First, care must be taken that segregation does not become or continue to be (as it is too often at present) a welcome refuge of idleness and criminal association, instead of a deprivation.
Penitentiaries for condemned prisoners—the classical prison experts make no distinction between their cells for prisoners before trial and those for convicts!—should not be so comfortable as to excite the envy (a vast injustice and imprudence) of the honest and ill-fed rural labourer vegetating in his cottage, or of the working-man pining in his garret.
Secondly, the obligation to labour should be imperative for all who are in prison, except in case of sickness. Prisoners should pay the State, not as now for their tobacco and wine, but for food, clothes, and lodging, whilst the remainder of their earnings should go to indemnify their victims.
The classical theory declares that ``the State,'' as Pessina writes, ``being compelled to adopt deprivation of liberty as the principal means of penal repression and retribution, contracts an absolute <p 229>obligation to provide those whom they punish in this way not only with bodily sustenance, but also with the means of supplying their intellectual and moral needs.'' So the State maintains in idleness the majority even of those who are said to be ``sentenced to hard labour,'' and the offence, after it has served the turn of the offender, further assures him free lodging and food, shifting the burden on to honest citizens.
I cannot see by what moral or legal right the crime ought to exempt the criminal from the daily necessity of providing for his own subsistence, which he experienced before he committed the crime, and which all honest men undergo with so many sacrifices. The irony of these consequences of the classical theories could not, in fact, be more remarkable. So long as a man remains honest, in spite of pathetic misery and sorrow, the State takes no trouble to guarantee for him the means of existence by his labour. It even bans those who have the audacity to remind society that every man, by the mere fact of living, has the right to live, and that, as work is the only means of obtaining a livelihood, every man has the right (as all should recognise the duty) of working in order to live.
But as soon as any one commits a crime, the State considers it its duty to take the utmost care of him, ensuring for him comfortable lodging, plenty of food, and light labour, if it does not grant him a happy idleness! And all this, again, in the name of eternal and retributive justice.
It may be added that our proposals are the only <p 230>way of settling the oft-recurring question as to the economic competition (by the price of commodities), and the moral competition (in the regularity of work) which prison labour unjustly wages with free and honest labour. As a matter of fact, as prisoners can only remain idle or work, they must clearly be made to work. But they must be made to work at trades which come less into competition with free labour and it is especially necessary to give prisoners wages equal to those of free labourers, on condition that they pay the State for their food, clothes, and lodging, whilst the remainder goes to indemnify their victims.
Over the prison gates I should like to carve that maxim of universal application: ``He who will not work, neither shall he eat.''
V.
Since the novel proposals put forward half a century ago, amongst others by doctors Georget and Brierre de Boismont, a whole library of volumes has been published in favour of criminal lunatic asylums. A few voices here and there were heard in opposition or reserve, but these have almost entirely ceased.