the photograph is real, but the story behind it is, as far as we can tell, entirely conjecture on the part of the dude who took the picture. from my understanding, there’s reason to believe that this punishment was used the same as stocks in colonial times. they would stick you in there for a period of time so that you could be publicly humiliated and uncomfortable, and then you’d eventually be released. there are stories of Mongolian prisoners having food thrown to them in tiny coffin-like boxes, there’s not much reason to believe this is any different