broadcast by networks and reprinted in newspapers at least in part for their entertainment value." But he found them to serve a legitimate state interest as well: History Perp walks have historical antecedents in public spectacles around the administration of justice throughout history. Within the United States, again particularly in New York City, the process has evolved over time and through some celebrated instances. Medieval Europe In medieval Europe, the end of the judicial process, often an execution, was often its most public, and sometimes the only public, aspect. French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, his influential history of the evolution of criminal justice over the course of the Enlightenment: At that point, "[i]t was the task of the guilty man to bear openly his condemnation and the truth of the crime he had committed." Convicts wore placards summing up their offense, and on the way to the gallows were stopped at churches to make an amende honorable, a ceremonial plea for forgiveness. The executions themselves were long, almost theatrical spectacles, such as the 1757 drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens for his attempted assassination of King Louis XV. A detailed account of that procedure, the last execution by that method in French history, opens Foucault's book. In medieval England as well, those convicted of high treason were paraded through the streets in an open wagon to their executions. Originally they had been dragged by horses, but some arrived almost dead from that treatment, unable to live through the hanging, castration, disemboweling and drawing and quartering that followed. While being transported, they were often pelted with objects thrown at them by onlookers. "This was a symbolic process that led the criminal to oblivion," observed Charles Spencer in Killers of the King, his 2014 account of the regicides of Charles I, many of whom were executed this way. "The drawing through the streets provided a final, degrading journey from the living world." In the 19th century, as penal-reform efforts began to succeed, imprisonment began to replace execution as the preferred punishment for egregious crimes, since it offered the possibility of the convict's eventual repentance. The spectacles surrounding execution became more restrained, even when those were held in public. By the middle of the century larger cities were establishing police departments, professionalizing the prevention and investigation of crime. 1890s–1960s: The early years In the United States, the perp walks