In 17th century New Amsterdam a man named Mesaack Maartens was sentenced to stand in the pillory for an entire day with rotten cabbages balanced on his head, after being accused of stealing cabbages from a fellow carpenter. One can imagine the scene this created, as our colonial forebears stopped and laughed, some perhaps pelting Maartens with a rotten vegetable of their own as he remained helplessly trapped by the heavy wooden bonds, face growing red with humiliation as he prayed for the day to end. But eventually the day did end, and Maartens was allowed to return home, wash the decomposed food from his body, and be done with it.

The girl who sat two rows ahead of me in eighth grade health class, the quiet one with the kinky ponytail and crossed eyes, was not so lucky. Recently arrested for sexual contact with an inmate, her name and picture have been blasted onto the internet for all to see with a few quick keystrokes. It took me all of thirty seconds to find out that she was arrested at 4:40 a.m., that she was crying when it happened, and that she will be charged with six felonies. What was I doing on such a website in the first place? you may ask, to which I don’t have a good response. I go there to look. I am a modern day vegetable—tosser.

Thestumponline.com, and its stiffer, less sexy cousin adasheriff.org, are updated with the daily arrest records from my hometown of Boise, Idaho, complete with the time of the arrest, the full name and age of the suspect, the crime(s) charged and their severity, and, most importantly, a picture. The young girls with DUIs appear trainwrecked, their eyes puffy and red, while the men arrested for possession of a controlled synthetic substance—meth—keep a hollow, defiant grin on their face. A few will look worked over in the picture, blood still dripping from the wounds on their foreheads, the last charge against them listed as “resisting arrest”.

This isn’t a phenomenon localized just to Boise, a city of 200,000 with crime rates well below the national average in most categories. A simple Google search turned up dozens of similar sites throughout the country, in cities as widespread as Sarasota, Holyoke, and Menlo Park. Though they differ in their structure and thoroughness (one even listed the suspect’s home address and employer), each fulfill the same purpose, which, ostensibly, is to provide citizens with the current information needed to identify criminals and protect our society in whatever fashion necessary. The names and photographs of criminals are public domain, and it’s important to know who your neighbors, employees, and babysitters might really be.

It’s not a need for safety, though, that keeps me checking on a near—daily basis, searching with a squirmy, guilty feeling for an old classmate, thinking of the best caption to include with the picture I’ll email to all my friends from high school. Are we really protecting anyone? Or are we demonizing those who have made mistakes, who are quietly paying their debt to society, and who may in fact be innocent?

The website only posts arrests, not convictions. Echoing “Cops,” the disclaimer points out that all suspects are innocent until proven guilty. Some probably plea bargain the charges away, some may be found not guilty after a lengthy trial, and maybe a few are completely innocent all along. Yet the pictures remain up indefinitely, a digital ball and chain broadcast to the entire world. Scattered in thestumponline’s mail postings, amongst the angry or desperate pleas for pictures to be removed and for the sites’ creators to die of cancer, are a few emails from European visitors, flabbergasted that such a site exists in America.

“Don't you think this pillory—method is mediaevel [sic] and a disgrace to the US of A,” a German asks. “You should be in jail yourself,” says one Belgian visitor. “Nazi [sic] did the same to their opponents.”

Public humiliation is not a new method of punishment, nor is it one distinctive to a specific country or culture. Pillories, stocks, scarlet A’s: they all served to embarrass a criminal in the hopes of preventing further crimes. Today, however, cruel and unusual punishment has been ruled unconstitutional, and incarceration has replaced public humiliation as the most common sentence (though not without exception: in 2004 the 9th District Court of Appeals upheld a San Francisco judge’s ruling that a convicted mail thief had to stand outside a post office with a sign that read “I stole mail”). But perhaps in today’s anonymous and shameless society, public humiliation is the only fair weapon we have to punish those who would otherwise slide between the cracks, placing the criminals, naked (figuratively, in America at least) but for their crimes, squarely in front of an unblinking public eye that demands retribution.

