What punishment should be given to taggers, the persons who sneak around and spray paint personal and public property? If the graffiti is not removed immediately, it attracts yet more taggers to practice their malicious mischief.
Should the taggers be required to perform community service repairing the damage left by taggers? Should the parents be punished and involved in the reparations as well?
The Pillory.
. They should be made to spray paint all of their own belongings, and those of parents if there’s stuff like a dozen paint cans inside the house.
. They should be required to paint out any graffiti on a given bridge or sound barrier for a year, with time added if something lasts over a day.
. They should be relocated to another town where they don’t have any pals. Unless they’re loners, in which case they should go directly tojail, since that’s where they’ll be soon enough.
<JDT> circumcision </JDT>
‘Round these parts (Minneapolis) there’s a lot of folks who consider these cusses to be legitimate artists (apparently, graffiti is seen as the visual counterpart to hip-hop). So for every business owner and city councilperson who decries wanton vandalism, theres another clove-smoking, bespectacled espresso-drinker who rises to the forefront to defend the taggers’ “right” to “express themselves,” their arguments wafting into the public air like so many richly fricative farts.
That in mind my idea for punishment would be to open the graffitied walls to art-criticism. Let a local critic inspect the work then write some damning, devastating piece in the local rag. Get a good enough writer and the panned taggers might never pick up another spray can again.
Tagging is actually getting more popular around my parts, which is really sad. I was at the bank yesterday and some hooligan had “tagged” most of drive-through. Makes me mad, really. I think the punishment around here is a hefty fine (they make the parents pay it if the transgressor is under 18) and community service. Personally, I think they should cut the little buggers’ hands off. No mercy, teach by example and all that. But that’s just because I’ve had property of family tagged before, and it’s a real pain to get rid of (and costly!).
Well, gosh, at the very least, they ought to scrub it off.
Community service, consisting of putting fresh coats of paint on public buildings, hospitals, libraries and schools that are in need of new paint. (optional – have them watch as another tagger attacks a wall that they spent 10 hours painting).
Send them to art classes.
In Delphica’s Own Private Universe:
Take every possession of theirs – clothing, cars, games, toothbrush – and write “Have a nice day, xoxo Delphica!!!” using pink letters with all the i’s dotted with little hearts and flowers. See how they like to have their personal possessions marked with someone else’s name.
Arm them with spray paint cans that have been carefully doctored so that when they are pointed toward a wall, the paint sprays out in the opposite direction.
Felony, 10 years+ in Maximum Security prison.
Take all possessions, let victims take what they like, burn the rest.
Amputation of Index Finger.
As these guys like showing off their own “tags” so much, I’d suggest an appropriate punishment would be their tag being tatooed on a visible part of their body.
That’s some D@mn fine writing there Torgo, remind me to have you write my biography.
This more closely approaches my sentiments.
Personally, first offense taggers should be sentenced to white washing out the tags of their gang rivals at the other end of town. In gang circles this is an act punishable by death.
Multiple offense taggers should look at hard time in jail combined with full restitution to the victims with treble damages. This is not a minor crime. People go through a lot of misery removing tags and neighborhoods are blighted by this entirely avoidable vandalism.
Special attention should be paid to those who utilize carbide or diamond scribes in order to “etch” their tags into surfaces. Sadly, penalties for the destruction of property are less than those for grafitti so this part of the law seems to lack teeth. Again, treble damages should be paid to the owners of said damaged property and multiple offenders should look at hard time.
Finally, if I’m going to rail against tagging I had better posit some sort of solution. One that I originated and have supported for years is the creation of “Grafitti Parks.” There would be several large walls where the more artistically inclined could ply their craft. The parks would be fenced off to avoid rivals from “defacing” the artwork that is put up. After a week, if you wish to paint something new, you get permission to blank out a wall whose time limit has expired and thusly earn the right to paint a new piece of work. The art supplies would be kept in a secure location on or off site and would be furnished through commercial donations and grants by manufacturers of said products.
The results would be photographed, there would be judgings and art scholarships could be awarded for those who show the most promise. In order to participate, individuals would have to sign agreements not to perpetrate grafitti vandalism at risk of losing their right to scholastic awards and publication of their work in the compendium.
If we could supply a constructive outlet for the true artists among the droves of thugs that ply this trade, there might be more than a few inner city youth who could punch their own ticket out of an urban hell. I would cheerfully devote some of my tax dollars for this sort of effort.
For minors and first time taggers, I think that a good punishment would be involving them in a different kind of painting: They should have to work a certain ammount of hours with the people who do the work of removing or painting over grafitti.
For repeated taggers: Increasing fines, and possible prison time, dependent on the monetary value of damage done.
