Part 8

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.

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 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. . . .”

[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)

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:

_Eight_ preferred separate confinement to working in CATEGORY A. association, and were not conscious of harmful

_Fifteen_ would prefer work in association, but CATEGORY B. (1) Having suffered from their separate confinement, had got more or less used to it (three cases). (2) Were suffering, but thought it was good for them (three cases). (3) Were so incapable of expressing their experiences, that no definite answer could be got from them (nine cases).

_Thirty-seven_ preferred association; suffered severely CATEGORY C. from separate confinement; and asserted that they had been harmed; that all prisoners were harmed, and some driven crazy.

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

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

_One_ was 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.

_One_ was 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’s _punishment_ to 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 (the _Nation_, 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 and _as 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.

(4)

(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 enforced_ on 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.

II

THE SPIRIT OF PUNISHMENT (An Article in the _Daily 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 rule _in 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 the _imprisonment 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 be _reformed_ by 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.