1. For exceptions among the early modernists, see Beattie, John, Crime and the Courts in England, 1688–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Cockburn, J. S., “Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment,” Law and History Review 12.1 (1994): 155–79.Google Scholar For a study that traces punishment of the body into the twentieth century, see Evans, Richard J., Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar The resumption of executions in the U. S. in 1976 has inspired a host of studies of the death penalty in the recent past. For an excellent overview, see Sarat, Austin, ed., The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

2. Garland, David, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985).Google Scholar Garland identified the complex array of therapeutic strategies (such as probation, indeterminate sentences, psychiatric case work) that emerged in concert with the rise of the welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

3. In Foucault's words, “One no longer touched the body, or at least as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself …. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary …. From becoming an art of unbearable sensation punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.” Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 11.Google Scholar

4. Recent examples include Rawlings, Philip, Crime and Power: A History of Criminal Justice, 1688–1998 (London: Longman, 1999)Google Scholar; Weiss, Robert, Social History of Crime, Policing and Punishment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999)Google Scholar; and Walker, Samuel, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New York; Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

5. Lucas, George, “is Hermeneutics Philosophy? Interpretation and Overinterpretation of the Past,” History of European Ideas 20.2 (1995): 177–94, 186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Here Lucas is condensing Godamer's observation that “a legal order that has become obsolete and antiquated is a constimi source of legal difficulties, for meaningful interpretation requires adaptation to the actual situation.” Godamer, Hans-Georg, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Lawrence, Frederick G. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 95.Google Scholar

6. I have examined the struggle to repeal Canadian death penalty statutes elsewhere. See Strange, Carolyn, “The Lottery of Death: Capital Punishment in Canada, 1867–1976,” Manitoba Law Journal 23.3 (1996): 593–619.Google Scholar

7. Spierenburg, Pietre, The Spectacle of Suffering (London: Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

8. McGowen, Randall, “Civilising Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England,” Journal of British Studies 33 (July 1994): 257–82, 282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Laqueur, Thomas, “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. Beier, A. L., Canadine, David, and Rosenheim, James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 305–55.Google Scholar

9. Elias argued that there was no such thing as modernity, since civilization is always in process. Bruno LaTour agrees. See his We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). I use the term in an empirically grounded Weberian sense, since one can document the rise, in the mid-nineteenth century, of new institutions, practices, routines, and experts, who worked toward the calculability and rationalization of personal, social, political, and economic life. These principles of objectivity and scientific rigor did not tame irrationality, however. For the psychic strictures of modernity, see Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

10. Mennell, Stephan, “Decivilising Processes: Theoretical Significance and Some Lines of Research,” International Sociology 5 (1990): 205–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pratt, John, “Towards the ‘Decivilising’ of Punishment?,” Social and Legal Studies 7.4 (December 1998): 487–515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am grateful to John Pratt for sharing an earlier version of his article.

11. Elias, Norbert, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Schröter, Michael, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996 [1989]), 308.Google Scholar

12. Breur, Stefan, “The Dénouements of Civilisation: Norbert Elias and Modernity,” International Social Science Journal, no. 128 (1991): 414Google Scholar, as quoted in Robert van Krieken, Norbert Elias(London: Routledge, 1998), 126

13. Robert van Krieken argues that recent forms of “modern barbarism” continue to be justified in the name of their civilizing mission. See his “The Barbarism of Civilisation: Cultural Genocide and the ‘Stolen Generations,’” British Journal of Sociology 50.2 (June 1999): 297–315.

14. This was not the case until the early nineteenth century, before which time women were subjected to public whippings and punishment in the stocks and pillories. In England, those convicted of petty treason were also burnt at the stake, a penalty to which men were not subjected. For an excellent account of the decline in the public physical punishment of females, see Smith, Greg T., “Civilized People Do Not Want to See That Sort of Thing: The Decline of Physical Punishment in London, 1760–1840,” in Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment and Discretion, ed. Strange, Carolyn (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996): 21–51.Google Scholar

15. Former colonies fell under federal criminal justice policy once they joined Confederation. The Revised Statutes of Canada (R.S.C.) exempted women from judicially ordered corporal punishment. R.S.C. 1886, c. 181, s. 30.

16. In 1921, whipping was added as a sentencing option for robbery; in addition, both attempted rape and rape were made punishable by flogging. For a full list of the offenses subject to judicial whipping sentences at the time of the committee's deliberations, see Criminal Code of Canada, with Annotations by J. C. Manin (Toronto: Cartwright, 1955), 978–79.

