(2)

“Solitude produces in him (the vacuous-minded, erratic, and animal person who is usually the criminal) no intellectual activity and no searching of conscience; it serves to deepen his mental vacuity and to deliver him over to unnatural indulgence in the one animal appetite of which he cannot be deprived.” (“The Criminal,” Havelock Ellis, p. 328.)

Beltrani-Scalia, formerly Inspector-General of Prisons in Italy, is of the same opinion, and remarks that “the cellular system looks upon man as a brother of La Trappe.” (“The Criminal,” p. 329.)

The following passage, taken from Prince Kropotkin’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” refers to a peasant confined solitarily in a cell beneath him in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and with whom he and his neighbour could communicate by knocking.

“Soon I began to notice, to my terror, that from time to time his mind wandered. Gradually his thoughts became more and more confused and we two perceived, step by step, day by day, evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries came next from the lower storey; our neighbour was mad. . . . To witness the destruction of a man’s mind under such conditions was terrible.”

Finally, this is the judgment of the rector of St. Marylebone, Dr. W. D. Morrison (after more than ten years’ experience as Prison Chaplain): “It tends to have a demoralising effect upon many classes of prisoners.”

Such evidence might be multiplied indefinitely.

Now, sir, in regard to the object of solitary confinement we have surely no need to go behind the finding of your committee:

“It would appear that the main object of the separate” (closed-cell) “confinement had come to be deterrence . . . In effect this is the purpose which it must be regarded as now designed to serve.”

In regard to its nature, we have, as surely, no need of other description than its supporter’s, the late Sir Edmund Du Cane’s “An artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health.”

The questions arising, then, are two:—

(a) Is this practice of solitary confinement, in fact, deterrent?(b) Has a civilized nation the right to retain offenders for months in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the purpose of deterrence?

(a) Is this practice of solitary confinement, in fact, deterrent?

(b) Has a civilized nation the right to retain offenders for months in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the purpose of deterrence?

As to question (a). No support can be gathered for the plea of deterrence from the statistics of penal servitude; mere severity of punishment has never been proved to be a factor of deterrence. When men were hung for horse or sheep stealing those offences were far more prevalent than they are now. Moreover, the nature of their coming punishment is too vaguely known to those who have never been in prison for the thought of solitary confinement to have any deterrent effect on ninety-nine out of a hundred first offenders. Indeed, that it is not sufficiently present to any man’s mind is shown by the fact that so humane a public as ours knows and thinks so little about the suffering of solitary confinement as to have allowed it to remain part of their prison system.

The effect of a period of solitary confinement which comesat the beginningof long years of imprisonment is inevitably wiped out by the monotony of the prison life which follows. Mechanical adjustment to environment is always going on in the human being. Solitary confinement is a smothering process to which the mind must adapt itself, or perish. The mental demoralization remains after the confinement comes to an end, but the consciousness of that mental ruin, the consciousness of the suffering, has become dulled; from his closed cell the convict passes on to the ordinary prison life, actually unable to appreciate the extent of the misery he has undergone. Obviously, moreover, deterrence (if there be deterrence) paid for by mental and moral weakening is not true deterrence;for the acquired power of resistance to crime, if any, is nullified through deterioration of the prisoner’s fibre.

The true deterrence of imprisonment lies in the general fear of loss of liberty; in that nightmare of a thought all details of impending punishment (even if known) mechanically merge.

This solitary confinement, however, is sometimes justified on the ground that it is necessary to buoy the convict up with hope. It is thought that by placing him at the outset in the seventh hell of pain we lessen his sufferings in the minor hells which await him at the expiration of those first dire months. That, sir, is humanity with a vengeance. Imagine this principle logically applied to social life. The husband would beat the wife that she might not so greatly feel the inevitable wear and tear of matrimony; the mother would starve the child that it might experience with more equanimity the ordinary pangs of hunger; the master would withhold wages that the servant might more duly appreciate the receipt of what was due to him. It appears, indeed, to be almost what is called a vicious principle.

To question (b)—Whether a civilized country has the right to retain its offenders in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the sake of a supposed deterrence—I conceive, sir, but this one answer: Only so long as we do not realize what this solitary confinement means.

Six months (to take the mean sentence) is a short time to a free man; it is an eternity to a prisoner confined in solitude. One hundred and eighty days—four thousand hours, of utter solitude and silence in a cell, which—in the words of Sir Robert Anderson (Nineteenth Century, March, 1902)—“differs from every other sort of apartment designed for human habitation in that all view of external nature, such as might soothe, and possibly alleviate, the mind, is, with elaborate care, excluded”—solitude broken only by one hour a day, of chapel, and walking up and down a yard, by the sight of a warder, three times or so a day, bringing in food; by a ten minutes’ visit perhaps from chaplain or governor.

