Comparisons with Prisons

Public schools (especially boarding schools) have sometimes been light-heartedly compared by their pupils or ex-pupils to prisons. O. G. S. Crawford stated that he had been "far less unhappy" when incarcerated in Holzminden prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War than he had previously been at his public school, Marlborough College. Evelyn Waugh observed in his satirical novel Decline and Fall (1928) that "anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison". Former Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment for perjury in 1999, commented in an interview: "As far as the physical miseries go, I am sure I will cope. I lived at Eton in the 1950s and I know all about life in uncomfortable quarters."