What are some unusual punishments?

When my kids were young, if they misbehaved in the car, I would put a cassette tape of Yoko Ono singing on.
After a couple times, all I had to do is say Yoko Ono, and they would chime “We’ll be good!”

Choice selection of them if you visit Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

My high school had a minimum number of hours of community service required to graduate. When I got caught engaging in some shenanigans, I had extra hours tacked on.

There was a judge in NE Ohio that used to offer odd punishments. Judge Michael Cicconetti of Painesville Oh used to give offenders a choice on their punishment. Example: an 18 year old skipped out on paying a cab driver for a 30 mile cab ride. The punishments she was offered was the standard 30 days in jail or to walk 30 miles. Another woman left her dog in what amounted to a hoarder house for a week by itself. The dog was put up for adoption, but the woman was given the choice of 90 days in jail or spending 8 hours at a landfill picking up trash. A drunk driver ran a stop sign and injured a husband and wife. The normal penalty was 5 days in jail, but he offered her a chance to do a 3 day alcohol treatment course and she had to view dead bodies of accident victims. A guy that was arrested for disturbing the peace by cussing at cops and calling them pigs was offered an option of standing for 2 hours in with real pigs while holding a sign that read “These are not police officers”.

He usually does this sort of thing only for first time offenders and generally not for violent crimes. His recidivism rate for these cases is very low. The defendants are always given a choice between the standard punishment or his creative punishment. He doesn’t usually see the offenders in his courtroom ever again.

When you whip your children with a switch from a willow tree, you make the child go out and cut the switch! And if the parent doesn’t like the switch selected, the child gets a harsher whipping!!
(I heard of this from a neighbor when I was a child so, thankfully, it never happened to me. I always got whipped with my father’s belt.)

When my dad was mad at me, he would threaten to not drive me to school.

Despite this stellar parenting, I actually did well in school.

It NEVER happened to me, but I’ve heard of parents who sprinkle grains of rice on the floor & force the offending child to kneel on the rice for hours on end. I’ve been told that it is VERY uncomfortable & can actually cut through the skin. Another was making a naughty child place their nose in the corner of the wall & stand there for hours without being allowed to let their nose off the wall. If the nose wasn’t touching, the child had to start over on the punishment time. It’s hard to shift feet without your nose moving just a little bit.

@seawulf575 I like the way that judge operates. He’s actually thinking rather than blindly handing out sentences by rote. I like ones who think outside the box.

I don’t know, but the stupid bastards who make children kneel painfully deserve their own special kind of punishment.

I had two teachers who did that, who were plausibly psychopaths and sadists. Reading that this is some sort of standard practice in some parts of the world has raised my hackles.

I do recall being locked in the cloak room for doing something heinous.
I went to Catholic Grade school that was filled with Felician Sisters. I can’t even begin to tell you.