Four thousand hours of utter solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven—with the prospect of anything from two to twenty years of monotonous routine and loss of liberty to follow! Can a Public Opinion, which succeeds in bringing these facts home to its imagination, justly say that two and a half to twenty years of loss of liberty, with all that this means in prison, is not sufficient punishment for any crime that man can commit, without the preliminary agony of four thousand hours of solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven?

Sir, Public Opinion has never yet succeeded in realizing what this so-called separate confinement means. In the year ending March, 1907, we set 1,035 persons, of whom 691 had never been sentenced to penal servitude before, to endure these hours of agony and demoralization. In the year ending March, 1908, we set another 1,179 to endure the same, 749 of them for the first time. At the present moment another thousand, more or less, are undergoing it.

In thus subjecting year by year a thousand persons to nine, six, or three months of an “artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health,” we are annually committing an offence against our reason, of which we reap the full reward in the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of persons already demoralized enough; and an offence against our humanity in reality as great as if we had placed them on the rack.

I by no means lose sight of the fact that this closed-cell confinement falls with different effect on different temperaments; it falls, no doubt, far less heavily on the sluggish and the brutalized than on the nervous types, of which, however, we are now breeding great numbers. But, sir, even the habitual criminal—popularly supposed to dread flogging more than anything—has been known while enduring solitary confinement to beg for the lash in place of it. Sir J. Jebb, giving evidence before the Penal Servitude Acts Commission in 1863, uses these words: “With burglars and reckless characters I think that separate confinement is dreaded more than any other kind of discipline.” And in regard to other effects on the habitual criminal, the words of Professor Prins, above quoted, are significant. The sluggish brutality of many recidivists is produced in the first place by this very process of closed-cell confinement. Man, even the lowest type of man, is a social and gregarious animal—all that is best in him depends on, and is brought out by, contact with his fellow-creatures; if that be not so, our religion and whole social scheme are falsely conceived. Deprive man of all contact with his fellow-man, shut him in upon himself, hopelessly, utterly, month by month, and he will come out of that artificial existence lower and more brutal than when he entered it. Prolonged starvation and agony of the mind is worse than starvation and agony of the body, carrying, as it does, the wreck of the body with it.

We have the right to restrain offenders and to safeguard society; in doing this we unavoidably punish with that already terrible punishment “loss of liberty.” But, sir, we have—surely—not the right to inflictunnecessary and harmful suffering. I recognise to the full that there is no lack of humanity among those who work our prison system; recognise to the full that they would not willingly inflict any suffering that they acknowledged to be unnecessary; but in every department of life those who administer a system are, in the nature of things, with rare exceptions, too habituated to that system, too close to it, to be able to see it in due perspective.

I ask you, sir, and I ask the common sense of the public, whether harmful and unnecessary suffering must not inevitably be endured by the mind, and through the mind by the body, of a human being during these thousands of hours of closed-cell confinement. To answer that question fairly each member of the public has but to ask what would be the effect on himself or herself of nine or six or even three months’ utter seclusion (except for one hour each day) from all sight and sound not only of human beings, but of animals, trees, flowers, and from the sight even of the sky, all but a patch no bigger than a tea-tray. We are on the whole a humane people; and it is not so much a question of our humanity as of our imaginations. The position is plainly this: Those who have to work our prison system perhaps could not do so at all if they allowed their imaginations fair play. The community are too aloof to realize what that prison system means. And so the unnecessary demoralization and suffering caused by this closed-cell confinement goes on at the rate of (for convicts alone) more than four million hours a year!

I do not base the appeal of this letter so much on humanity as on common sense. Why, when we are faced with appalling statistics of criminality, with appalling difficulties in dealing with and reforming criminals, do we deliberately continue a practice which both evidence and reason tell us contributes to the more complete demoralization of such as are already demoralized?

In the Report of your Departmental Committee of 1895 occur these words:

“It should be the object of the prison authorities, through the prison staff and any suitable auxiliary effort that can be employed, to humanize the prisoners, to prevent them from feeling that the State merely chains them for a certain period and cares nothing about them beyond keeping them in safe custody and under iron discipline.”And again: “. . . it strengthens our belief that the main fault of our prison system is that it treats prisoners too much as irreclaimable criminals instead of reclaimable men and women.”

And again: “. . . it strengthens our belief that the main fault of our prison system is that it treats prisoners too much as irreclaimable criminals instead of reclaimable men and women.”

