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Arrested development by Theodore Dalrymple

Old Blog Import

A discussion of modern prison life compared with Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

The last time I attended a hanging in the prison it was a murder, not a suicide. I arrived too late to bring the hanged man back to life: for, if there are degrees of deadness, he was by then already very dead.

The cellmate of the hanged man did not so much confess as boast that he had intimidated the dead man into hanging himself. He had threatened to cut his throat in his sleep if he did not hang himself first, and the man, who was two weeks from his release, chose the rope”

(New Criterion)

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