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I believe that the punishment may have euphemistically been referred to as some kind of exile (maybe in order to get around capital punishment not being legal?), but it was actually a death sentence because the prisoner was 'exiled' into such a small space that they couldn't possibly survive, like an inch wide or something. It may not have been a way of getting around legalities though, it could just have been a really weird method of execution.

In the scene I remember, the character finds themselves in one of these chambers - and the wall is advancing towards him slowly as if driven by a piston. But he scrabbles at the wall at the back and finds some loose stones or bricks that he's able to pull out and I think he climbs up the wall somehow before the piston crushes him - suggesting that this was some kind of apparatus located outside, I don't think it was indoors. I really thought that it was supposed to be at the very edge of the city (?), hence the 'exiling' to just outside its limit against a wall, but I could be misremembering that part.

I think it stuck with me because I found it disturbing, but now I can't remember anything else about the context at all, at first I thought it was from Emphyrio by Jack Vance but it seems not.

I believe the general setting was kind of an anachronistic SF, like not hard or high-tech SF but some kind of really odd society with fantasy elements, which is perhaps why I remembered it being from Emphyrio which has that kind of vibe.

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  • Hi, welcome to SF&F. When did you read this? Was it a physical book or an e-book? Commented yesterday
  • Hi! I believe it was a physical book and I read it about 10 years ago. Gut feeling is that it was probably written in the 60s, 70s or 80s. Commented yesterday
  • If you've self-answered, the thing to do is to post an answer. If you feel it's off-topic, there's a delete button. Commented yesterday
  • The general premise sounds similar to "The Iron Shroud" by William Mudford, but that is considerably older, and the protagonist doesn't escape. Commented yesterday
  • @ClaraDíazSánchez and in between that and Vance, Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. Since Poe it has become a fairly routine idea s while the answer is almost certainly correct, it's quite likely that something very similar exists Commented 23 hours ago

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Your guess was right: this is from Emphyrio, by Jack Vance. In Ambroy, the setting of this novel, criminals are exiled in one of four directions, but unfortunately this might be into a very narrow space:

"...Well then—can a noncup be rehabilitated?"

"No," said Nion Bohart. "If he is determined a criminal he is expelled, over one of the four frontiers. A simple vagrant is expelled east into Bayron. A smuggler fares worse and is expelled into the Alkali Flats. The worst criminals are expelled into the first two inches of Bauredel. The Special Investigator explained all this to me. I told him I wasn't a criminal, that I had committed no great wrong; he said I had disobeyed the regulations. I told him that maybe the regulations should be changed, but he refused to laugh." (from Chapter 8)

The protagonist, Ghyl Tarvoke, is eventually caught by the authorities and punished by expulsion into Bauredel, but he escapes, just as you remember, by climbing onto a wall:

A great concrete piston, entirely filling the alley, moved forward, thrusting Ghyl toward that single inch of Bauredel territory available for his occupancy.

Ghyl backed up against the piston, planted his feet against the crumbling brick. The piston thrust forward. Sixty feet to the border. A film of sunlight, pale as lymph, slanted into the avenue, outlining uneven edges of the brick, framing the concrete plug of the portal with a black shadow.

Ghyl stared at the bricks. He ran forward, tugged at a brick, then another, then another, until his fingernails broke and his fingertips were bloody. By the time he found a loose brick, the piston had denied him all but forty feet of avenue. But after the first brick came up, others pulled up without difficulty. He rushed to carry the bricks to the wall, stacked them into a pile, ran back for more.

Bricks, bricks, bricks: Ghyl’s head pounded; he gasped and wheezed. Thirty feet of avenue, twenty feet, ten feet. Ghyl scrambled up the pile of bricks; they collapsed below him; frantically he stacked them again, with the piston looming over his shoulder. Up once more, and as the pile gave way he scrambled to the top of the wall. The piston thrust upon the bricks. A crunch, a crush: the bricks compressed into a friable red cake. (from Chapter 18)

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