The standard assumption is that if you do something wrong, you should be punished for your actions. Younger kids will be timed out for breaking the rules. Students in the class are arrested or expelled for talking or fighting with the teacher. We expect people who break the law to be fined or jailed.
In general, there are two main bases for punishing criminals: prevention (significant punishment makes breaking the rules or law less attractive) and public safety (removal of law-breakers from society protects law-abiding ones).
For minor infractions (such as being rude to a co-worker/classmate, spraying graffiti, or knocking over a trash can at a fast food restaurant), public safety will not be enforced. Thus, the fundamental value of punishment it is to prevent someone from doing bad behavior and to prevent someone who has done it once from doing it again.
However, people who have done bad things once will do it again. So punishments can be a deterrent, but they are by no means perfect. And that’s why creative punishments for minor offenses have proliferated, where the offender is given a sentence that causes them to suffer some of the damage they caused. Someone who yells at a co-worker can spend weeks making angry calls to the company’s customer service line. A vandal can clean graffiti in a park for a month. Someone who tips trash at a fast food restaurant can spend a week cleaning that restaurant every day. The idea is that if a person experiences the harm caused by their wrongdoing, it can make them less likely to want to do it again.
Public opinion on creative punishments
What do people think about such punishments? After all, for a creative approach to punishment, it helps if people think it’s a good idea. Judges, school principals, and others who administer punishment are unlikely to be creative if it causes outrage.
This question was explored in a 2026 paper by Timothy Kundro, Salvatore Affinito, and Daniela Rodríguez-Mincey. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In several studies, these authors compared creative punishments in which the offender experienced harm caused by his own actions with conventional punishments (suspension or incarceration) of the same length. The duration of the punishment was determined by a group of participants who assessed the appropriate punishment for various simple violations. The researchers then came up with creative punishments for each violation (similar to what I mentioned above).
Later, in several studies, participants compared these types of punishment. For example, in one study, participants read about a violation, then read about creative and conventional punishment, and were asked which one they thought should be given and which one they would learn more from. Participants chose creative punishment about 60% of the time, and also decided that the offender would learn more from creative punishment than usual. Several studies have replicated this finding and also found that participants found creative punishments less severe than conventional punishments, suggesting that creative punishments can lead to learning without being severe. Another study compared creative punishments cognitive-behavioral therapy and participants in this study also preferred creative punishment to therapy for the offender.
The importance of fitting the punishment to the crime
Another study found that creative punishment should be appropriate for the offense. In this study, the punishments the researchers created for one action were paired with another action (so cleaning a fast food restaurant might be a punishment for yelling at a co-worker). In this case, the punishments were not preferred over the usual punishments and they might not have led to learning.
In an interesting twist on these studies, the researchers conducted another experiment in which participants were asked to imagine themselves breaking the law and asked which punishment they preferred and which one they learned more from. Like the observers in the other studies I’ve described, the people who assumed the role of the criminal preferred the creative punishment and thought they would learn more from it.
These studies suggest that it may be useful to change the way we think about how we punish people who do wrong for minor infractions. Instead of giving them arbitrary punishment (such as suspension from school or going to jail), punishment that causes them to experience some of the damage they have caused can be an effective strategy to help keep people from doing wrong again.
