If the capitalists are allowed to erect their constructive capitalist
community, I speak quite seriously when I say that I think Prison will
become an almost universal experience. It will not necessarily be a
cruel or shameful experience: on these points (I concede certainly for
the present purpose of debate) it may be a vastly improved experience.
The conditions in the prison, very possibly, will be made more humane.
But the prison will be made more humane only in order to contain more of
humanity. I think little of the judgment and sense of humour of any man
who can have watched recent police trials without realising that it is
no longer a question of whether the law has been broken by a crime; but,
now, solely a question of whether the situation could be mended by an
imprisonment. It was so with Tom Mann; it was so with Larkin; it was so
with the poor atheist who was kept in gaol for saying something he
had been acquitted of saying: it is so in such cases day by day. We no
longer lock a man up for doing something; we lock him up in the hope
of his doing nothing. Given this principle, it is evidently possible
to make the mere conditions of punishment more moderate, or--(more
probably) more secret. There may really be more mercy in the Prison,
on condition that there is less justice in the Court. I should not be
surprised if, before we are done with all this, a man was allowed to
smoke in prison, on condition, of course, that he had been put in prison
for smoking.
Now that is the process which, in the absence of democratic protest,
will certainly proceed, will increase and multiply and replenish the
earth and subdue it. Prison may even lose its disgrace for a little
time: it will be difficult to make it disgraceful when men like Larkin
can be imprisoned for no reason at all, just as his celebrated ancestor
was hanged for no reason at all. But capitalist society, which naturally
does not know the meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of
disgrace: and it will still go on imprisoning for no reason at all. Or
rather for that rather simple reason that makes a cat spring or a rat
run away.
It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the
form that every prison should be a school; or in the more candid form
that every school should be a prison. They have already fulfilled their
servile principle in the case of the schools. Everyone goes to the
Elementary Schools except the few people who tell them to go there. I
prophesy that (unless our revolt succeeds) nearly everyone will be going
to Prison, with a precisely similar patience.