"Easy solution: Desert. Barbed Wire. Tents. Blankets. Bologna sandwiches. There I just the cut the cost of PRK prisons by 50% and made it possible to expand 'em quickly and indefinitely. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1903576/posts"
TO WHICH I SAY:
Ah, poor Freeper chap! Little does he know the eccentric, underrated, and misunderstood British director Peter Watkins already came up with this idea -- in his 1971 film _Punishment Park_. In that film, anti-war protesters and civil disobedients are placed in this Freeper's fantasy, desert internment camps. (Watkins won the Academy Award in '66 or so for _The War Game_, one of the creepiest movies about nuclear war ever made.)
This is from IMDB's description of _Punishment Park_:
"'Punishment Park' is a pseudo-documentary purporting to be a film crews's news coverage of the team of soldiers escorting a group of hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-establishment types across the desert in a type of capture the flag game. The soldiers vow not to interfere with the rebels' progress and merely shepherd them along to their destination. At that point, having obtained their goal, they will be released. The film crew's coverage is meant to insure that the military's intentions are honorable. As the representatives of the 60's counter-culture get nearer to passing this arbitrary test, the soldiers become increasingly hostile, attempting to force the hippies out of their pacifist behavior. A lot of this film appears improvised and in several scene real tempers seem to flare as some of the 'acting' got overaggressive. This is a interesting exercise in situational ethics. The cinema-veritie style, hand-held camera, and ambiguous demands of the director - would the actors be able to maintain their roles given the hazing they were taking - pushed some to the brink. The cast's emotions are clearly on the surface. Unfortunately this film has gone completely underground and is next to impossible to find. It would offer a captivating document of the distrust that existed between soldiers willfully serving in the military and those persons who opposed the war peacefully."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067633/plotsummary
This film's been compared to the Stanford Prison experiments because Watkins got real anti-war radicals, black power folks, and the like to play the captives, while real jock-ish, macho dudes played the cops. Within a short amount of time these 'actors' dutifully assumed their roles and developed real animosity towards one another, clearly seen on film in some tense scenes.
-B.