The trial was over, but I remained for another couple of months at
the Lyons prison. Most of my comrades had lodged an appeal against
the decision of the police court and we had to wait for its results.
With four more comrades I refused to take any part in that appeal to a
higher court, and continued to work in my _pistole_. A great friend
of mine, Martin--a clothier from Vienne--took another _pistole_ by the
side of the one which I occupied, and as we were already condemned, we
were allowed to take our walks together; and when we had something to
say to each other between the walks, we used to correspond by means of
taps on the wall, just as in Russia.
Already during my sojourn at Lyons I began to realize the awfully
demoralising influence of the prisons upon the prisoners, which brought
me later to condemn unconditionally the whole institution.
The Lyons prison is a ‘modern’ prison, built in the shape of a star,
on the cellular system. The spaces between the rays of the star-like
building are occupied by small asphalte-paved yards, and, weather
permitting, the inmates are taken to these yards to work outdoors.
They mostly beat out the unwound silk cocoons to obtain floss silk.
Flocks of children are also taken at certain hours to these yards.
Thin, emasculated, underfed--the shadows of children--I often watched
them from my window. Anæmia was plainly written on all the little faces
and manifest in their thin, shivering bodies; and not only in the
dormitories but also in the yards, in the full light of the sun, they
themselves increased their anæmia. What will become of these children
after they have passed through that schooling and come out with their
health ruined, their will annihilated, their energy weakened? Anæmia,
with its weakened energy and unwillingness to work, its enfeebled
will, weakened intellect, and perverted imagination, is responsible
for crime to an infinitely greater extent than plethora, and it is
precisely this enemy of the human race which is bred in prison. And
then, the teachings which the children receive in these surroundings!
Mere isolation, even if it were rigorously carried out--and it cannot
be--would be of little avail; the whole atmosphere of every prison is
an atmosphere of glorification of that sort of gambling in ‘clever
strokes’ which constitutes the very essence of theft, swindling,
and all sorts of similar anti-social deeds. Whole generations of
future prisoners are bred in these nurseries which the state supports
and society tolerates, simply because it does not want to hear its
own diseases spoken of and dissected. ‘Imprisoned in childhood:
prison-bird for life,’ was what I heard afterwards from all those who
were interested in criminal matters. And when I saw these children
and realized what they had to expect in the future, I could not but
continually ask myself: ‘Which of them is the worst criminal--this
child or the judge who condemns every year hundreds of children to this
fate?’ I gladly admit that the crime of these judges is unconscious.
But are, then, all the ‘crimes’ for which people are sent to prison as
conscious as they are supposed to be?
There was another point which I vividly realized since the very first
weeks of my imprisonment, but which, in some inconceivable way,
escapes the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal
law--namely, that imprisonment in an immense number of cases is a
punishment which strikes quite innocent people far more severely than
the condemned prisoners themselves.
Nearly every one of my comrades, who represented a fair average of the
working-men population, had either their wife and children to support,
or a sister or an old mother who depended for their living upon his
earnings. Now, being left without support, these women did their best
to get work, and some of them got it, but none of them succeeded in
earning regularly even as much as fifteen pence a day. Nine francs
(less than eight shillings), and often six shillings a week, to support
themselves and their children was all they could earn. And that meant
evidently underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and the deterioration
of the health of the wife and the children: weakened intellect,
weakened energy and will. I thus realized that what was going on in
our law courts was in reality a condemnation of quite innocent people
to all sorts of hardships, in most cases even worse than those to
which the condemned man himself is submitted. The fiction is that the
law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of physical and
degrading hardships. But man is such a creature that whatever hardships
be imposed upon him, he gradually grows accustomed to them. As he
cannot modify them he accepts them, and after a certain time he puts
up with them, just as he puts up with a chronic disease, and grows
insensible to it. But what, during his imprisonment, becomes of his
wife and children, that is, of the innocent people who depend upon him
for support? They are punished even more cruelly than he himself is.
And in our routine habits of thought no one ever thinks of the immense
injustice which is thus committed. I realized it only from actual
experience.
* * * * *
In the middle of March 1883, twenty-two of us who had been condemned
to more than one year of imprisonment, were removed in great secrecy
to the central prison of Clairvaux. It was formerly an abbey of St.
Bernard, of which the great Revolution had made a house for the poor.