17. Home Office, Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment (London: His Majesty's Printing Office, 1938).Google Scholar

18. Canada, Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada (Archambault) (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938). Serious rioting at the Kingston Penitentiary in the early 1930s produced political pressure for the federal government to review penal policy and to refocus on the reform potential of incarceration.

19. For further details on lobbying efforts and parliamentary maneuvering, see Strange, “The Lottery of Death.”

20. In 1954, shortly after the Joint Committee began to deliberate, the Criminal Code was amended to restrict the number of offenses for which sentences of corporal punishment could be ordered. Gross indecency, assault on a sovereign, and “assaults on wife or other female” were removed.

21. Struthers, James, No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914–1941 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983)Google Scholar; John Herd Thompson, with Seager, Alan, Canada, 1922–1939: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McLelland and Steward, 1985).Google Scholar

22. In 1931 alone, twenty-five men were executed (out of thirty-two condemned to death). From Confederation to 1930, approximately half of those sentenced to death had been executed: over the 1930s, that rate rose to 61 percent, although the per annum rate declined sharply by the decade's end. In 1936, the number of executions fell to fourteen, and by 1940 it sank to nine. Figures compiled from Ministry of the General, Solicitor, Capital Punishment: Material Relating to Its Purpose and Value (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1965), appendix B, table A.Google Scholar

23. On 28 January 1937, “Bill 6, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Death Penalty)” reached second reading, with the recommendation that the issue be studied by a special committee that was struck on 2 February 1937. The committee (hereafter Death Committee) met four times in February and March 1937, tabling its report to Parliament on 17 March 1937.

24. Creighton, Donald, The Forked Road: Canada 1939–1957 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), 107–9.Google Scholar

25. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 15 December 1953, 943 (hereafter Debates). Work on overhauling the Criminal Code began in 1948 and was completed in 1956.

26. Lay Police Magistrate Haig-Brown, quoted in Debates, 13 August 1956, 7489

27. Stuart Garson, Debates, 15 December 1953, 941. The legal defense of insanity was the fourth issue left unresolved in revisions to the Criminal Code.

28. Donald Creighton sums up the period effectively when he says that the post-war decade was “a sober and conventional period which kept the law and retained established customs.” The Forked Road, 245.

29. The committee presented its final reports on each of these three issues separately.

30. Brubaker, Rogers, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984).Google Scholar For analyses of the dysfunctionality of modern bureaucracies, see Wrong, Dennis, ed., Max Weber (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1970).Google Scholar

31. In England, the privatization of capital punishment subjected executions to the prison regime. According to McGowen what had been “ceremonial and festive” became “petty, tedious, and mean.” McGowen, “Civilising Punishment,” 281.

32. Nevada was the first state to introduce lethal gas in 1924. Death Committee, 1.

33. Death Committee, 4.

34. Ibid., 58–59. Apparently the reigning “Mr. Ellis” had been hired because of his experience in the Indian Army (where he acquired his skills executing deserters and saboteurs, one assumes), 62–63.

35. Ibid., 24. Dr. Plouffe, an alienist superintendent of the criminally insane at Montreal's Bordeaux Prison agreed, but he refused to respond to a question about whether or not it was difficult for guards and professionals to care for a prisoner for months, only to kill him or her. Ibid., 58.

36. In response to the report, the National Parole Board was established in 1958. Canada, Department of Justice, “Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Principles and Procedures Followed in the Remission Service of the Department of Justice in Canada (Fauteux Report)” (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1956).

37. When members of or witnesses before the 1954 committee raised issues concerning insanity, the chair or other members typically reminded them that theirs was not the appropriate forum for such discussions. For the terms of the Royal Commission's appointment, see Debates, 15 December 1953, 941.

38. Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons on Capital and Corporal Punishment and Lotteries, “Minutes and Proceedings of Evidence” (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1954), vol. 3, 132 (hereafter, Joint Minutes).

39. The 1930s were peak years in judicial sentences of corporal punishment. In that period, approximately 10 percent of convictions for offenses subject to the possibility of corporal punishment provisions resulted in such sentences. By the 1950s, that rate had dropped to 1.5 percent. Canada, Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons, “Final Report on Corporal Punishment,” Journals of the Senate, 11 July 1956, 557d and 557e.Google Scholar

40. Except in jokes, as I discuss below. Section 1060, subsection 4 of the Criminal Code prohibited the infliction of corporal punishment on females.

