OUR HISTORY IS replete with revolting punishments:
The scaffold was surrounded by a great force of cavalry with drawn swords. The crowd gaped as if in a stupor. It was November 1, 1817, and it was time for Jeremiah Brandreth to be executed for having taken part in a conspiracy to overthrow the government of England. The infamous executioner Calcraft slipped the noose around Brandreth's neck, then quickly sent him swinging.
That was not the end of it.
Brandreth was cut down after half an hour, still not dead, since in those days hanging caused death through strangulation, not through breaking the neck as is the case today. He was carried to the block, where the executioner took one mighty swipe with an ax which had been ordered specially for the job. But his aim was not true, and he only partly severed the head. His assistant finished the job with a butcher's knife. Then Calcraft laid hold of the hair of Brandreth's bloody head and raised it high, first to the right, then to the left, crying out as was required by law, "Behold, the head of a traitor, Jeremiah Brandreth! "
The crowd went wild, running hysterically in all directions.(1)
Why do such punishments appear so revolting to us?
"It is because we are civilized," we say, "we don't do that sort of thing any more."
An important reason why bodily punishments are thought of with such repugnance is that they have been historically linked to the process of torture. But painful punishment is clearly distinguishable from torture as we will see in Chapter 12.
The history of punishment also tells us that severe bodily punishments were used in the English criminal law until less than a couple of hundred years ago, yet there is very little evidence that the process of torture as it was used in Continental Europe ever took hold in England.(2)
Therefore, there must be additional reasons for our revulsion, and these obviously have to do with our civilized sensitivities. We are a civilized people and so we are naturally revolted by barbarities. But what are barbarous acts? And are they the opposite to civilized acts?
There are three ingredients of punishments that represent the essence of barbarism:
1. Mutilation
2. Excess
3. Violence
Mutilation
The prototype of the barbaric act of mutilation is that of killing and eating another human being-cannibalism.(3) The savagery of our past history cannot be denied, and indeed is still recognized on the battlefield. There are few students of civilization who would say that we have risen all that far above our violent histories. There is always the danger of sinking back. This is not to say that our history is not also full of great altruism and kindness, but simply that we must recognize that there is an underside to our precariously civilized state.
The recognition of the sovereignty of each person's physical being has come quite late. And although we gave up eating each other very early in the history of Western Civilization, we were unable to give up mangling the bodies of criminals and prisoners of war until very late indeed-some would say only a decade ago if we consider the atrocities of the Vietnam war.(4)
Our revulsion at mutilations is also conditioned by the fact that we have, in large part, become "disembodied" in our relationships with each other. Much more emphasis is placed today on the person as a "psychological entity" rather than on a person as a "thing" or "body" as was, perhaps, the perception of people in the days when slavery was considered the normal state of affairs.
Today is also the age of "narcissism"-that is, love of one's own body or self, and this is perhaps expressed through the extreme view of the body as being inviolable, sacred, private, except for very specific sexual and medical purposes. This change in the perception of the person has been aptly described by Professor Van den Haag in his interesting book, Punishing Criminals.(5)
Mutilating punishments are, then, barbaric because they violate the body's integrity which is a value we have come to respect in our civilization, and because they seem like a throwback to our cannibalistic past.
But the resolution of the problem of barbarity is not that simple.
We say that prison was introduced as a "civilized" punishment, if we subscribe to the idea that there is some progress in the history of punishment,(6) or if, even putting aside this sticky question, we merely claim that prison took the place of the mutilating punishments of the past. Apart from the fact that we have noted that prison actually permits the violation of the body by default (violence and rape in prison), one may also argue that it is based on the idea of mutilating the soul of the prisoner.
In the age of "psychological man," we give as much or more importance to the "self," or one's "mental state" than we have ever done before, so that one might well argue whether it would be more humane to do less of the mentally mutilating punishment, and use a little corporal punishment instead, especially of the kind that is less violating of the body.
This brings us back to the observation that there are a variety of corporal punishments available, some of which are much less mutilating, or indeed may not be mutilating at all. For example, electric shock, properly applied, leaves no bodily scars or mutilations so does not leave behind it the mental anguish or stigmata that go with bodily mutilation. Most important, it can be administered in a very brief time, seconds if need be, so that the actual period of violation of the individual may be kept at a minimum. All other bodily punishments of history have been unable (or their advocates unwilling) to avoid this violation of body and mind. The corporal punishment of electric shock is able to accomplish this, but only if it is not used in excess.