Subsequently it became a house of detention and correction, which
went among the prisoners and the officials themselves under the
well-deserved nickname of ‘house of detention and corruption.’
So long as we were kept at Lyons we were treated as the prisoners
under preliminary arrest are treated in France; that is, we had our
own clothes, we could get our own food from a restaurant, and one
could hire for a few francs per month a larger cell, a _pistole_.
I took advantage of this for working hard upon my articles for the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Nineteenth Century.’ Now, the
treatment we should have at Clairvaux was an open question. However, in
France it is generally understood that, for political prisoners, the
loss of liberty and forced inactivity are in themselves so hard that
there is no need to inflict additional hardships. Consequently, we were
told that we should remain under the _régime_ of preliminary detention.
We should have separate quarters, retain our own clothes, be free from
compulsory work, and be allowed to smoke. ‘Those of you,’ the governor
said, ‘who wish to earn something by manual work, will be enabled to
do so by sewing stays or engraving small things in mother-of-pearl.
This work is poorly paid; but you could not be employed in the prison
workshops for the fabrication of iron beds, picture frames, and so on,
because that would require your lodging with the common-law prisoners.’
Like the other prisoners we were allowed to buy from the prison canteen
some additional food and a pint of claret every day, both being
supplied at a very low price and of good quality.
The first impression which Clairvaux produced upon me was most
favourable. We had been locked up and had been travelling all the day,
from two or three o’clock in the morning, in those tiny cupboards
into which the cellular railway carriages are usually divided. When
we reached the central prison we were taken temporarily to the
cellular, or punishment quarters, and were introduced into the usual
but extremely clean cells. Hot food, plain but of excellent quality,
had been served to us notwithstanding the late hour of the night, and
we had been offered the opportunity of having the half-pint of very
good _vin du pays_ (local wine) which was sold to the prisoners by the
prison canteen, at the extremely low price of 24 centimes (less than
2½_d._) per quart. The governor and the warders were most polite to us.
Next day the governor of the prison took me to see the rooms which he
intended to give us, and when I remarked that they were all right but
only a little too small for such a number--we were twenty-two--and
that overcrowding might result in illness, he gave us another set of
rooms in what was in olden times the house of the superintendent of
the abbey, and now was the hospital. Our windows looked out upon a
little garden, and beyond it we had beautiful views of the surrounding
country. In another room on the same landing old Blanqui had been kept
the last three or four years before his release. Before that he had
been imprisoned in the cellular house.
Besides the three spacious rooms which were given to us, a smaller
room was spared for Gautier and myself, so that we could pursue our
literary work. We probably owed this last favour to the intervention
of a considerable number of English men of science who, as soon as I
was condemned, had addressed a petition to the President asking for my
release. Many contributors to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ as well
as Herbert Spencer and Swinburne, had signed, while Victor Hugo had
added to his signature a few warm words. Altogether, public opinion in
France received our condemnation very unfavourably; and when my wife
had mentioned at Paris that I required books, the Academy of Sciences
offered the use of its library, and Ernest Renan, in a charming letter,
put his private library at her service.
We had a small garden, where we could play nine-pins or _jeu de
boules_. We managed, moreover, to cultivate a narrow bed running
along the wall, and, on a surface of some eighty square yards, we
grew almost incredible quantities of lettuces and radishes, as well
as some flowers. I need not say that we at once organized classes,
and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux I gave my
comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding
them in the study of languages. Nearly every one learned at least one
language--English, German, Italian, or Spanish--while a few learned
two. We also managed to do some book-binding, having learned how from
one of those excellent Encyclopédie Roret booklets.
At the end of the first year, however, my health again gave way.
Clairvaux is built on marshy ground, upon which malaria is endemic,
and malaria, with scurvy, laid hold of me. Then my wife, who was
studying at Paris, working in Würtz’s laboratory and preparing to
take an examination for the degree of Doctor of Science, abandoned
everything, and came to stay in the hamlet of Clairvaux, which consists
of less than a dozen houses grouped at the foot of an immense high wall
which encircles the prison. Of course, her life in that hamlet, with
the prison wall opposite, was anything but gay; yet she stayed there
till I was released. During the first year she was allowed to see me
only once in two months, and all interviews were held in the presence
of a warder, who sat between us. But when she settled at Clairvaux,
declaring her firm intention to remain there, she was soon permitted
to see me every day, in one of the small guard-houses of the warders,
within the prison walls, and food was brought me from the inn where she
stayed. Later, we were even allowed to take a walk in the governor’s
garden, closely watched all the time, and usually one of my comrades
joined us in the walk.
