Mitchel's recent biographer, Anthony Russell, who recommends that Mitchel's statue in Newry "be accompanied by at least an explanation of the context – perhaps even by a work of art condemning slavery", argues that Mitchel's stand on slavery was not an aberration. His rejection of philanthropic liberalism was equal to his disdain for "free labour" political economy. In his "Jail Journal" Mitchel urged capital punishment for crimes such as burglary, forgery and robbery. The "reformation of offenders" was not, he argued, "the reasonable object of criminal punishment”: "Why hang them, hang them….you have no right to make the honest people support the rogues….and for 'ventilation'… I would ventilate the rascals in front of the county jails at the end of a rope".