Excess
The punishments of the 18th and early 19th centuries in England were clearly excessive: people could be hanged just for stealing a loaf of bread! There were two important illuminating reasons why these punishments became so excessive.
One was the idea that one should punish the crime through analogy to the body.(7)
The other, and the more important, was that the rulers of England callously used the criminal law to terrify the common people into obedience (we call it "deterrence" today). This occurred especially at the end of the 18th century when the rulers were concerned that there might be an uprising of the "dangerous classes" as had occurred in the revolutions of France and America.(8)
Punishment by analogy to the body has been common enough throughout Europe. We saw how the head of Brandreth was held up as the source of the traitor's crime. Sometimes the offender's heart was cut out, transfixed to his open hand, then held before his face with the words, "Here is your heart."
These were intricate punishments designed to get to the very depths of the criminal disposition. The seat of the criminal's guilt was wrenched out of him in no uncertain terms. Today, it might be said, we do not do this, because we consider that the seat of guilt lies in the mind, not the body.
But these punishments are also aggravated forms of either corporal punishment or capital punishment and as such they may be said to be excessive-excessive by default, in that their overriding aim was not to administer as much pain as possible, but rather to punish the crime by analogy to the body. The analogical function of these punishments, however, also made it easy to pervert their use for other purposes-namely those of deterrence. The transformation of analogical punishments into deterrent punishments occurred as follows.
Punishment by analogy aims at expressing the crime through the punishment. That is to say, the development of such punishments has been through:
1. Reflection of the crime in the punishment.
2. Through this reflection making an exemplary punishment by
punishing publicly, and by adding words of admonishment, such as, "Behold the heart of a traitor."
3. The graphic communication of this punishment to the populace such as placing the dismembered limbs of the offender on public display.
This educative function of what is really a basic form of retribution has been largely lost in our use of punishment today. The educative function has been displaced by a deterrent function-that is, the use of deserved punishments for a utilitarian purpose. In the case of 18th century England, the purpose was to terrorize the populace into submission. Excesses of punishment resulted, by which we mean that the severity of the punishments often was out of proportion to the crime (that is, death for a petty theft).
This is a widely recognized defect in the utilitarian justification for punishment of which the deterrence principle is a part. It is unable to set limits on particular punishments. That is, provided that one can make an argument that some greater good can be obtained by using some outrageous punishment as an example to others (and this may include the punishment even of an innocent person if it can be shown that the evil of doing so is overcome by the good achieved by the ultimate goal), one can claim that it is morally defensible.(10)
The exemplary punishment of retribution is not intended to set an example of fear to others at all. Rather, it is intended to enlighten or embellish the significance of the crime both to the criminal and society. The idea is not to frighten individuals into submission (although that may happen), but rather for all to learn together about the evil of the offense committed. We shall have more to say about this aspect of retribution when we look at prisons and their retributive function, and shortly when we consider the important role of punishing publicly.
A clear cause of excess, therefore, is the sheer force of the utilitarian ethic which will press for more and more punishment by example. In the era of bodily punishment, this led to truly excessive use of punishments which we find easy to pronounce as barbaric, and which we have rightly eliminated from our punishment repertoire.
But it is an error to confuse the excesses of punishment with the types of punishment. Not all corporal punishments mutilated. Not all corporal punishments in and of themselves are excessive. For example, the paddle has been used since time immemorial, but used with restraint, there are few who would say it is "barbaric" (though one may disapprove of it for other reasons). If we do say that it is barbaric, we are forced to admit that we are not a very civilized people at all since it is widely used in the United States and many countries of the world as a method of disciplining children.
Yet it is with whipping especially that punishment to excess may easily be demonstrated historically. The reasons it became excessive are two: the highly utilitarian purposes to which it has been put, and the fact that it is a numerically based punishment-the numerical base, of course, being another product of the "civilizing process." A brief look at the history of whipping demonstrates the interesting relationship between barbarity and what one might call (X) civilized excess."