Side note: It’s too bad there’s no way to determine the importance of different properties. It seems as if there is some difference between the unkempt cement wall in back of the tennis courts behind the pricker bushes in the corner of the park that is out of direct view, and the nicely maintained storefront. But I’m not gonna deny that property is property, and no matter where someone tags, likelyhood is that whoever owns it is going to be be mad. It would be nice if people could tag in places that were still privately owned, but the owner didn’t care about it. Then the tagger could get their enjoyment out of the illegality of what they were doing, and the owner wouldn’t be troubled. But that would ruin the principle of disallowing grafitti as a whole, so why bother to think about it? And the same thing applies to the matter of how big the tag is. Be it fat black marker or fifty can piece, it still falls under jurisdiction.
first we have to decide a suitable punishment for whoever is responsible for building the countless ugly buildings and structures that make up any modern city. then, whatever punishment you decide upon for taggers should be applied with tenfold severity to owners of billboards and any other form of public advertisement.
a good start would be to execute anybody who was thinking i should have said “whomever.”
i never saw graffiti that didn’t make the city more beautiful and interesting when compared to a billboard or the cookie-cutter design of a franchise store or restaurant. taggers deserve subsidies and scholarships!
-fh
Tagging is an excercise in arrogance. Some person broke into Mrs. Spritle’s car last year and stole her cell phone. The police filed a report and basically said, “It’s a cell phone. Kids steal them, trade them for drugs and when the service is cut off (usu. w/in 48 hrs) they smash them and throw them away. If we find it, we’ll let you know.”
HA!! Joke’s on you! Dude decided to scratch his tag on the bumber of my other car (rubber, buffs right out, but NOT before I took pictures). Pictures go to police, police identify dude from tag and make arrest (they have an index). They also identify his other tags and tack on additional charges.
She never got her cell phone back, but I don’t really mind…
*BTW, there is an interesting story of the self proclaimed “Graffiti King” tag: G-Kae, some rich kid who tagged several hundred buildings across two states when he was caught (with marked paint).
They should be painted grren.
Let the owner of the tagged property bill them for the advertising space used.
They should have to fix whatever they messed up and pay for it too. And, for good measure, they should have to fix someone else’s graffiti too.
Or, like in The Life of Brian, they should have to write it 100 times. 
I’ve seen some graffiti that is really very well done, shows great artistic flair, and actually improves the look of the plain surface it was applied to.
Sadly, none of these graffiti artists live in my town.
Instead, we have a bunch of no-hopers running around leaving marks on everything. Mostly, they just sign their name, but some take the trouble to paint a straightish line across every surface they can find. A market has recently been built in the main shopping district to replace the derelict old market. It’s really an attractive building, and stands out amongst the pre-fab everywhere else in the shopping district. However, within a month or two of construction completing, some moron took it upon himself to spray blue paint in a straight line from one side of the building to the other - straight onto the bricks. It ruins what is otherwise an attractive building. They should force that kid to scrub it clean, repaint the safety rail that some of his paint wound up on, and restore the building to it’s original state.
When I was in school, our teachers made us paint our classroom. Sounds like a weird activity, but I think it had the desired effect. Not only were we so proud of the job we’d done that none of us wanted to ruin it by marking it with vandelism, but when kids from other classes left their names signed on the walls, kids from my class would track them down and abuse them. For at least a couple of years, this really helped keep the classrooms clean. Perhaps taking vandals out and making them proud of something they’ve done will help teach them not to attack other people’s hard work with their tags.
Only if it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they were making an inadequate effort(or none at all) to teach thatr kids proper values and keep them out of trouble.
Ahhhhh, lighten up. I myself was an enthesiastic tagger as a teen. I however followed several rules. #1. I only tagged public things. Stop signs, Traffic light boxes, the Baltimore County Police Headquartes sign(no lie)etc… While the logic seems a bit thin to me now, at the time it was important not to damage someone else’s stuff.#2 That quickly got boring, so I moved on to doing graffiti art- like the murals you see on the side of NY Subway trains. These are an entirely different kettle of fish. In Baltimore, with no subway, this meant underpasses. Now, y’all should know, this type of art is NOT easy. It takes time and practice to get it right. Truthfully, I have never seen an underpass or bridge where a good piece ( Graffiti slang for masterpiece) is not an improvement over a blank wall. I fully support Zenster’s “graffiti park” idea. I even was paid by several businesses to do graffiti style signs for them, and it really improved the looks of their businesses. This is one area where common sense sorting needs to be done. Sponsored murals on unused public places enhance the appearence of the city. Pointless scribbles on random objects do not.