“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 cells _with 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.
(2)
(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 unfortunates _for 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 punish _for the mere sake of punishing_
those 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 not _live_ in 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, the _existing system_ has 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 and _ultimate elimination_,
except in individual cases. . . .”
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[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.
(3)