The Growth of Abstract Punishments
Whipping is probably the oldest numerically based punishment we have, which means that it has "civilized" punishment by making it possible to calculate in an abstract way the proportion of the punishment to the crime. This abstraction of the relation between the crime and the punishment (that is, having to translate the seriousness of the particular crime into the one dimension of whipping) promotes excessive punishments. Sentences may be pronounced with little regard for the concrete facts of the punishment, since once one begins to abstract punishments into a numerical sentence, there is no clear way of telling what the difference is between, say, fifty lashes and fifty-five lashes.
In 17th and 18th century England this is exactly what happened, and this occurred especially in the British navy where whipping was almost the sole form of punishment for serious and minor offenses alike, since many of these offenses could be dealt with summarily by the captain of the ship. The use of numbers to define the differences between the seriousness of offenses reached incredibly bizarre proportions in the military and navy, where the practice of whipping was much older than in the criminal justice arena. It reached its gravest proportions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when punishments of one or two hundred lashes were common. These extreme punishments have been reported in another book The Punishment Response, but to provide the flavor of what went on, here are a few examples:
As far as one can ascertain, the actual number of lashes was always prescribed by the captain or commanding officer, and whatever written laws or rules there were apparently did not state the specific number of lashes for a specific offense. The main reason for this was that the offenses were those of a summary nature directly related to the maintenance of firm command, so that such offenses as "disobedience" or "drunkenness" were commonly punished by severe whippings. Although whipping in general was the prescribed punishment for most offenses, when it came down to giving the order to punish, the commanding officer always specified the number of lashes. It is also claimed that the large majority of those punished were not subjected to more that twenty-five lashes, although the records reported in The Punishment Response would not suggest this. Fifty or more would seem to have been quite common, and this got worse and worse as the 18th century wore on.
During the Royal Commission on whipping conducted by the Royal Navy in 1835-1836, a strong argument for its retention was that it was a milder punishment than the death penalty which was a common punishment in the French Navy for quite minor offenses. (There was a famous case of a sailor being sentenced to death for flipping a button at a superior officer).
It is of great interest to note that the actual number of lashes was not prescribed in the criminal law until quite late. Whipping, when it was used with other punishments, was not usually stated in terms of number of lashes. Sentences typically stated that the offender be (X) whipped at the cart's tail" without reference to the number of strokes. The only suggestion of "how much" was implied in the distance the offender was to be dragged by the horse and cart.
An example of such a sentence was that passed by the House of Lords under James I on Mr. Edward Floyde for "irreverent observations" and "being a papist":
' sentence of life imprisonment, preceded by branding on the forehead and whipping at the cart's tail from Fleet to Westminster Hall. "
Indeed, in 1539 under the rule of Henry VIII, the infamous Whipping Act, which was designed to punish vagrants, never stated the number of lashes. It simply ordered that the offenders were to be "tied to the end of the cart naked, and beaten with whips throughout each market town till the body shall be bloody by reason of such whipping." Fifty years later, the cart's tail was eliminated, and the whipping posts erected. This served the purpose of focusing the punishment specifically upon the whipping itself, and it was at this time that the actual number of strokes was legislated. It should be noted that this was introduced as a reform, since it was thought that by using the post, the number of lashes could be counted more easily than if the whipping were administered to a moving body!
We must understand then, that for criminal punishment by whipping there was no clear concern with matching the numerical amount of whipping to the particular crime until the end of the 16th century. Rather, it was added into the mixture of punishments which often incorporated the pillory, ridicule, branding, being paraded through the streets sitting on a horse facing its tail, and all manner of demonstrative punishments.
The focus of the punishments was on making a clear link between the quality of the crime and the quality of a punishment. There was no attempt to punish in proportion by matching amount for amount as we do today. It was only when whipping posts were erected, focusing the punishment more clearly on a stationary object, that we had the judicial requirement of the number of lashes to be administered. Even here, so long as other punishments were still administered (as were commonly the pillory and the stocks), there was not too much attention paid to the number of lashes.
The idea of legislating the number of lashes was introduced to provide limits to the amount of whipping. The notion of limits is an interesting one here, since there were effectively no limits with many of these punishments. The pillory, for example, could lead to a death penalty if the offender happened to be unpopular with the street crowds, who were likely to pelt him with stones.