Or perhaps, equally as likely, public humiliation serves no other purpose than to satisfy that public’s voyeuristic impulse.

Some days the arrest roster reads like roll call in my old homeroom. There are the obvious ones: a friend of mine, the one who used to purposely lean into pitches during little league games so he could try to incite a brawl, was arrested for fighting. The nightmarishly tall she—bully who stalked the junior high playground was arrested for battery. The lanky kid who brought a pack of Old Gold cigarettes to school in fifth grade—proudly explaining that Old Gold was code for O.G., his pride turning to frustration when we didn’t understand what “Original Gangster” meant—was arrested for frequenting. Frequenting what, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s safe to assume it wasn’t the library.

There are the shocking ones: the president of my high school’s Fellowship of Christian Youth, the girl who scolded us for saying “Shutup,” was arrested for petty theft, and again later for full—blown burglary, gazing out from her picture with the agitated bug—eyes normally reserved for the drug—torn.

There are the tragic: my football team’s waterboy, the archetype of the position down to the doughy grin and clumsy, consonant—filled last name, was sentenced to four years for burglary. His picture was startling. He beamed arrogantly, exuding a confidence that I had never before seen in him. Maybe this was his response to years of being yelled at to fill up our water bottles and clean up our sweaty towels. His picture showed up again a few months later, some kind of technical prison transfer, this time sporting a bright orange jumpsuit and a shaved head. His cocky smirk was gone now, replaced by the deadened grimace I imagine is mandatory in prison.

There’s the disturbing: the waterboy, in a chilling coincidence, spent a good deal of practice time talking to a quiet, unassuming defensive end who was content simply to wear the uniform and cheer from the sideline as he downed cup after cup of Gatorade. This end, my teammate, was recently arrested for statutory rape.

And then there’s the ones that rip you off your high and mighty throne, that make you laugh to cover up the uneasiness swelling in your gut, that make you think that maybe, just maybe, this whole thing isn’t right: my best friend, the same one that’s held that position since kindergarten, was involved in an altercation outside of a bar late one evening. As those things tend to do, it got out of hand, and the night ended with him in jail, charged with both fighting and assault & battery on a police officer. After hearing the facts of the case, which explained how my friend was more involved with breaking up the fight than starting it, the prosecuting attorney dropped the assault charge and changed fighting to disturbing the peace. He spent his night in jail, paid a fine, and put it behind him.

That is, until another buddy of ours dug up the records on thestumponline (the arrest occurred in 2003) and sent out an email to our group of friends, using the same joking tone we use whenever we find someone we know. “Do you know this felon?” the email asks, with a link to my friend’s picture. Despite the fact that he was guilty of neither, the charges listed on the website are, as they will forever be, “assault & battery on a police officer” and “fighting.”

This friend, with a faint nod toward the ironic, is now in law school. He feels very strongly that sites such as thestumponline are illegal and unconstitutional, and though he was fine with being posted on the Ada County Sheriff’s website for a week as part of his punishment, he worries that the permanent display at thestumponline could hurt his professional life and feels that the independent sites should be regulated. For the rest of his life, anyone who enters his name into a search engine can find the site and will think, erroneously, that he beat up a cop.

But if most of thestumponline’s other visitors are like me, they don’t bother to check the outcome of the suspect’s trials. They smother quivers of guilt as they race to be the first to send a picture out to their friends, giving the email a title like “Correctional Facility Makeover!” or “Your old girlfriend?” They tell themselves that it’s just a harmless joke, that a sick sense of arrogance has nothing to do with it, and that the people who get arrested bring it upon themselves anyway.

And, if they’re like me, they have yet to completely convince themselves of all this. Tomatoes are rotting in my kitchen at this very moment.

We’re trapped in a curtain-less society, and I can’t stop myself from peering in. I don’t know if it’s right. I don’t know if it’s wrong. I keep looking.