The government in the colonies was theocratic, autocratic, and patriarchal. This means that it was centered around the rules established by the Bible (theocratic), which would be regulated by the colony's own government system (autocratic), and led mainly by selected, male individuals that serve as guides and watchers of the people (the magistrates, elders, governors, and reverends). This is the type of government that we see in The Scarlet Letter.
Along with the theocratic and patriarchal government, the autocratic rules determined by the magistrates decide which consequences best fit a crime. In the book History of American Law, Lawrence M. Friedman writes that,
"The earliest criminal codes mirrored the nasty, precarious life of pioneer settlements."
He cites the statute of limitations that was in practice in Jamestown titled "Articles, Lawes and Orders Divine, Politique, and Martiall for the Colony in Virginia,". This document was published by the Virginia Company of London in 1611.
These "articles, laws, and divine, martial and political orders" were nothing but tyranny embodied. Punishments included hanging, starvation, burning, breaking bones on the wheel, chasing down people with a whip, and even chaining people down.
Lesser-type punishments included public dunking (on a pond or lake), wearing objects on your body, namely, neck, mouth, head, or feet. Public humiliation, included allowing people to yell, sneer, and even throw things at those standing at the scaffold. These were also ways to break the sinner to the point of personal disgrace.
This being said, Hester Prynne gets was to wear a red letter "A" on her chest, going to prison, and standing at the scaffold. Those are relatively diminutive consequences compared to what the colonists were capable of deciding. Chapter 2 tells us more about it:
...this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, [...]held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France"
Therefore, public humiliation was a way to enter the psyche of citizens, break them from the inside out, and ingrain in them a deep sense of shame that will serve as a lesson for, both, the law-breaker, and the other citizens.
"In Hester Prynne's instance however, as not infrequently in other cases, here sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head"
Again, public humiliation was considered pretty harsh, as it was. Hester was extremely lucky that she was not further shamed by being made to wear the neck gripe, or having to be on her knees with her hands sticking out two holes, along with her head. Presumably, Dimmesdale's intervention was responsible for avoiding the bad to go worse.
Even the "goodwives"in chapter 2 agree that they would have rather killed Hester, or branded the scarlet letter on her head with a hot iron. Charming. Regardless, the important thing to keep in mind is that humiliation was as bad then as it would be now for those who are prone to anxiety. It was a mechanism of terror to show the parishioners all that could happen to whoever breaks the law- at every and any level.
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