I submit that no unprejudiced man can regard this closed-cell confinement as a humanizing influence, except in the rarest cases, or maintain that it helps to reclaim men and women.

I refer again to this paragraph in the Report of your Committee:

“It” (the detention of convicts in closed-cell confinement at local prisons) “is certainly a practical convenience in the sense that the expense of sending convicts immediately after sentence to convict prisons, either singly or in detachments, is curtailed by the system of gathering prisons.This consideration alone is not sufficient to justify the practice.”

I am credibly informed that the whole matter is one of administration, and can be modified without Act of Parliament. I appeal, then, to you, sir, who have already done so much towards reforming our prison system, to work for the abandonment of this custom of confining convicts in closed cells for nine, six or three months,or any less period, either in local or in convict prisons; to substitute therefore work in association from the commencement of sentence; or, where such is not immediately possible, work in separate cellswith open doors. And I would further appeal to you to advocate the reduction of the twenty-eight days, closed-cell confinement endured by prisoners serving sentences of hard labour.

Than this great and necessary reform I can conceive none that will, at a single stroke, remove so much harmful and unnecessary suffering, or do more to reconcile our Penal Laws with Justice and Common Sense.

(From a Letter to Sir Evelyn Ruggles Brise, K.C.B., Prison Commission, Whitehall, July, 1909.)

“. . . I was at X. Prison on Tuesday, at Y. Prison yesterday. Saw all the officials, and talked with twelve convicts. . . .

“It was suggested to me at X. that I ought to stay some days there and see every convict. I would be willing, if you will allow me, to stay some days at X. Prison, see every convict, and keep record of the answers obtained from each one as to the effect on him of separate confinement. I think they would speak to me freely. From all I hear, and certainly from its situation and general airiness and lightness, X. Prison is the best of the four collecting prisons, and there would be no danger of getting an impression more unfavourable to separate confinement than I should get from seeing each convict in all four prisons.

“An expression used during our conversation the other day leads me for a moment into the deeper and wider significance of this question. It was the expression ‘a downright enemy of society’ used of a certain class of prisoner. I have been thinking over that phrase ‘a downright enemy of society’ to see if one more meditation on it would correct the conclusions of a hundred previous meditations, but I do not feel that it has. I think of it like this: Every now and then, seldom enough but still too frequently, we come across children, in all classes, who, from the age when they begin to act at all, show that there is something in them warped, distorted, inherently inimical to goodness. It is in them, of them, a taint in their blood, a lesion of their brain. They grow up. They are not insane, but they have a blind spot, a place in their souls or internal economy—or whatever you like to call it—that some mysterious, rather awful, hand has darkened. They are doomed from their birth by reason of that blind spot sooner or later to become criminals, that is, to commit some action which is not consonant with the actions of those who are born without this blind spot; some are not found out, some are. When found out they are known as ‘the criminal type.’ They form a portion, not perhaps a very large one, of our convicts. Can those, who have had the good fortune to be born like their fellows, punish these unfortunatesfor the sake of punishing them, for the sake of avenging society? I cannot bring myself to think so.

“These are not, however, the bulk of our convicts. The greater part of them are those who are born more or less normal, but with what is called a weak character.[5]I don’t know if you have ever been much amongst those classes which supply the vast proportion of our criminals; if you have, you will recognize, as I do, what a wonderful thing it is that so small a proportion of them become criminals. You will have seen the very dreadful struggle they have against luck from the time when they begin to know anything. You will feel, as I do, that keeping their heads above water is, and must be, touch and go with them from day to day; they’ve just a plank between them and going down, and a very little extra sea (it runs high all the time) tips that plank over. Many of them are bred in slums and garrets where the only real God is Drink. When they go under, they are suddenly up against the most inexorable thing in life, Law and Order, to whose mercilessness every citizen subscribes in self-defence, whether he will or no. When they have paid their debt to Law, they emerge into the same conditions against which they were too weak by nature to stand up before, with the one weapon they had, character, either gone or gravely damaged. It is not remarkable that they go down again, and then again, and so on, until they become ‘enemies of society.’

“It seems to me that gentlemen (I speak in the spirit), holding as their creed the duty of putting themselves in the place of others, cannot reconcile it with that creed to punishfor the mere sake of punishingthose whose chances in life have been so vastly inferior to their own.

“These general considerations must be platitudes to you, and I feel that you do not, any more than I, believe in punishment as a means of revenging society, but merely as a means of protecting society by restraining and trying to reform the offender. Society (I speak in the widest sense of heredity and environment) makes the offender; it can restrain, but it cannot with justice exact vengeance from the victims of its own shortcomings.

