten meats generated, alongside the abuse levied by passers-by, it would hopefully ensure their inferior wares were not a regular occurrence.

Similarly humiliating punishments were handed out to people found guilty of cheating at card gambling games. An occasional punishment for swindlers of that kind saw the guilty individual forced to sit facing backwards on a horse with their clothes covered in playing cards to highlight their particular wrongdoing offence. Onlookers would of course gawk at the strange sight and ridicule the backward riding fool.

A little earlier, in the medieval period, innkeepers found selling poor quality or putrid wine were occasionally tied to a stake in public locations. While there, a group of musicians would gather round, stirring up attention and luring in a crowd.

Once the crowd had gathered, any bottles of alcohol found to be spoiled would be poured over the guilty innkeeper’s head before they were allowed to walk home in foul smelling shame.

It may sound like a standard Friday night at college, but in the medieval times that kind of public humiliation wasn’t taken so lightly! As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly easy getting your customers back after everyone in town saw you being unwilling bathed in your own inferior goods.

Man Gets Creative Sentence For Calling Officer "Pig"

In 2002, an Ohio man got into a verbal confrontation with a police officer that culminated with him calling the officer the age old police related insult: pig. The officer in question wasn’t so pleased about that cold serving of bacon, and arrested the man on a misdemeanor charge.

When the court date arrived, the man’s case was handled by Judge Michael Cicconetti. As you may recall from earlier, Cicconetti is somewhat famous for his creative sentencing, and that case was no different. As the charge wasn’t all that serious, Cicconetti ordered the man to pay his dues in a humorous, yet undoubtedly demeaning manner.

He was tasked to stand in the Town Square of Painesville, Ohio, with a makeshift pig pen, right next to a 350-lb pig. In sight of a much amused public, the message became very clear to both the guilty fellow and the onlookers that a real pig is very different to a police officer.

A brief inhalation of the pig’s rather pungent odor made that fact abundantly clear. Well, that and the sign the man was holding, which indicated the pig, and read “This Is Not a Police Officer.”

Goat Tickle Torture

When the leaders and generals of Ancient Rome needed information from an enemy, uncomfortable imprisonment was far from the only method used to squeeze the info out. There were many methods too horrible to list on an advertiser friendly article, but one method was a little less brutal, albeit still very uncomfortable.

The method I’m talking about involved dipping the target’s feet in salt water, and having a goat come and lick it off. That process would be insanely ticklish, and for those with particularly sensitive feet, unbearable.

Anyone who’s ever been tickled against their will can vouch for how horrible that would’ve felt! That said, it was probably a pretty great way of removing dead, dry skin from your feet. Only problem is, depending on how long the goat was licking for, it’d probably end up removing some of the non-dry skin too.

Deer Poacher Ordered To Watch Bambi In Jail

When a Missouri man was found guilty of illegal deer hunting in a protected area in 2018, the judge handling his case decided a year long jail sentence wasn’t quite enough. That was because, with no respect for the ecosystem of the forest, the man had remorselessly hunted a huge number of those deer purely for their antlers, wastefully throwing the meat away.

With that fact considered, the judge figured out a way to give him a little more empathy for the creatures: forcing him to watch the Disney classic, Bambi, at least once a month for the duration of his sentence.

After so many hours spent watching the film which is equal parts heart warming and heart breaking hopefully, that hunter learned to appreciate the impact of taking a deer’s life a little more. Or, even if not, at the very least, he’d suffer some serious boredom from watching the same film over and over again.

Shrew’s Fiddle

During the medieval period in Germany and Austria, a unique type of punishment emerged, specifically aimed at dealing with people who argued in public. That punishment involved locking the feuding individuals face to face within a wooden yoke, secured around their necks and hands.

The contraption, known as a "double fiddle", was designed to force the adversaries to let all their verbal anger out and resolve their disagreement. Until their argument was resolved, they wouldn’t be let out, and would have to walk around attached to one another until it was! Of course, that punishment was reserved for non-physical conflicts, as the foes would still have easily been within kicking and spitting range.

Regardless, the double fiddle was an effective tool for its purpose, and was adapted from a similar idea, known simply as the "shrew’s fiddle". That was a one person alternative which was used to punish people who voiced angry or provocative opinions in public, usually those who criticized the ruling powers.

Ducking Stool

Between the 16th and early 19th centuries, from Europe to the early American colonies, an unusual practice existed that appeared a little like a modern day fair ground ride. But it wasn’t particularly fun for those who experienced it.