41. The 1938 Archambault Committee's exposure of institutionalized prisoner abuse was a major source of embarrassment for the federal government. By the time the Ouimet Committee on the penitentiary services reported in 1969, the practice had ceased altogether. Canada, Correctional Service of Canada, “Fifty Years of Human Rights Developments in Federal Corrections” (Ottawa, 1998), 10. This observation applies only to recorded punishments and to federal, not provincial prisons, jails, or reformatories.

42. The Criminal Code specified the cat-o-nine-tails, unless the sentence called for another instrument. Since corporal punishment was also carried out in provincial penal institutions, further variations were possible (usually a leather lash or paddle of some sort).

43. Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson, Joint Committee, Joint Minutes, 1:44.

44. In its 1954 interim report, the Joint Committee indicated that the following practitioner's guide was on order: Duff, Charles, A new handbook on hanging, being a short introduction to the fine art of execution, containing much useful information on neck-breaking, throttling, strangling, asphyxiation, decapitation, and electrocution, rev. ed. (London: Melrose, 1954).Google Scholar

45. As late as 1966, the majority of Canadians still accepted the use of corporal punishment in schools. When asked if they thought that school officials should “ever have the right to give pupils ‘a licking’?” 51 percent said yes. Gallup Poll of Canada, Canadian Institute of Public Opinion, press release, 8 January 1966.

46. Joint Committee Minutes, 657.

47. Joint Minutes, 5:235.

48. Bentham, Jeremy, “Of Circumstances Influencing Sensibility,” Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780)Google Scholar, quoted in Mack, Mary Peter, ed., A Bentham Reader (New York: Pegasus, 1969): 101–6.Google Scholar

49. Joint Committee, “Final Report on Corporal Punishment,” 557g, 557f.

50. Death Committee, 36.

51. Gallup polls indicated that Canadians' support for the death penalty dropped sharply over the 1950s. In 1950, 70 percent favored it; by 1960, only 51 percent of Canadians continued to support the death penalty. Statistics quoted in Department of the General, Solicitor, Capital Punishment. New Material, 1965–1972 (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1972), 69.Google Scholar

52. The New Democratic Party, the political inheritor of the C.C.F., was the only party to vote consistently in favour of abolition in the 1960s up to the most recent vote in 1986. For a detailed analysis of the party breakdown in voting, see Chandler, David, Capital Punishment in Canada (Ottawa: McClelland and Steward, 1976): 74–144.Google Scholar

53. Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons on Capital and Corporal Punishment and Lotteries, “Minutes and Proceedings of Evidence, No. 1” (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1954), 111, 119, 77.

54. The Final Report summarized testimony on this matter by commenting that professional criminals were “already hardened” and that they regarded imprisonment merely “as an occupational hazard.” Joint Report, 545k. Testimony from law enforcement witnesses was considerably more colorful, however. RCMP Commissioner Nicholson was one of many witnesses who warned of an “influx of gangsters” if Canada abolished the death penalty. Joint Committee Minutes, vol. 15, 626.

55. Canada, Debates, 13 August 1956, 7492

56. The Final Report emphasized that the Archambault Report's advice on prescribing reasonable limits for the use of corporal punishment be observed. Essentially, it advocated restricting corporal punishment to acts of violence or insurrection. Joint Report, Corporal Punishment, 557n.

57. Quoted in Fletcher, Jonathan, Violence and Civilisation: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), 46.Google Scholar

58. For a discussion of the methodological and theoretical issues such an analysis entails, see Hudson, Barbara, “Punishment and Governance,” Social and Legal Studies 7.4 (1998): 581–87.Google Scholar

59. For exceptions, see Smith, “Civilized People.” Myra Glenn observes in her analysis of antebellum debates about corporal punishment that advocates associated whipping with manliness (the ability to withstand pain stoically) whereas opponents argued that it emasculated men (putting them in a posture of humiliating subservience). Glenn, , Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 117–19.Google Scholar

60. For criticism of gender blindness in Elias's work, see Hargreaves, Jennifer, “Sex, Gender and the Body in Sport and Leisure: Has There been a Civilising Process?” in Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process: Critique and Counter Critique, ed. Dunning, Eric and Rojeck, Chris (London: Macmillan, 1992): 161–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In response to Hargreave's critique, Dunning admitted that he and Elias had “in the past been too silent on questions of gender,” but that they “needed feminists … to point out the unexamined masculinist assumptions in [their] work.” Quoted in van Krieken, Norbert Elias, 159–60.