“All hope of real diminution in crime and criminals (in default of better social conditions) depends, in my belief, not on the infliction of ‘deterrent suffering’ in prisons, but,first, on the extension of probation, and your splendid Borstal system;secondly, on abolition of ‘tickets of leave,’ and that vicious principle of not having done with the offence when you have paid the penalty for it;thirdly, on a moderate, humane, and reformatory use of the principle of detention of the hopeless recidivist;fourthly, on the increase of humanizing influences brought to bear on prisoners in prison. I give full weight to the necessity for not making prison life a treat, and to the consideration that what would be hell to us may be comparative ease to the habitual criminal; but I think that, with ‘closed-cell’ confinement abolished, society might still make its mind easy. The man who will come back to prison life from choice, so long as he can get his bread in freedom, does not exist; the cumulative force of hard and regular work, of silence, of no tobacco, of no drink, of no knowledge of what is going on outside, of being ordered about from morning to night, of being, a number, not a man, of losing all touch with his family and friends, above all, of utter monotony, of the sense at the best of being in school, at the worst of being in slavery, of the feeling of having whole years sponged out of his life (for a man does notlivein prison), may not be easy to grasp for those who live in liberty themselves, but it is none the less tremendous.

“It is perhaps superfluous to remind you, who for so many years have been fighting for and achieving reforms, of what a queer, hypnotizing influence ‘things as they are’—in fact, theexisting systemhas on the minds of those who are constantly confronted with it; and to beg you for that reason to take due discount from the evidence of those who are necessarily under that hypnotic influence; just as no doubt you will, without my begging you, take discount from my appeal on the ground that I am an outsider.

“I can’t close this letter without saying that it’s impossible to go over our prisons and not see that the country has in yourself a great reforming administrator; I shall consider it a rare piece of good fortune if any words of mine help to bring about in your mind the belief that this particular feature of our prison system, closed-cell confinement, requires immediate mitigation andultimate elimination, except in individual cases. . . .”

[5]Criminality, I now think, is as often the result of too strong a character, or rather of too much unbalanced self-will.—J. G.

[5]

Criminality, I now think, is as often the result of too strong a character, or rather of too much unbalanced self-will.—J. G.

A Minute on Separate Confinement

Forwarded to the Home Secretary and the Prison Commissioners, September, 1909.

(Compiled from visits paid to sixty convicts undergoing separate confinement in X. and Y. Prisons, July and September, 1909.)

By the courtesy of the Prison Commissioners, to whom my thanks are due, I visited these convicts in their cells, and conversed privately with each one of them for from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour. I put certain definite questions to each in regard to the effect of separate confinement on themselves, and, so far as they could tell me, on other prisoners, prefacing each conversation by the information that I was in no way connected with the prison authorities. My object in the course of these conversations was to get behind the formal question and answer to the man’s real feelings. I met with no hostility, defiance, or conscious evasion in any single case. In some cases a word or two was sufficient to bring a rush of emotion. Several men were in tears throughout the interview. In the majority of cases, however, I found it difficult to get the prisoners to express themselves; and in some cases formal answers, stolidly given, were reversed by some sudden revelation of feeling evoked, as it were, in spite of the prisoner’s self. Generally speaking, I judged that feelings were understated rather than overstated.

The summary of these interviews is as follows: (sixty convicts interviewed): —

Of these:

Of the eight convicts in Category A, who preferred separate:

Fourwere educated men (three of whom asserted a natural preference for their own society in or out of prison).Onewas an old recidivist with five sentences of penal servitude.Two(of a callous type) preferred separate confinement because they had no temptation to talk and get into trouble.Onewas the only prisoner I saw who said he had deliberately committed his offence in order to get into prison.

Fourwere educated men (three of whom asserted a natural preference for their own society in or out of prison).

Onewas an old recidivist with five sentences of penal servitude.

Two(of a callous type) preferred separate confinement because they had no temptation to talk and get into trouble.

Onewas the only prisoner I saw who said he had deliberately committed his offence in order to get into prison.

