“I’ve been a judge for almost 14 years, and the most effective punishments are those that fit the crime,” Judge Cicconetti says. "They teach the offenders a lesson they’ll never forget. My court is a people’s court. Every day, I see 40, 50, 60 people. Every day brings a new adventure. When I first went on the bench, I saw people who would commit one offense. They might be fine for a couple of months, but [then they’d] come back again, and they would repeat and repeat and repeat. There had to be a better way. I had one case with a couple, and they had defaced a statue of baby Jesus at one of the churches. I said, ‘Let’s have them walk from the scene of the crime to the police department, and then make a general apology with a donkey, and a billboard-type sign on it.’”

Other punishments Judge Cicconetti has given out include putting scarlet letter license plates on the cars of repeat drunk drivers, making a man who pled no contest to animal cruelty visit elementary schools as Mr. Safety Pup, and making young men who threw rocks off an overpass hold up signs that told the public what they did.

“Sending young people to jail oftentimes has a reverse effect,” Judge Cicconetti says. “It becomes a status symbol, but let that same young impressionable individual be humiliated a little bit, boy, his friends are not going to be high-fiving him. Nothing in this world is 100 percent, but with the success rate that we’ve had, it’s amazing. It’s a lesson, and we hope that it’s a life-long lesson.