I was quite astonished to discover that the central prison of Clairvaux
had all the aspects of a small manufacturing town, surrounded by
orchards and cornfields, all encircled by an outer wall. The fact
is that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more
dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the
warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the
prisoners is far more humane than it is in the corresponding lock-ups
on this side of the Channel. The mediæval spirit of revenge which still
prevails in English prisons has long since been given up in France.
The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a
mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to the prison he gets
a decent bed and retains it. He is not compelled either to do degrading
work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, on
the contrary, in useful work, and this is why the Clairvaux prison
has the aspect of a manufacturing town in which iron furniture,
picture-frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen,
ladies’ stays, small things in mother-of-pearl, wooden shoes, and so
on, are fabricated by the nearly 1,600 men who are kept there.
Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there
is none of the flogging which still goes on in English prisons: such a
punishment would be absolutely impossible in France. Altogether, the
central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best prisons
in Europe. And yet, the results obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in
any one of the lock-ups of the old type. ‘The watchword nowadays is to
say that prisoners are reformed in our prisons,’ one of the members of
the prison administration once said to me. ‘This is all nonsense, and I
shall never be induced to tell such a lie.’
* * * * *
The pharmacy at Clairvaux was underneath the rooms which we occupied,
and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were
employed in it. One of them was a grey-haired man in his fifties,
who ended his term while we were there. It was touching to learn how
he parted with the prison. He knew that in a few months or weeks he
would be back, and begged the doctor to keep the place at the pharmacy
open for him. This was not his first visit to Clairvaux, and he knew
it would not be the last. When he was set free he had not a soul in
the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. ‘Who will care
to employ me?’ he said. ‘And what trade have I? None! When I am out
I must go to my old comrades; they, at least, will surely receive me
as an old friend.’ Then would come a glass too much of drink in their
company, excited talk about some capital fun--some capital ‘new stroke’
to be made in the way of theft--and, partly from weakness of will,
partly to oblige his only friends, he would join in it, and would be
locked up once more. So it had been several times before in his life.
Two months passed, however, after his release, and he was not yet
back to Clairvaux. Then the prisoners, and the warders too, began to
feel uneasy about him. ‘Has he had time to move to another judicial
district, that he is not yet back? One can only hope that he has not
been involved in some bad affair,’ they would say, meaning something
worse than theft. ‘That would be a pity: he was such a nice, quiet
man.’ But it soon appeared that the first supposition was the right
one. Word came from another prison that the old man was locked up
there, and was now endeavouring to be transferred to Clairvaux.
The old prisoners were the most pitiful sight. Many of them had begun
their prison experience in childhood or early youth, others at a riper
age. But ‘once in prison, always in prison,’ such is the saying derived
from experience. And now, having reached or passed over the age of
sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in a gaol. To quicken
their departure from life the prison administration used to send them
to the workshops where felt socks were made out of all sorts of woollen
refuse. The dust in the workshop soon gave these old men consumption,
which finally released them. Then four fellow prisoners would carry the
old comrade to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog
being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest
would march in front of the procession, mechanically reciting his
prayer and looking round at the chestnut or fir-trees along the road,
and the four comrades carrying the coffin would enjoy their momentary
escape out of prison, the black dog would be the only being affected by
the solemnity of the ceremony.
When the reformed central prisons were introduced in France, it was
believed that the principle of absolute silence could be maintained in
them. But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement
had to be abandoned. In fact, even solitary confinement is no obstacle
to intercourse between the prisoners.
To the outward observer the prison seems to be quite mute; but in
reality life goes on in it as busily as in a small town. In suppressed
voices, by means of whispers, hurriedly dropped words, and scraps of
notes, every news of any interest spreads immediately all over the
prison. Nothing can happen either among the prisoners themselves, or
in the _cour d’honneur_, where the lodgings of the administration are
situated, or in the village of Clairvaux, where the employers of the
factories live, or in the wide world of Paris politics, but that it
is communicated at once throughout all the dormitories, workshops,
and cells. Frenchmen are of too communicative a nature for their
underground telegraph ever to be stopped. We had no intercourse with
the common-law prisoners, and yet we knew all the news of the day.