The following phrases taken from notes made immediately after each interview indicate the general nature of the suffering experienced by prisoners separately confined:

“I used to look up at the window, and something seemed to pull me back.”“The first month was awful, I didn’t hardly know how to keep myself together. I thought I should go mad.”“It’s made me very nervous. The least thing upsets me; I was not nervous before.”“I’ve got a daughter, and I grieve over her all the time; there’s nothing to take your mind off.”“I’ve never felt right since—it’s got all over me.” (This man cried all the time. He seemed utterly unnerved, and broken up. A Star Class man.)“I feel it dreadfully. It gets worse as it goes on.”“It’s no life at all. I’d sooner be dead than here.” (This man was very tearful and quavery.)“My first spell of ‘separate’ nearly drove me raving.” (This was a recidivist serving his third term.)“It broke me down on my first sentence. It destroys a man.”“I had a cold lonely feeling. . . . Nine months of it is killing for most men.”“It’spunishmentto shut up a man for nine months.” (This is a fair specimen of the very general under-statement of evidently acute feelings.)“It’ll send men ‘up the stick.’ ” (Off their heads.)“I’m very miserable and down-’earted. You feel it more and more as you get older. I hardly know sometimes what I’m doing.” (This was from an old man of sixty-one who had been twenty years in prison, and said he did not expect to last through this sentence.He had still six months of separate to run, and struck me as very broken up, and suffering.)“I keep ‘picturing’ things, and walking about. It sends men ‘up the pole!’ ” (Another bad case of a young recidivist of twenty-nine, with five months of his ‘separate’ still to run.)“Walls seem to close in. . . . I get blankness in the brain; have to stop reading.”“It’s hell upon earth.” (An educated prisoner.)“Almost unbearable depression.” (An educated prisoner.)“Sleep’s the only comfort.”“I sit there sometimes at work, not knowing what I’m doing.”“I’ve good nerves. A man with bad nerves would soon snuff out in ‘separate’.”“If a man had the spy-hole open even, so that he could see out, it would make a vast deal of difference. . . . I’ve seen numbers of men come on the public works from their ‘separate,’ quite silly.”“I’ve seen many a man driven queer.” (This recidivist had served four terms of penal servitude.)“I’ve seen men driven off their nuts.”

“I used to look up at the window, and something seemed to pull me back.”

“The first month was awful, I didn’t hardly know how to keep myself together. I thought I should go mad.”

“It’s made me very nervous. The least thing upsets me; I was not nervous before.”

“I’ve got a daughter, and I grieve over her all the time; there’s nothing to take your mind off.”

“I’ve never felt right since—it’s got all over me.” (This man cried all the time. He seemed utterly unnerved, and broken up. A Star Class man.)

“I feel it dreadfully. It gets worse as it goes on.”

“It’s no life at all. I’d sooner be dead than here.” (This man was very tearful and quavery.)

“My first spell of ‘separate’ nearly drove me raving.” (This was a recidivist serving his third term.)

“It broke me down on my first sentence. It destroys a man.”

“I had a cold lonely feeling. . . . Nine months of it is killing for most men.”

“It’spunishmentto shut up a man for nine months.” (This is a fair specimen of the very general under-statement of evidently acute feelings.)

“It’ll send men ‘up the stick.’ ” (Off their heads.)

“I’m very miserable and down-’earted. You feel it more and more as you get older. I hardly know sometimes what I’m doing.” (This was from an old man of sixty-one who had been twenty years in prison, and said he did not expect to last through this sentence.He had still six months of separate to run, and struck me as very broken up, and suffering.)

“I keep ‘picturing’ things, and walking about. It sends men ‘up the pole!’ ” (Another bad case of a young recidivist of twenty-nine, with five months of his ‘separate’ still to run.)

“Walls seem to close in. . . . I get blankness in the brain; have to stop reading.”

“It’s hell upon earth.” (An educated prisoner.)

“Almost unbearable depression.” (An educated prisoner.)

“Sleep’s the only comfort.”

“I sit there sometimes at work, not knowing what I’m doing.”

“I’ve good nerves. A man with bad nerves would soon snuff out in ‘separate’.”

“If a man had the spy-hole open even, so that he could see out, it would make a vast deal of difference. . . . I’ve seen numbers of men come on the public works from their ‘separate,’ quite silly.”

“I’ve seen many a man driven queer.” (This recidivist had served four terms of penal servitude.)

“I’ve seen men driven off their nuts.”

I could not get an admission from any prisoner that the suffering they underwent in separate confinement deterred them from coming back to prison. The two reasons they assigned for coming back to prison were:

(1) That they had so little chance outside. (2) Drink.

It is obvious, however, that the separate period is almost universally regarded as much the worst part of the sentence.

My reasons for believing that, in spite of this, separate confinement is not, in fact, deterrent were given in my open letter to the Home Secretary (theNation, May 1st and May 8th, 1909); this belief has been strengthened rather than weakened in the course of this investigation. As a final result of these visits I record my deliberate conviction that no competent observer with any knack of getting at men’s feelings, and the opportunity of conversing in private andas a private person, with the prisoners could come to any other conclusion than that an immense amount of harmful and unnecessary suffering is inflicted by closed-cell confinement extending over the periods (especially the longer periods) now prevailing. It is my belief that if the authorities were able to adopt this method of getting at the real state of the case the system would not remain unaltered for a single day.

