What punishments really undermine human dignity?

Thanks to this post by Dan Markel, I saw this short article in The Economist discussing shaming punishments.  Dan is a critic of public shaming, and the article reports that he believes "shaming punishments undermine human dignity."  Because I generally support shaming punishments (and most alternatives to incarceration), I want to unpack this claim a bit:

1.  This critique of shaming, like similarly deontological critiques of the death penalty and other punishments, is just a declaration refutable by a counter-declaration.  I can simply assert that shaming punishments actually honor and strengthen human dignity.  (Shame seems uniquely human.  Notably, we do not shame bad animals, we just lock them in cages or kill them.)

2.  As I have said before, shaming punishments must be considered against the backdrop of other punishments and our society's modern over-reliance on incarceration.  Is locking lawbreakers in tiny cages better for human dignity than shaming them?   As I stressed here after a recent NPR series on Supermax solitary confinement, our imprisonment policies involve a stunning assault on human dignity.  Consider again this snippet from NPR:

Wino is a 40-something man from San Fernando, Calif.  He was sent to prison for robbery.  He was sent to the SHU for being involved in prison gangs.  He's been in this cell for six years. "The only contact that you have with individuals is what they call a pinky shake," he says, sticking his pinky through one of the little holes in the door.  That's the only personal contact Wino has had in six years.

3.  According to the piece in The Economist, Dan's concern is with any punishment that incorporates a "public-humiliation factor."  But, given our society's extraordinary (and very costly) reliance on severe private deprivations through mass incarceration, I continue to believe we should be more willing to experiment with novel and public punishments.

UPDATE: Dan responds here, while suggesting that I may be "the only person left in the legal academy who now supports shaming punishments today."  I doubt that's true, but if it is, it reinforces my concerns about the legal academy's misplaced sentencing and punishment priorities.  To perhaps aid this debate, let me refine my challenge to those who oppose all shaming punishments:

Has any modern shaming punishment ever produced personal harms or society costs anywhere close to the harms and costs to be endured by, say, Robert Berger, the Phoenix high school teacher sentenced to 200 years in prison for a first offense of possessing child pornography?

I think shaming sentences could be a lot more effective and humane for the Bergers of the world (case basics here, commentary here and here).

I wish academics worked up about shaming (or the death penalty) would be more concerned about the affront to human dignity and the principles of liberty represented by lengthy sentences of incarceration.  Dan will surely say he is against Berger's sentence, but at some point he must confront the reality that anti-shaming advocacy greatly reduces the likelihood that the public and politicians might start to seriously embrace alternative punishments.

MORE:  Scott at Grits for Breakfast has this satisfying addition to this debate.