“. . . but, at the best, the system of ‘separate confinement’ is a very bad one. It is only solitary confinement slightly improved, and it has some of the worst effects of that terrible punishment. The intention of it, doubtless, is to impress the prisoner with the gravity of his offence against society, and to bring him to a better state of mind. But in some cases, I am convinced, it has quite the opposite result. The solitude and the hopeless monotony, with nothing to think of but the long years of suffering and disgrace ahead, produces nervous irritation approaching, in some cases, to frenzy, and instead of softening the man brings out all the evil there is in him. Under such conditions, the worst companions he could have are his own thoughts. In men of a different temperament, again, it deadens all sensibility, so that they do not care a straw what happens afterwards, but would just as soon become habitual criminals as not. It is this sullen hatred of themselves and of everybody else engendered and fostered during the long dismal months of separate confinement that makes the most dangerous and troublesome prisoners at a later stage. There are a third class, who, having no criminal instincts, nor any strong instincts at all, merely give way mentally, without any acute distress, and become little better than half-witted by the time their separate confinement is at an end. . . .”
These are the remarks of Professor Prins, Inspector-General of Belgian prisons:
“Solitude produces in him (the vacuous-minded, erratic, and animal person who is usually the criminal) no intellectual activity and no searching of conscience; it serves to deepen his mental vacuity and to deliver him over to unnatural indulgence in the one animal appetite of which he cannot be deprived.” (“The Criminal,” Havelock Ellis, p. 328.)
Beltrani-Scalia, formerly Inspector-General of Prisons in Italy, is of the same opinion, and remarks that “the cellular system looks upon man as a brother of La Trappe.” (“The Criminal,” p. 329.)
The following passage, taken from Prince Kropotkin’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” refers to a peasant confined solitarily in a cell beneath him in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and with whom he and his neighbour could communicate by knocking.
“Soon I began to notice, to my terror, that from time to time his mind wandered. Gradually his thoughts became more and more confused and we two perceived, step by step, day by day, evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries came next from the lower storey; our neighbour was mad. . . . To witness the destruction of a man’s mind under such conditions was terrible.”
Finally, this is the judgment of the rector of St. Marylebone, Dr. W. D. Morrison (after more than ten years’ experience as Prison Chaplain): “It tends to have a demoralising effect upon many classes of prisoners.”
Such evidence might be multiplied indefinitely.
Now, sir, in regard to the object of solitary confinement we have surely no need to go behind the finding of your committee:
“It would appear that the main object of the separate” (closed-cell) “confinement had come to be deterrence . . . In effect this is the purpose which it must be regarded as now designed to serve.”