We do not really see clear trends towards the necessity to introduce limits into the amount of punishment until Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century who pronounced the utilitarian dictum that the evil of the pain must be only just enough to outweigh the pleasure of the offense. But this method of arriving at limits also has its difficulties, since it still requires a highly abstract assessment of how serious the particular offense is (or in Bentham's words, how much pleasure could be derived from it).
With the introduction of the numerical sentencing of offenders-whipping, prison, and transportation to the colonies-the qualitative base for the punishment very quickly disappeared, and led to the horrendous punishments of several hundred strokes of the lash, many years in prison, or many years transportation. The bizarre lengths that these sentences have reached-hundreds of strokes of the lash in the olden days and many years in prison today-have been cut loose from their links to the crimes for which they were legislated. The numbers have developed a life of their own, and have become, in a sense, limitless.
Two illustrations of modern sentencing practice and penal philosophy easily demonstrate how numbers have taken the place of the concrete facts of punishment.
It has become a common practice of hard-nosed judges in cases of very serious crimes to "stack" a series of sentences on top of each other for a variety of crimes of which the offender has been convicted, with the result that some criminals are sentenced to over one hundred years in prison. Although it may be said that one motivation of the judges in handing down such sentences is to make sure that the offender never sees the light of day again, it is also clear that the numbers have very little to do with the concrete quality of the punishment. That is, it is simply impossible for a criminal to spend over one hundred years in prison.
Here is an even more convincing example. It is the claim of penologists who say they are enlightened that the offender is sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment. This is clearly a symbolic transformation of a concrete punishment into numbers alone. We are told to be satisfied merely with the sentence of so many years-that is, it is the sentence itself that we are supposed to accept as the appropriate punishment, not the pains that should go with a punitive sentence.
Violence as Barbaric
Another more encompassing way of stating the cannibalism argument is to suggest that the essential element of any civilization is its ability to cast off violence. The traditional picture is that of the war of all against all, as Hobbes popularized it, contrasted with an ordered, non-violent society. It is the latter, of course, which is claimed to be "civilized."
Many books have been written about this controversy-some flatly denying that there was ever anything faintly resembling the "primal horde" in man's tribal history, others claiming that the dormant feature of today's society is in fact violence.(11) We can avoid this controversy by approaching the question from another direction.
Many writers of different disciplines have concluded that the decisive fact that sets a civilized society apart from a barbaric one is that of the capacity to symbolize, to solve problems abstractly. (12) By this argument we may say that the attempt to transform concrete punishments such as mutilating or violent punishments into abstract punishments such as numbers of years in prison is a civilizing process. If this is the case, we should be prepared to defend prison and other numerically based punishments as civilized rather than barbaric.
However, the great contradiction in which we find ourselves when we defend such punishments is that, by the very nature of their abstraction, they are less able to satisfy the concrete needs of retribution-which it might even be admitted are "primitive" in the sense that they are over a couple of thousand years old. As a result, there is today a constant pressure for more and more punishment.
Is there a way out of this dilemma?
Violence Transformed
It must be apparent from our analysis of acute and chronic pains and the variety of punishments that produce these effects that some punishments are neat mixtures of both the abstract and concrete elements of punishment. Acute corporal punishments are clearly in this category since they inflict an element of violence, yet they are highly abstract in that they can be turned into numbers both in terms of duration and intensity.
It is also apparent that acute corporal punishments may be arranged according to whether they are more or less violent. For example, the use of the lash requires a great deal of physical exertion and may clearly be said to be a violent process. In contrast, the administration of electric shock requires no more physical exertion than the pressing of a button. Even though the effects of the electric shock may be just as violent as those of the lash, the process itself is less violent and therefore preferable. This is not to say that we could not invent a way of administering the lash that was less violent. In fact, Jeremy Bentham designed a whipping machine that would have made the process essentially similar to the administration of electric shock.
The chronic punishment of prison offers what appears to be the only substitute for those violent punishments that we think violent criminals deserve (but understand that to inflict violence upon them would be barbaric). The transformation of violent punishments into prison is something more than an abstraction, though. We may argue that prison, used with a clearly retributive purpose-that is, with the intention of inflicting pain on the offender-may reflect certain elements of the criminal's offense. For example, it seems perfectly appropriate that if a mugger has inflicted lasting injury on a victim, prison should inflict lasting pain on him. There are additional ways in which prison may be made to match the crime or criminal. They will be considered in chapter 7.