(From a Letter to the Home Secretary, the Right Hon. Herbert John Gladstone, M.P., October, 1909.)

“. . . Every day that passes with this question undealt with means so many thousand hours of solid, tangible, harmful, removable misery. There is a distinction between this particular kind of misery and any other experienced by man in a state of society such as we now have in England. There is no other form of acute,prolonged misery enforcedon people in such a way as that they can by no possibility avoid it. The old saying, ‘He deserves all he’ll get and more,’ stultifies itself the moment it is looked into; the plea of deterrence does not hold water; and this misery stands out stark—a survival from the philosophy (!) of the dark ages. . . .”

Note.—Solitary (or separate) confinement for convicts has been reduced from nine, six, and three months to three months for “old hands,” and one month for the other two classes of convicts. But the writer feels as strongly as ever that, except in special cases, it should be done away with altogether.—J. G.

The Spirit of Punishment

(An Article in theDaily Chronicle, 1910.)

In the matter of our administration of justice there is a very simple question to be asked by every man of his own conscience: What do I believe is the object of punishment? Until this question has been asked and coherently answered by the community it is obviously as mad to apply punishment as for a man to set out to dine with a friend of whose address he has no knowledge. But by how many people has this question been asked; by how many has it been coherently answered?

The whole administration of our justice at present treads the quicksands of ambiguity as to the object of punishment. The vast majority of us have never put to ourselves the question at all, being quite satisfied that the object of punishment is to “serve people right”; and out of the small minority who have asked the question the far greater number have given themselves no coherent answer. And yet it is only from a coherent and wise answer, graven in letters of stone on our law courts and prisons, in letters of feeling in our hearts, that hope of diminution in crime, and in the damage which arises from it, both to the community and to the offender, can come.

Now, whatever sentimental relation there be between punishment and our deep instincts of equity,the object of punishment is the protection of society and the reformation of the offender. That is the only safe rulein practice; and everything in our administration of justice which conflicts with it is falsely conceived. But it is the commonest thing in the world for people to accept that definition without considering in the least what it means; for experts, after thoroughly agreeing with it, to suddenly remark that for such and such a crime they, personally, would have no mercy; for sentences to be passed in which the judge has obviously fitted the punishment to his private views of the heinousness of the crime, without real regard for the protection of society, or for the reformation of the person sentenced. All which is extremely natural, and very bad.

The confusion arises from not keeping the idea of the protection of society closely enough coupled with the idea of the reformation of the offender; from dwelling too much on the past, and not looking enough to the future; from the continued existence of the old theory, “an eye for an eye” condemned to death over nineteen hundred years ago, but still dying very hard in this Christian country.

The protection of Society includes the adjustment of punishment so as not to leave on the mind of the injured person a crude sense of injury unhealed by retribution. It includes the removal from individuals of the desire to take the law into their own hands. It is necessary to preserve in punishment a due element of deterrence. The State and those who administer its functions have no business with anything but the scientific application of the best means to do all this, and reform the offender.

Yet in the glibbest way that golden rule “protection of society and reformation of the offender” is cited to cover all the flaws in our administration of justice.

In its name men are prosecuted, when with better comprehension they should be warned or helped.

In its name first offenders are imprisoned, when with better comprehension theimprisonment of first offenders, of whatever age, for whatever offence, should be unknown; a much greater danger to society arises, and infinitely less chance of reforming the delinquent exists, when that delinquent has once been committed to prison. Place him on probation, or send him to a reformatory institution such as Borstal, for whatever fixed period may seem necessary—but to a prison, as prisons now are, never! To send him there is fatal, hopeless, uneconomic, unscientific.

In its name, the continuance of closed-cell confinement is defended; and we endeavour to reform men by consigning them to the operation of what, in the words of its staunch supporter (the late Sir Edmund Du Cane), is, “an artificial state of existence, absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health.” We try in fact to protect society by a method that does not reform. Many have raised their voices against this strange practice since evidence, given before the Select Committee on Prison Discipline, 1850, described closed-cell confinement as dangerous to health, and unjust to the prisoner “because it throws him back into society with diminished physical ability to encounter the variableness of climate, the severity of labour, and the pinchings of want, to which as a labourer in the market of competition he must ever be liable.” . . .! Yet in the name of the golden rule the practice lingers on, helping to rot men and women.