61. C. Claxton, Death Committee, 10. Claxton referred to a 1933 article, “Capital Punishment by Lethal Gas,” published in the American Mercury, in which a lawyer claimed to have witnessed executions where the condemned appeared to have endured horrible distress. Every U. S. warden polled agreed that gas was the most humane method available.

62. Hyndman, Death Committee, 13. Dr. Blair, the bill's sponsor appeared to have taken him seriously. Nitrous oxide was unsuitable because it could induce “an excitable convulsive condition.”

63. Ibid., 5.

64. Ibid., 31, 33, 38.

65. Ibid., 50.

66. Ibid., 62, 32, 67, 61.

67. The promise of a distinctive Canadian flag was first introduced in 1945. Debates raged into the 1950s and Canada finally flew the maple leaf for the first time in 1965. Granatstein, Jack, Canada: 1957–1967: The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986): 201–5.Google Scholar

68. Joint Committee Minutes, 17:714. Sellin was quoting from his foreword to Caldwell, Robert Graham, Red Hannah: Delaware's Whipping Post (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The 1938 Cadogan Committee had similarly concluded that corporal punishment had no discernible deterrent effect.

69. Ibid., 14:599, 603.

70. Ibid., 135–37, 352, 613.

71. Given that sado-masochistic rituals often dramatize images of state punishment (ruthless prison guards and vulnerable inmates acting out scenes of torture and sexual slavery, for instance), the line between state sanctions and subversive sexual play are not nearly so distinct as respectable advocates of physical punishment would care to admit. This issue has arisen recently in regard to concerns about the possible erotic effects produced by asphyxiation through hanging. For nineteenth-century penal reformers' concerns about the sado-masochistic aspects of whipping, see Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment, 47–49.

72. Ibid., 145–46, 230–31. Winch betrayed his own chivalrous inclinations when he said that wife beaters were the only offenders for whom he could agree that the lash was appropriate. Ibid., 357.

73. The scandalous female onlooker is a conventional trope in critiques of spectacular punishment's brutalizing effects. Consider, for instance, Dickens's Madame de Farge or the female spectators in Hogarth's The Idle Apprentice. On carnivalesque spectatorship, see Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnival, and the State.”

74. Garland, , Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar As he continues, the “social meaning and motivations of punishment” are intelligible only if one decodes the “languages, discourses, and sign systems which embody cultural meanings.”

75. I would add historians and penal theorists to the list of those who have declined to make the sexual aspects of corporal and even capital punishment explicit. Contemporary historians are not immune from the same social and cultural imperatives that civilized punishment.

76. Perhaps this accounts for the controversy over newspaper pictures of the Kingston warden holding a strap and a cat-of-nine-tails. Several members thought it was a public service to publicize the image, but one member thought that the public was unable to discriminate and would think of the warden as “a pretty grim man.” Joint Committee Minutes, 221–22.

77. As members of the Canada Welfare Council pointed out, “most of the West European and South and Central American countries, as well as six U.S. states, had abolished the death penalty by the post-war era.” Joint Committee Minutes, 409.

78. Joint Committee Minutes, 415, 414

79. Ibid., 415, 650

80. Members briefly considered the guillotine and firing squad as options but did not take them seriously. Thorsten Sellin perhaps explained their reservations best when he answered an inquiry about the guillotine: “it is certainly a quick method but rather a messy one.” Joint Committee Minutes, 694.

81. Ibid., 451–52. Because of the secrecy surrounding the hangman's identity, it is difficult to ascertain who held this position when the Joint Committee met. The Final Report indicated that two provinces (probably Ontario and Quebec) had their own hangmen who acted as roving executioners for the other provinces. Joint Committee, “Final Report,” para. 86, 11.

82. Respected defense lawyer Arthur Maloney, an opponent of capital punishment, cited the U.K. Royal Commission on Capital Punishment to underline Canadian shortcomings in execution techniques. Officials contended that England had not had a botched execution in the past fifty years. Joint Committee Minutes, 169. On the craft tradition among English executioners, see Syd Dernley with Newman, David, The Hangman's Tale: Memoirs of a Public Executioner (London: Pan Books, 1989).Google Scholar

83. Joint Committee, “Final Report,” para. 91, v. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate the minutes recording the testimony of the Illinois State Penitentiary warden (on electrocution) and the San Quentin Penitentiary warden (on gas). It is possible that this evidence was delivered in camera.