‘John, the gardener, is back for two years.’ ‘Such an inspector’s wife
has had a fearful scrimmage with So-and-So’s wife.’ ‘James, in the
cells, has been caught transmitting a note of friendship to John from
the framers’ workshop.’ ‘That old beast So-and-So is no more minister
of justice: the ministry has been upset.’ And so on; and when the news
goes that ‘Jack has got two five-penny packets of tobacco in exchange
for two flannel spencers,’ it flies round the prison in no time.
Demands for tobacco were continually pouring in upon us; and when a
small lawyer detained in the prison wanted to transmit to me a note, in
order to ask my wife, who was staying in the village, to see from time
to time his wife, who was also there, quite a number of men took the
liveliest interest in the transmission of that message, which had to
pass I do not know how many hands before it reached its goal. And when
there was something that might specially interest us in a paper, this
paper, in some unaccountable way, would reach us, with a little stone
wrapped into it, to help its being thrown over a high wall.
Cellular imprisonment is no obstacle to communication. When we came
to Clairvaux and were first lodged in the cellular quarter, it was
bitterly cold in the cells; so cold, indeed, that when I wrote to
my wife, who was then at Paris, and she got my letter, she did not
recognize the writing, my hand being so stiff with the cold. The order
came to heat the cells as much as possible; but do what they might,
the cells remained as cold as ever. It appeared afterwards that all
the hot-air tubes in the cells were choked with scraps of paper, bits
of notes, penknives, and all sorts of small things which several
generations of prisoners had concealed in the pipes.
Martin, the same friend of mine whom I have already mentioned, obtained
permission to serve part of his time in cellular confinement. He
preferred isolation to life in a room with a dozen comrades, and went
to a cell in the cellular building. To his great astonishment he found
that he was not at all alone in his cell. The walls and the keyholes
spoke round him. In a day or two all the inmates of the cells knew who
he was, and he had acquaintances all over the building. Quite a life
goes on, as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only
that life often takes such a character as to make it belong entirely
to the domain of psychopathy. Kraft-Ebbing himself had no idea of the
aspects it takes with certain prisoners in solitary confinement.
I will not repeat here what I have said in a book, ‘In Russian and
French Prisons,’ which I published in England in 1886, soon after my
release from Clairvaux, upon the moral influence of prisoners upon
prisoners. But there is one thing which must be said. The prison
population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those
who are usually described as ‘the criminals’ proper, and of whom we
have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck
me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered
as a preventive measure against anti-social deeds, are exactly the
institutions for breeding them and for rendering these offences
worse and worse after a man has received prison education. Everyone
knows that the absence of education, the dislike of regular work
acquired since childhood, the physical unpreparedness for sustained
effort, the love of adventure when it receives a wrong direction,
the gambling propensities, the absence of energy and an untrained
will, and carelessness about the happiness of others, are the causes
which bring this category of men before the courts. Now I was deeply
impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these
defects of human nature--each one of them--which the prison breeds in
its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison,
and will breed them so long as there are prisons. Incarceration in a
prison necessarily, fatally, destroys the energy of a man, and still
more kills his will. In prison life there is no room for exercising
one’s will. To possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get
into trouble. The will of the prisoner _must_ be killed, and it
is killed. Still less is there room for exercising one’s natural
sympathies, everything being done to destroy free contact with those
outside the prison and within it with whom the prisoner may have
feelings of sympathy. Physically and mentally he is rendered less
and less prepared for sustained effort; and if he has had formerly
a dislike for regular work, this dislike is only the more increased
during his prison years. If, before he first came to the prison, he
soon felt tired by monotonous work, which he could not do properly,
or had a grudge against underpaid overwork, his dislike now becomes
hatred. If he doubted about the social utility of current rules of
morality, now, after having cast a critical glance upon the official
defenders of these rules, and learned his comrades’ opinions of them,
he openly casts the rules overboard. And if he has got into trouble in
consequence of a morbid development of the passionate sensual side of
his nature, now, after having spent a number of years in prison, this
morbid character is still more developed--in many cases to an appalling
extent. In this last direction--the most dangerous of all--prison
education is most effective.
