Black Mirror: "White Bear"

In class on Monday, we watched another episode of Black Mirror, this one pertaining to the subject of discipline and punishment. In the episode, titled "White Bear", a woman with amnesia wakes up in unfamiliar surroundings with not much more than a flickering tv with a strange symbol flashing on it and a photograph of a child she assumes is her child. When she makes it outside of the house she woke up in, she notices people in similar houses watching and filming her with their phones. To her surprise and dismay, the people filming her do not come to her aid when she calls for help. Then a masked man appears wielding a shotgun and chasing after her. That is when she ran into a girl, Jem, who was unaffected from the signal and helped her escape from the madman. Jem also explained why all the other people were just filming and not helping; they had been hypnotized by the same symbol that was flashing on the tv screen earlier, and her goal is to destroy the transmitter located at "White Bear" to put an end to the signal effecting everyone. As the episode progresses the unnamed woman starts to have flashbacks, which become more and more frequent, and she slowly gets the feeling that there is something wrong with "White Bear". At the climax of the episode, it is revealed the whole thing had been staged. The amnesiac woman is actually named Victoria, and the photo of the girl that she assumed was her daughter was actually her victim. As she is held captive, Victoria is forced to watch videos of her victim and is told the full extent of what she did. "White Bear" turns out to be a reference to the victims toy that she disappeared with, which became the symbol of the search for the girl, and then the name of the "justice park" that holds Victoria captive and makes her relive the same horrific day over and over again.
This is an extreme form of cruel and unusual punishment. Not only is Victoria subjected to every atrocity that she subjected her victim to, but her memory is wiped at the end of the day so she has to relive the exact same day, experiencing the terror and shame anew everyday. Not only does this "justice park" hold her captive, but they make a profit from it, selling tickets to guests who play the unhelpful bystanders who film her. Instead of being put in prison or sentenced to death, Victoria's punishment is to experience the fear that her victim did. Although it is fitting, it is still fairly extreme. This form of punishment--one emulating the crime--is not common by any means, but perhaps as portrayed in Black Mirror it might become a solution to felonies in the future.