However, in drawing these conclusions in favor of symbolic or abstract punishments, we must be aware of the clear danger of using such punishments. The danger is that they separate us from the concrete fact of retribution, the concrete fact being that we must feel that punishment has been done. When corporal punishment is used there will be no doubt about our feeling that punishment has been done, because everyone has at some time in their lives experienced such pain (whether at the dentist or at the hands of a parent). In contrast, very few have experienced the chronic pain of prison, so that there is the clear danger that we may be separated from such a punishment. Is this a serious defect?
Yes it is, and the reason lies in an element of retribution which we have not yet considered in sufficient detail.
We Must Feel that Punishment is Done
A punishment must not only fit the quality of the crime but also the quality of the feeling or sentiment that the law-abiding people have about the crime of which they personally have not been convicted (though they may be guilty of it). Thus, the stoning to death of an adulterer in early Jewish law was an entirely appropriate punishment, the deep psychology of which was so clearly unearthed by Christ's challenge: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone..." Each stone was a missile of guilt transferred from the punisher to the punished, from the "innocent" to the "guilty." That is, by punishing the offender he was made more guilty and became the repository of society's guilt.
This is a crucial point to understand about- the psychology of retribution. It is not simply a statement of the crime-punishment connection, the expression of an inherently rational logic as so popularized by Kant. It is the expression of an irrational force: the inherent power of the logic derives from the mass sentiment that underlies much of what we do to criminals.
They are the criminals we are the law abiding. They are punished as a result of our feelings of revulsion.
This is not to say that we are in fact as evil as those we punish, but it is to say that we often feet as though we are. We feel this way because ours is a guilty society, unable to shake off the stigma of original sin, yet a society so uncertain of its moral standing that it is ashamed to punish.
The satisfaction of these feelings of revulsion was clear in the case of the public and collective punishments of which there were many in past history: stoning to death, mass hysteria at public hangings, public whippings, the pillory, the stocks. All of these punishments held mass appeal.
They all suddenly disappeared in the early 19th century (with some rare exceptions-Delaware managed to publicly whip a few offenders up until about 1940). In their place rose the great prison castles, the mysteries beyond whose walls the public knew nothing and still knows little.
Punishment is no longer carried out by the masses. Instead, prison is a punishment that is carried out by the State in almost complete secrecy. Earlier generations were well aware in the deepest emotional sense of what punishment was all about when they witnessed a hanging or public whipping because the quality of these punishments was such that it clearly expressed the emotional feelings about criminals and about being law-abiding.
Prison in its present form cannot fulfill this need.
What could we do to make prisons and other abstract punishments fulfill this concrete need? The obvious answer is to make sure that the punishment is public-that people are made well aware of the pains that are inflicted in prison. This would mean opening up the prisons to the public as they were in the early days of prisons in 18th century England. Public access to prisons should be made a major feature of prisons today. People must be able to verify for themselves that punishment is truly being done.
This would also provide a safeguard against prisons getting out of hand because of their highly abstract nature. Also, if prisons are to be used retributively, they will become harsh places (as we will see in Chapter 7), so that we must be ever vigilant that their harshness does not turn to wanton violence (as is the case in many prisons today).(13) Public supervision is essential if we wish to control the harshness of prison conditions.
The alert reader will realize that this solution could only go part of the way to preventing sentencing excess. Since whipping was used to excess in the past and its use was essentially public, the problem cannot lie entirely with prison.
There are other steps we may take to place limits on numerically based punishments, but a discussion of these must wait until we consider the sentencing process itself. This is because choosing punishments in actual practice is a highly abstract undertaking today and there is much research on how these decisions are made and who should make them.
In Sum...
1. We have established general rules as to the limits to which we may go in trying to match crimes to their deserved punishments.
2. We have had to make some accommodations so that the competing demands of retribution on one hand and civilizing punishments on the other, could be met.
3. Acute corporal punishments are the ideal mix of the concrete elements of retribution and the civilizing process of using numerically based punishments.
4. While there are serious dangers in the use of prison as a punishment instead of violent bodily punishments, there appears to be no other way of avoiding barbarous acts of punishment. However, provided prison is used retributively and is made as public as possible, the concrete needs of retribution may be to some extent satisfied.
