Word: penal
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Bird Man of Alcatraz. One of the strangest cases in U.S. penal history is that of Robert F. Stroud, who spent 43 years in solitary confinement. As the convict murderer who became a bird expert behind bars, Burt Lancaster gives the finest performance of his career...
Bird Man of Alcatraz. During a span of 43 years, Robert F. Stroud became a renowned authority on the diseases of birds, and produced an exhaustive book on the subject. He also wrote a mammoth study of the federal penal system. He did both while serving the longest term in solitary confinement in U.S. prison history at Leavenworth and Alcatraz, as the convicted murderer...
...soft-spoken prison guard and Telly Savalas as Stroud's humorous cell neighbor, both of whom break through the bird man's embittered aloofness to show him that the community of man is not all enemy country. The film's overall indictment is of the penal system as a profoundly damning instrument of society. Bird Man of Alcatraz argues forcefully and with eloquence that the destruction of individual dignity, the reduction of a human soul to a numbered automaton, is as great a crime as any for which men are jailed...
...Liberal Democrat Ralph Richardson, 43, a U.C.L.A. English professor and president of the Los Angeles school board, flew his own plane all over the state to argue for a program of team teaching, smaller classes, summer schools, teaching machines. Opposing excesses of discipline that would turn the schools into "penal institutions," Richardson argued that California's teaching of the basics, especially English, could be systematically upgraded "without wasting energy in name calling or labels about 'progressive education' or the 'three R's.' " He got well-organized support from liberals and labor...
Deciding against two wives accused of adultery who had sought to have Article 559 of the Penal Code declared unconstitutional, the judges ruled that the law, enacted during Mussolini's Fascist regime, was valid, even though it stood in clear contradiction to the 1947 constitution. Article 3 of the constitution states that "all citizens have equal social rank and are equal before the law without distinction of sex." True enough, reasoned the venerable judges, but this did not mean that the framers of the law "were obligated to provide equal discipline for all." Husbands must be protected against...