(_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 comes _at the
beginning_ of 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 inflict
_unnecessary 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.”
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.