84. Joint Committee Minutes, 694. Sellin responded to a question about whether or not the “ratio of inefficiency” was as great in regard to the electric chair as it was with hanging. As he replied, “I do not recall any case where electrocution has failed to kill a person promptly.”

85. Joint Committee, Final Report, paragraphs 89–93, p, u, v.

86. The amendment was made in 1868 but violated after the Northwest Rebellion. See Greenland, Cyril, “The Last Public Execution in Canada: Eight Skeletons in the Closet of the Canadian Justice System,” Criminal Law Quarterly 29.4 (1987): 415.Google Scholar The scaffold was erected at a height of twenty feet inside the fort at Battleford and eight Aboriginal men, convicted of treason, were hanged en masse, 418–19.

87. Hundreds clamored for perches to witness the execution of Reginald Birchall in Woodstock in 1890. Hilda Blake's hanging was clearly visible from behind the fence at the Brandon (Manitoba) Provincial Jail in 1899. Anderson, Frank, A Concise History of Capital Punishment in Canada (Calgary: Frontier Publishing Ltd., 1973), 43, 48.Google Scholar

88. Joint Committee Minutes, 409, 648. The article was printed in the Toronto Daily Star, 26 May 1954.

89. Ibid., 576, 647

90. Ibid., 464, 694, 650.

91. The presiding chairman dismissed the latter prospect on legal grounds. “If he gave it to himself it would be suicide.” Joint Committee Minutes, 467.

92. Joint Committee Minutes, 650; Joint Committee Final Report, u.

93. Joint Committee, Final Report on Corporal Punishment, 557g. The Saskatchewan Attorney-General was more direct: “We consider the use of corporal punishmen … as an instrument of unadulterated revenge.” Joint Committee minutes, 783.

94. Joint Committee, Final Report, para. 88, u.

95. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, 281.

96. For a critique of ahistorical analyses of emotion, see McGowen, Randall, “Revisiting the Hanging Tree: Gatrell on Emotion and History,” British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

97. Van Krieken, “The Barbarism of Civilisation.” I am grateful to Robert for underlining this application of Elias's notions about civilizing and decivilizing processes.

98. British historiography is especially well developed in this area. See McGowen, Randall, “A Powerful Sympathy. Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 312–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiener, Martin, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Devereaux, Simon, “In Place of Death: Transportation, Penal Practices, and the English State, 1770–1830,” in Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment, and Discretion, ed. Strange, Carolyn (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996): 52–76.Google Scholar

99. As Elizabeth B. Clark argues in regard to antebellum America, emotionally powerful antislavery writings “expandf[ed] the definition of cruel behaviour”and thereby made it imaginable for white Americans to care about the physical punishment of slaves. “lsquo;The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82.2 (1995): 463–93, 463.

100. For a study of the cultural meanings of technology in domestic life, see Parr, Joy, “What Makes Washday Less Blue? Gender, Nation, and Technology Choice in Post-War Canada,” Technology and Culture 38.1 (1997): 153–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

101. Van Krieken, “The Barbarism of Civilization,” 299.

102. During the second moratorium on capital punishment, the governing Liberal party commissioned a University of Montreal academic to study the impact of the death penalty on Canadian murder rates. The resulting report concurred with Sellin's findings: the death penalty had no demonstrable impact on the number of murders in Canada. Fattah, Ezzat, A Study of the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment with Special Reference to the Canadian Situation (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973).Google Scholar

103. Although some states, notably those closest to the Canadian border, do not include death penalty statutes, federal penal sanctions include capital punishment. For this reason, Amnesty International defines the U.S. as a retentionist nation, both in law (after the landmark Supreme Court decision, Gregg v. Georgia, Supreme Court Reporter [1976]: 2909–50), and in practice.

104. According to a Newsweek poll, over a third of U.S. respondents approved of Michael Fay's caning (four strokes on bare buttocks with a wet cane) for spray-painting cars. Newsweek, 4 July 1994. Almost 90 percent of residents polled in Dayton, Ohio (Fay's home town), believed that the punishment was just. Baltimore Sun, 14 April 1994, 1 A. In 1996, the case inspired Canada's rightwing Reform Party's justice critic, Art Hanger, to pay a visit to Singapore, so that he might observe caning in person. When reporters asked if he had evidence to support its reintroduction to Canada, he replied: “It just seems like a good idea.” Ottawa Sun, 2 March 1996.