That punishment was known as the "ducking stool", and was used on dishonest tradesmen, disorderly women, and people deemed guilty of being ‘scolds’. The word "scold", in that case, meant troublesome, angry people who insulted others behind their back and regularly caused public arguments with their neighbors without any good reason.

For misdeeds like that, the guilty individual would be fastened to a chair on a pole with a pulley system, with which they’d be repeatedly "ducked" into a pond or river. While that wasn’t usually intended to permanently harm the individual, the water could be very cold, and the whole spectacle was highly embarrassing.

The practice was surprisingly common in that period, to the extent that poems like this one below, were even written warning unruly people of the practice:

If noisy dames should once begin To drive the house with horrid din, Away, you cry, you’ll grace the stool, We’ll teach you how your tongue to rule.

Costumes & Masks As Punishments

An outfit can say a lot about a person and nobody knew that better than those distributing punishments in the Middle Ages. Indeed, in that period, wearable items were regularly used to punish a range of behaviors considered taboo at the time.

For starters, people who did things that were considered offensive or indecent were occasionally made to repent by dressing in nothing but a white sheet and loudly begging for forgiveness in front of their friends and family outside the local church.

That was seen as an act of repentance through embarrassment, and once the local clergymen were satisfied or, perhaps, had finished laughing their butts off, the shamed person was forgiven.

Another medieval way to shame wrongdoers was to parade them through the streets in embarrassing metal masks that were often designed to reflect their offenses. For example, someone found to be gossiping or spreading lies may have been forced to wear masks with long tongues and big ears.

Someone found guilty of being shamefully greedy at others’ expense, meanwhile, might be dressed up in a pig mask.

Women were particularly common targets of that enforced mask wearing, and sometimes had to wear an even less dignified type, known as a "scold’s bridle". It's a metal mask that acted like a muzzle, designed to stop women who’d been caught gossiping or arguing in the streets from talking.

To really send the lesson home, the wearer would typically be led around the town by a male escort using a leash tied to the scold’s bridle. Sometimes, there would even be a bell attached to draw more attention to the utterly humiliating act!

With the sheer embarrassment any of those costume related public shaming's incurred, I’m sure those experiencing them would quickly learn their lesson. After all, being seen in masks like those more than once was probably not on anyone’s bucket list!

Michael Cicconetti's Chicken Suit

While forcing people to dress up in ridiculous costumes as punishment may seem like a thing of the past, one conviction in 2007 proved that’s not entirely the case. The unbelievably whacky incident is another spectacular tale from the archives of Ohio Judge Michael Cicconetti, and the costume in question is a chicken suit. Or, more specifically, three chicken suits.

After three men were caught attempting to solicit something indecent from an undercover police officer in Painesville, Ohio, they found themselves facing Cicconetti’s hammer. In his typical fashion, Ohio’s favorite Judge gave the men two options: 30 days in jail, or an afternoon spent standing in the middle of town in chicken costumes.

Meet the Judge Who Went Viral For His Creative Punishments by ABC News

The men opted for the chicken suits, and were ordered to carry out their unusual punishment while carrying signs that said, "no chicken ranch in Painesville". The signs referred to the slang usage of "chicken ranch" as a place where the types of indecent encounters the men had been seeking were usually found. Those types of places had no home in Painesville, but humorous punishments for minor crimes certainly did, all thanks to Michael Cicconetti.

Judge Sentences Men To Dress As Women

In 2001, two young men from Coshocton, Ohio were involved in a misdemeanor that left them facing a 60 day jail sentence. However, the judge on their case David Hostetler, was concerned about overcrowding at the local County Jail, and decided something a little different might be more suitable.

Perhaps inspired by fellow Ohio judge Mike Cicconetti, Judge Hostetler came up with the idea to subject the men to something that might knock their egos down a peg or two. Considering they’d been arrested for trying to be all macho by throwing glass bottles at private property, the judge decided the best way to remedy that ill informed attempt at masculinity was with something excessively feminine.

Specifically, he ordered the men to walk around downtown Coshocton for an hour wearing dresses, long wigs, and makeup. With the options of lip gloss or jail time, it was an obvious choice, though by no means a particularly joyful one.

Nonetheless, the men carried out their duty, and after some serious heckling in their short time dressed as women, it’s fair to say their lesson was well and truly learnt. Whether or not either of them secretly thought they looked great in lipstick was never revealed. But the mocking laughter of the townsfolk, many of whom had turned out specifically to watch the punishment carried out probably turned them off the idea for a while.

If you were amazed at these weird punishments, you might want to read about the worst punishments in History. Thanks for reading!