In the name of this golden rule, prisoners working in association are, in our prisons, forced into an unnatural silence, for ever furtively evaded. Some silence may be good, but perpetual silence is too unnatural not to defeat itself. Classification is the true preventive of contamination, not complete separation, nor perpetual silence.

In its name the handicap of the ticket-of-leave (now, thank heaven, modified) is placed on those who are desperately handicapped already.

The idea behind these and other practices of the administration of our justice is that much deterrent suffering is needful for the protection of society and the reformation of the offender. But those who know human nature know that, except in rare cases, human beings cannot bereformedby suffering inflicted on them against their will, and it is no use having a system of punishment beneficial to the few and harmful to the majority. The late Lord Coleridge once made these remarks:—

“There are few things more frequently borne in on a judge’s mind than the little good he can do the criminal by the sentences he imposes. These sentences often do nothing but unmixed harm, though I am sure that throughout the country the greatest pains are taken to make our prisons as useful as possible in the way of being reformatories. But,as a matter of fact, they are not so.”

Greater pains are now taken than when those words were spoken, but a man cannot go over prisons (I do not speak of the Borstal institutions) without seeing that they are not,cannot be, reformatory.

Reformation does not come from beating on the prisoner’s fibre with the dull mallet of suffering. To reform one must inspire. There is a spark of good in every man’s breast; the only chance lies in fanning that spark. But if we are not reforming men in our prisons, how can we be said to be protecting society, by sending them there? We are surely endangering society; and nurturing the spirit of crime.

The fact of the matter is this: Revenge is still at the back of our minds. Let a man argue on the subject with whomsoever he will, ten minutes will not have passed before he makes that discovery. The State still feels that because a man has hurt it, it must hurt him. And this feeling destroys all the economy and science of our laws. When a crime is committed, all we should be concerned with, in our own interests, is the application of the best possible means to minimize the results of that crime, to ensure that society shall run the least possible risk of a repetition of the crime, and the offender the least possible risk of remaining a criminal.

In doing this we cannot, in very many cases, avoid the detention of our criminals; but we can, and should, avoid inflicting suffering on those whom we detain, beyond the already great suffering and deprivation inseparable from disciplinary detention, and all that disciplinary detention implies; for by deliberately superadding such sufferings as solitude, or perpetual unrelieved silence, we do not to any appreciable degree deter others from committing offences, and we do foster in those whom we imprison the disposition to commit fresh offences when they are released.

That diminution of crime, dependsnoton deterrent punishment, but on wide and impalpable influences—growth of social feeling, spread of education, betterment of manners, decrease of intemperance, improvement in housing, a hundred other causes—is plain from the official statement lately issued. “The members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857, in spite of the fact that in the interim population has almost doubled.”And this in the face of admittedly milder penal measures!For further evidence that mere severity of treatment does not deter we need only look at the comparative success of the Elmira Reformatory in the United States, and the Borstal institutions here. Under these systems, which allow the offender some kind of natural life, the percentage of those who return to crime is most notably smaller.

Crime is disease—if not in the medical, in the moral sense of the word. It is either the disease of weakness, or of unbalanced self-will, or the disease of inherited taint. We have fought against this conclusion because we still harbour the spirit of revenge; but as knowledge advances we shall, we must, accept it. And the sooner we do accept it the less money we shall waste, the less harmful and unnecessary suffering shall we inflict.

The difficulties of judicial and prison administration are enormous, the force of prejudice encountered by reforming administrators terrific—all the more terrific because these prejudices, in the main conscientious, are wholly reinforced by the fact that change means trouble and expense, by fears of making things worse, by all the accumulated momentum of “things as they are.” For a man with any understanding in his composition it is impossible not to sympathize with those who, administering justice, earnestly desire to do their best, and are often, one is sure, sick at heart from the feeling that what they are doing isnotthe best.

It rests with public opinion in this country to re-animate our attitude towards crime; to shake itself free of our muddled conceptions of the object of punishment; to scotch once for all the spirit of revenge; to rise to a higher, more scientific and incidentally more economic, conception of our duty towards criminals. Let us get rid of the idea that we are protecting society and reforming offenders by inflicting suffering that we falsely call deterrent. Let us change our prisons into Borstal Institutions, and let us do it as soon as is humanly possible. Loss of liberty is, next to loss of life, the most dreaded of all fates; it has, in and by itself, almost all the deterrent force that is needful. There may be here and there men who prefer to be detained under strict discipline to being at liberty; but if there be, it can only be said that the conditions of their lives outside prison must constitute a disgrace to our civilization, and that our penal system cannot safely or justly be allowed to rest on any acquiescence in that disgrace. In the last annual report of the Borstal Association occur the following words:

“It is not a namby-pamby method. . . . The panic-monger who prophesies that the ambitious youth of the working classes will still clamour for admission through the gateway of crime to the advantages of Borstal, would be regarded as a humorist by those who have been there and ‘have had enough and learnt sense.’ ”

Let us, then, take discipline and loss of liberty as our sole deterrents, and on those whom we deprive of liberty let us use all the resources of a common sense that shall refuse to apply to criminals methods which would be scouted in the reform of human beings outside prisons.

