A Few Factoids From the Life of Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham’s remarkable life and work included much more than a sketchy design for a “panopticon” prison.

A cursory glance at Bernard Crick’s lengthy entry on Bentham in Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture* immediately yields some eye-opening facts.

To wit: Young Jeremy was 13 when he began attending Queen’s College, Oxford. And he was only 16 when he graduated. Such ages were normal for schooling at the time. Yet they seem downright strange to contemporary American sensibilities.

If he lived in our day, one suspects Bentham would be all over the scientific research on brain development among juveniles. If he were American, he would be insisting that the Supreme Court apply this research to the interpretation of cases on “juvenile lifers” and other related issues.

Consider also the glimpse Crick’s essay provides of the provenance of Bentham’s panopticon plan. The model for the panopticon, Crick says, began as a plan for cooperative settlements created not for prisoners, but for the unemployed.

Bentham worked on the panopticon idea off and on for twenty years. He was, Crick comments, a relentless perfectionist about this work, always struggling for definitive precision before considering it in finished form. It took a concerted effort by a host of followers to eventually apply and popularize it.

About Bentham’s famous donation of his skeleton to the University of London for scientific study, Crick has not a word to say. But if he had included a mention of this, I’m sure he would have included a telling detail or two.

*Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture, 1800-1914, ed. Justin Wintle (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).

Jail Time for Libel? Not in English Language Version of 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'

Translating a popular novel from one culture into a film aimed at another is certainly fraught with challenges. It’s essentially an act of double translation: from one culture to another and also from one artistic genre to another.

A host of artistic choices have to be made. Whatever the end result, it isn’t merely a matter of transposing the content from Form A to Form B.

Yet how odd it initially seems that an American film version of a European crime thriller omits a jail term served by one of the key characters. That is what writer / director David Fincher chose to do, however, in his Anglo Saxon take on the sensational Swedish novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

In the Stieg Larsson original, muckraking journalist Mikael Blomkvist must serve a couple of months in jail as part of his sentence after being convicted of libeling a notorious business tycoon. In Fincher’s film, the sentence consists only of fines, with no jail time or even probation.

One might have thought that including the jail term would be quite natural in a film aimed at American audiences. After all, we are the country that leads the world in incarceration rates, the country sometimes called A Nation of Jailers.

Fincher probably felt that the very liberality of the conditions of Blomkvist’s confinement would make it unintelligible to many Americans. For example, Blomkvist gets to choose when he will serve his jail term. Such discretion is little known in our system, geared as it is toward punishment.

Similarly, the jail term itself, when Larsson’s Blomkvist does serve it, turns out to be a positive experience for him - more like going to a summer camp than to a hellhole. This contrasts sharply with the American perception that a jail term must inevitably evoke constant fear and trembling.

Kenneth Young and Transformative Suffering

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn charted the depths of degregation within the Soviet prison system in his landmark book The Gulag Archipelago. In the preface to the book's first volume, he wrote, "I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed." With his unshakable commitment to write about it, to honor those who suffered and perished, he could even speak of a sense of love for the "monstrous world" from which he had emerged.

At age 24, Kenneth Young has already been imprisoned for nearly as long as Solzhenitsyn. When he was 14, on the mean streets of Tampa, Kenneth was forced into helping his mother's drug dealer commit a string of armed robberies. The 25-year-old drug dealer threatened to harm Kenneth's mom, 16-year-old sister, and even the sister's baby if Kenneth did not participate in the robberies. Kenneth and the dealer were caught, and a prosecutor charged Kenneth as an adult. Then a judge who now says he didn't understand the law sentenced Kenneth to life in prison without parole.



Last Friday, Nightline broadcast a segment on Kenneth's story. Terry Moran travelled to the maximum-security prison in Claremont, Florida, to interview Kenneth, who is one of more than 100 people around the country who are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes not involving homicide that were committed when they were under 18. Following a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, people in this group may now have a chance to be considered for release.

Kenneth Young's quiet dignity during his interview with Moran was remarkable. What must it be like to wake up every morning in prison knowing you have been sentenced to die there for succumbing to threats issused by your mother's drug dealer at age 14? It could be soul-destroying. Yet like Solzhenitsyn before him, Kenneth has clearly gone inward and "absorbed into himself" the entire experience of being given such a monstrous sentence. He prays daily, has a learned a trade (barbering), and longs to become a positive mentor for his young nephew.

At the time Kenneth Young was charged as an adult, the prosecution claimed he was a "menace to society." But Kenneth did not have a single prior conviction before he was sentenced to life without parole. The judge who sentenced him, J. Rogers Padgett, has admitted he did not understand Florida's frequently-changed sentencing law at time he imposed the sentence. Judge Padgett has submitted an affidavit stating, "It was not my intent that Mr. Young never be considered for release."

When told by Terry Moran that Judge Padgett had (at least partially) recanted, Kenneth Young took the news with the perspective that only transformative suffering can bring. His sentence was a death sentence, he said - no matter what the judge calls it now, or what he thought the parole board would do.