Pulling back the historical thread just a bit further:
In the effort to find a substitute for the death penalty, he
[Jefferson] and the other revisors had chief recourse, not to
retaliation --- which actually was invoked in relatively few
cases --- but to public labor. This was to be performed on roads,
canals, and other public works; and he afterwards concluded that
it would not have reformed the offenders. When tried elsewhere
the experiment proved unsuccessful. The exhibition of criminals
as a public spectacle on the highroads with shaved heads and mean
clothing produced in them an abandonment of self-respect which
plunged them into the most desperate and hardened depravity.
---Dumas Malone, *Jefferson the Virginian* (Little, Brown and
Company: 1948, pp. 272-3).
Bill