Four thousand hours of utter solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven—with the prospect of anything from two to twenty years of monotonous routine and loss of liberty to follow! Can a Public Opinion, which succeeds in bringing these facts home to its imagination, justly say that two and a half to twenty years of loss of liberty, with all that this means in prison, is not sufficient punishment for any crime that man can commit, without the preliminary agony of four thousand hours of solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven?
Sir, Public Opinion has never yet succeeded in realizing what this so-called separate confinement means. In the year ending March, 1907, we set 1,035 persons, of whom 691 had never been sentenced to penal servitude before, to endure these hours of agony and demoralization. In the year ending March, 1908, we set another 1,179 to endure the same, 749 of them for the first time. At the present moment another thousand, more or less, are undergoing it.
In thus subjecting year by year a thousand persons to nine, six, or three months of an “artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health,” we are annually committing an offence against our reason, of which we reap the full reward in the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of persons already demoralized enough; and an offence against our humanity in reality as great as if we had placed them on the rack.
I by no means lose sight of the fact that this closed-cell confinement falls with different effect on different temperaments; it falls, no doubt, far less heavily on the sluggish and the brutalized than on the nervous types, of which, however, we are now breeding great numbers. But, sir, even the habitual criminal—popularly supposed to dread flogging more than anything—has been known while enduring solitary confinement to beg for the lash in place of it. Sir J. Jebb, giving evidence before the Penal Servitude Acts Commission in 1863, uses these words: “With burglars and reckless characters I think that separate confinement is dreaded more than any other kind of discipline.” And in regard to other effects on the habitual criminal, the words of Professor Prins, above quoted, are significant. The sluggish brutality of many recidivists is produced in the first place by this very process of closed-cell confinement. Man, even the lowest type of man, is a social and gregarious animal—all that is best in him depends on, and is brought out by, contact with his fellow-creatures; if that be not so, our religion and whole social scheme are falsely conceived. Deprive man of all contact with his fellow-man, shut him in upon himself, hopelessly, utterly, month by month, and he will come out of that artificial existence lower and more brutal than when he entered it. Prolonged starvation and agony of the mind is worse than starvation and agony of the body, carrying, as it does, the wreck of the body with it.
We have the right to restrain offenders and to safeguard society; in doing this we unavoidably punish with that already terrible punishment “loss of liberty.” But, sir, we have—surely—not the right to inflict unnecessary and harmful suffering. I recognise to the full that there is no lack of humanity among those who work our prison system; recognise to the full that they would not willingly inflict any suffering that they acknowledged to be unnecessary; but in every department of life those who administer a system are, in the nature of things, with rare exceptions, too habituated to that system, too close to it, to be able to see it in due perspective.
I ask you, sir, and I ask the common sense of the public, whether harmful and unnecessary suffering must not inevitably be endured by the mind, and through the mind by the body, of a human being during these thousands of hours of closed-cell confinement. To answer that question fairly each member of the public has but to ask what would be the effect on himself or herself of nine or six or even three months’ utter seclusion (except for one hour each day) from all sight and sound not only of human beings, but of animals, trees, flowers, and from the sight even of the sky, all but a patch no bigger than a tea-tray. We are on the whole a humane people; and it is not so much a question of our humanity as of our imaginations. The position is plainly this: Those who have to work our prison system perhaps could not do so at all if they allowed their imaginations fair play. The community are too aloof to realize what that prison system means. And so the unnecessary demoralization and suffering caused by this closed-cell confinement goes on at the rate of (for convicts alone) more than four million hours a year!
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.”