In Siberia I had seen what sinks of filth, and what workshops of
physical and moral deterioration the dirty, overcrowded, ‘unreformed’
Russian prisons were, and at the age of nineteen I imagined that if
there were less overcrowding in the rooms, and a certain classification
of the prisoners, and healthy occupations were provided for them,
the institution might be substantially improved. Now, I had to part
with these illusions. I could convince myself that as regards their
effects upon the prisoners, and their results for society at large,
the best ‘reformed’ prisons--whether cellular or not--are as bad as,
or even worse, than the dirty lock-ups of old. They do not ‘reform’
the prisoners. On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority
of cases, they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect. The
thief, the swindler, the rough man, and so on, who has spent some
years in a prison, comes out of it more ready than ever to resume his
former career; he is better prepared for it; he has learned how to do
it better; he is more embittered against society, and he finds a more
solid justification for being in revolt against its laws and customs;
necessarily, unavoidably, he is bound to go farther and farther along
the anti-social path which first brought him before a law court. The
offences he will commit after his release will be graver than those
which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life
in a prison or in a hard-labour colony. In the above-mentioned book
I wrote that prisons are ‘universities of crime, maintained by the
state.’ And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the
light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of
mine.
Personally I have no reason whatever to complain of the years I have
spent in a French prison. For an active and independent man the
restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation
that all the remainder, all the petty miseries of prison life, are not
worth speaking of. Of course, when we heard of the active political
life which was going on in France, we resented very much our forced
inactivity. The end of the first year, especially during a gloomy
winter, is always hard for the prisoner. And when spring comes, one
feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty. When I saw from our
windows the meadows assuming their green garb, and the hills covered
with a spring haze, or when I saw a train flying into a dale between
the hills, I certainly felt a strong desire to follow it, to breathe
the air of the woods, to be carried along with the stream of human life
into a busy town. But one who casts his lot with an advanced party
must be prepared to spend a number of years in prison, and he need not
grudge it. He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not
quite an inactive part of the stream of human progress which spreads
and strengthens the ideas which are dear to him.
At Lyons my comrades, my wife, and myself certainly found the warders
a very rough set of men. But after a couple of encounters all was
set right. Moreover, the prison administration knew that we had the
Paris press with us, and they did not want to draw upon themselves
the thunders of Rochefort or the cutting criticisms of Clémenceau.
And at Clairvaux there was no need of such a restraint. All the
administration had been renewed a few months before we came thither.
A prisoner had been killed by warders in his cell, and his corpse had
been hanged to simulate suicide; but this time the affair leaked out
through the doctor; the governor was dismissed, and altogether a better
tone prevailed in the prison. I took back from Clairvaux the best
recollections of its governor; and altogether, while I was there, I
more than once thought that, after all, men are often better than the
institutions to which they belong. But having no personal griefs, I can
all the more freely, and most unconditionally condemn the institution
itself, as a survival from the dark past, wrong in its principles, and
a source of unfathomable evil to society.
One thing more I must mention as it struck me, perhaps, even more
than the demoralising effects of prisons upon their inmates. What
a nest of infection is every prison, and even a law court for its
neighbourhood--for the people who live about them. Lombroso has made
very much of the ‘criminal type’ which he believes to have discovered
amongst the inmates of the prisons. If he had made the same efforts
to observe people who hang about the law courts--detectives, spies,
small solicitors, informers, people preying upon simpletons, and the
like--he would have probably concluded that his ‘criminal type’ has a
far greater geographical extension than the prison walls. I never saw
such a collection of faces of the lowest human type, sunk far below
the average type of mankind, as I saw by the score round and within
the Palais de Justice at Lyons. Certainly not within the prison walls
of Clairvaux. Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a few of these
types; but they represent quite a world which gravitates round the law
courts, and infuses its infection far and wide around them. And the
same is true of each central prison like Clairvaux. Quite an atmosphere
of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts
spreads like a blot of oil round every prison.
I saw all this; and if before my condemnation I already knew that
society is wrong in its present system of punishments, after I left
Clairvaux I knew that it is not only wrong and unjust in this system,
but that it is simply foolish when, in its partly unconscious and
partly wilful ignorance of realities, it maintains at its own expense
these universities of crime and these sinks of corruption, acting
under the illusion that they are necessary as a bridle to the criminal
instincts of man.