All evidence shows that mere, so-called deterrent, severity is useless. Let us no longer fly in the face of evidence. Let us conform to facts. If we seriously desire to reduce crime to its irreducible minimum we must go to work like doctors.

An Unpublished Preface

(Written in 1910.)

It is not my habit to write prefaces, but there are certain things I want to say concerning the play “Justice,” as to its subject-matter, not its artistic qualities, bad, good, or indifferent.

Holding perhaps a more intimate knowledge of its author’s mind than can elsewhere be obtained, I would remark that the play is no indictment or attack, but a picture of the whole process of Justice as seen by this painter’s eye. There are thickenings of line here, and thinnings there, occasioned by lack of technical knowledge, or demanded by the exigencies of dramatic craft, but the spiritual essence of the matter is set down honestly, as best it could be perceived by him.

Justice was known by the ancients to be blind; by ourselves is admitted blind; will be acclaimed blind by the tongues of our descendants. It is blind because it is depart- or rather compart-mental.

The prosecutor, be he ancient Roman or Englishman of to-day, cannot gauge or control thewholeeffect on the offender and on society of the process which he initiates. The Judge, be he Solon or Judge of the High Court, cannot know enough of the temperament and antecedents of a prisoner to adequately apportion a sentence which he cannot see being carried out. The prison official is tied to the terms of the sentence and the conditions of the system, for some system there must be. The Public, on the prisoner’s release, acts mechanically in its own defence against a marked man. All see only their own bits of the game.

From this general blindness, it follows that punishment is almost always out of proportion. This is why it seemed to me worth while to make a picture of Blind Justice, and to hang it on the wall. There are some who believe that this picture will rapidly become out of date. I am not so sanguine. Short of our all becoming not only eager, but able, to see that which does not lie underneath our noses, I much fear that this picture will remain valid for some considerable time The conditions will change, but the spirit will remain—Justice is too naturally and inevitably blind. Is that any reason why we should not occasionally be reminded of the evil—one of the enduring, but perhaps diminishable, evils of human life? Even the administrators of this Justice might like now and then to glance at a picture of its blindness.

One word about the cell scene. It has been called false and exaggerated. . . . Two brothers went to see this play. At the end of the cell scene the younger, who stammers, turned to his elder and said: “It’s n-not so—j-j—olly as all that!”

Precisely! Prisoners do not commonly enjoy the relief of beating on their cell doors, though the incident is not unknown. But he who can project himself into the minds of others knows that prisoners, in closed cells, moping and brooding week after week, month after month, shut off from all real distraction, from all touch with the outer world and everything they care for, with the knowledge of years of imprisonment before them and of broken lives when they come out—knows that such prisoners, thousands of them, unseen by any eye,reach a state of mindwhich would make them constantly fling themselves for relief on their cell doors, if it were not for fear. No, it is not so jolly as all that!

The characteristics of all prison life, at all events in England, are silence and solitude, physical or spiritual; and this cell scene was selected to convey as nearly as the limitations of the stage permitted, these commonest characteristics of detention.

For the truth of this picture of Blind Justice as a whole I rely on the testimonial of that theatre attendant, employed out of charity, who, having been prosecuted, sentenced, imprisoned, and released, knew, let us hope, more of the matter spiritually, than those who criticize. After the play on the first night, to the question of his manager, “Well, is it true?” he looked up from his sweeping, and said: “Every word of it, sir.”

I have only this to add. If each scene is taken separately and looked on with a departmentally professional eye, it must needs seem out of drawing, for it was visualized by an eye looking on each department only in relation to the whole. When the professional reader or spectator of the Court or Prison scene, says “Oh! this or that is not true!” he is criticizing from the departmental, and not from the bird’s-eye point of view, which an author must needs assume. Even if the sentence be more than typically severe, though I doubt that, or the judgment not typically worded, they serve well enough as illustrations of that blindness which has accompanied the wisest judgments of one human being on another since the world began.

No, the only legitimate criticism which the professional reader or spectator can pass is that the particular bird’s-eye view is wrong. To that criticism this bird can make no answer, except to say with deference and courtesy that he must believe in his own eye—for it is all he has to see with.

Back to Index Next