In regard to its nature, we have, as surely, no need of other description than its supporter’s, the late Sir Edmund Du Cane’s “An artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health.”
The questions arising, then, are two:—
(a) Is this practice of solitary confinement, in fact, deterrent?
(b) Has a civilized nation the right to retain offenders for months in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the purpose of deterrence?
As to question (a). No support can be gathered for the plea of deterrence from the statistics of penal servitude; mere severity of punishment has never been proved to be a factor of deterrence. When men were hung for horse or sheep stealing those offences were far more prevalent than they are now. Moreover, the nature of their coming punishment is too vaguely known to those who have never been in prison for the thought of solitary confinement to have any deterrent effect on ninety-nine out of a hundred first offenders. Indeed, that it is not sufficiently present to any man’s mind is shown by the fact that so humane a public as ours knows and thinks so little about the suffering of solitary confinement as to have allowed it to remain part of their prison system.
The effect of a period of solitary confinement which comes at the beginning of long years of imprisonment is inevitably wiped out by the monotony of the prison life which follows. Mechanical adjustment to environment is always going on in the human being. Solitary confinement is a smothering process to which the mind must adapt itself, or perish. The mental demoralization remains after the confinement comes to an end, but the consciousness of that mental ruin, the consciousness of the suffering, has become dulled; from his closed cell the convict passes on to the ordinary prison life, actually unable to appreciate the extent of the misery he has undergone. Obviously, moreover, deterrence (if there be deterrence) paid for by mental and moral weakening is not true deterrence; for the acquired power of resistance to crime, if any, is nullified through deterioration of the prisoner’s fibre.
The true deterrence of imprisonment lies in the general fear of loss of liberty; in that nightmare of a thought all details of impending punishment (even if known) mechanically merge.
This solitary confinement, however, is sometimes justified on the ground that it is necessary to buoy the convict up with hope. It is thought that by placing him at the outset in the seventh hell of pain we lessen his sufferings in the minor hells which await him at the expiration of those first dire months. That, sir, is humanity with a vengeance. Imagine this principle logically applied to social life. The husband would beat the wife that she might not so greatly feel the inevitable wear and tear of matrimony; the mother would starve the child that it might experience with more equanimity the ordinary pangs of hunger; the master would withhold wages that the servant might more duly appreciate the receipt of what was due to him. It appears, indeed, to be almost what is called a vicious principle.
To question (b)—Whether a civilized country has the right to retain its offenders in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the sake of a supposed deterrence—I conceive, sir, but this one answer: Only so long as we do not realize what this solitary confinement means.
Six months (to take the mean sentence) is a short time to a free man; it is an eternity to a prisoner confined in solitude. One hundred and eighty days—four thousand hours, of utter solitude and silence in a cell, which—in the words of Sir Robert Anderson (Nineteenth Century, March, 1902)—“differs from every other sort of apartment designed for human habitation in that all view of external nature, such as might soothe, and possibly alleviate, the mind, is, with elaborate care, excluded”—solitude broken only by one hour a day, of chapel, and walking up and down a yard, by the sight of a warder, three times or so a day, bringing in food; by a ten minutes’ visit perhaps from chaplain or governor.