5. At the end of the previous chapter we observed that the infliction of violent punishments upon violent offenders was entirely defensible from the point of view of the ethics of retributive justice. We also concluded in the previous chapter that, while the infliction of economic punishments for economic crimes was the logical punishment from the point of view of retribution, for a number of practical and moral reasons this was not defensible, and that violent punishments were the most sensible solution.
6. We must recognize that the arguments against the use of violent punishments presented in this chapter are based on very shaky grounds. In fact, it is not easy to claim that our "civilized" society is any less violent than it was in any previous time in history. Therefore, we must not totally exclude the punishments of violence, and this is why we have concluded that the use of acute corporal punishments is not barbaric, and in fact when numerically based, is even civilized.
Therefore, our recommendation that acute corporal punishment be used for property offenses still stands.
7. As far as serious violent crimes are concerned, we have had to shift our stance a little. While we have recognized that we would very much like to administer harsh violence upon those who commit harsh violent crimes, we have also recognized that the civilized thing to do is to try to avoid such mutilations and excessive intrusions into the offender's body, and to try to abstract the punishment into one that is civilized. Prison seems to fulfill this prescription so long as it is used retributively to respond property to the crimes.
8. We also noted that in the modern age we give much more attention to the psychological dimension of man than was so some two hundred years ago. Could a case be made for the use of mental punishments for those criminals or crimes that deserve it? If we were to keep closely to the retributive philosophy of reflecting the crime in the punishment, we would have to accept such a punishment.
Perhaps the most typical of mental punishments is that of humiliation which would naturally be appropriate for criminals who inflict humiliation on the victim, such as rapists and some muggers. Prison readily offers the pain of humiliation for those offenders that a community wants locked up. For the others, it would seem that a form of acute corporal punishment such as the lash would offer the required humiliation along with physical pain. However this would be in cases in which it was clear that no prison was required, and in which "straight" corporal punishment without humiliation was considered insufficient for the crime.
Can corporal punishment be administered without humiliating the offender? Most certainly it can. We will see in the next chapter that acute corporal punishment has many attributes which place it among the best in our search for a just, equitable, effective, and cheap punishment.
I . This, and other descriptions of public executions, may be found in Sir Leon Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law I (London: Stevens and Son, 1948); see also Newman, The Punishment Response.
2. Radzinowicz, English Criminal Law.
3. Eli Sagan, Cannibalism and Cultural Form (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
4. We should understand that this "progress" is not necessarily related to a progression in our moral sensitivity, as much as it is related to progress in medical science. With the discovery of pain killing drugs, we have developed a more acute perception of the horror of pain than people used to have prior to the widespread use of these drugs.
5 . Much has been written on this complex topic. For a scholarly description of the age of "psychological man," see P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper, 1966). And on narcissism see N. 0. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
6. The major proponent of this view is H. E. Barnes, The Story of Punishment (Boston: The Stratford Co., 1930).
7. Newman, The Punishment Response, Chapter 2.
8. [bid. Also: D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J. G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and C. Winslow, Albion's Fatal Tree (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
9. A. M. Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972).
10. This point is explained in greater detail in Chapter 10.
11. Affirming the primal horde model: Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1946); Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. N. K. Wilson (New York: Bantam, 1967). Against the model: Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression (London: Oxford, 1976); Fromm, Anatomy of Destructiveness; P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Boston: Extending Horizon Books, no date. First published in 1914).
12. See, for example, S. Garn, ed., Culture and the Direction of Evolution (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964).
13. There is another very important advantage to making punishments public, especially in relation to prison: it may help to mitigate the credibility problem that has arisen concerning criminal punishment today. The media commonly reports examples of prison as "soft" punishment which conveys to the public the mistaken idea that prisons are not painful enough. For example:
Convict Thomas White of Arapahoe has served eight months of a I to 10 year term in a Wyoming State prison farm for breaking and entering, and for parole violations. He has been allowed on a number of "supervised excursions," and this time it was to a drivein movie with a prison guard and three other inmates. The movie was appropriately titled, Escape from New York, in which the whole of Manhattan is depicted as a maximum security prison. White went to the bathroom ... and never came back. (Albany Times Union, 9 August, 198 1).