A Sheaf

by John Galsworthy

Reformation does not come from beating on the prisoner’s fibre with the dull mallet of suffering. To reform one must inspire. There is a spark of good in every man’s breast; the only chance lies in fanning that spark. But if we are not reforming men in our prisons, how can we be said to be protecting society, by sending them there? We are surely endangering society; and nurturing the spirit of crime.

The fact of the matter is this: Revenge is still at the back of our minds. Let a man argue on the subject with whomsoever he will, ten minutes will not have passed before he makes that discovery. The State still feels that because a man has hurt it, it must hurt him. And this feeling destroys all the economy and science of our laws. When a crime is committed, all we should be concerned with, in our own interests, is the application of the best possible means to minimize the results of that crime, to ensure that society shall run the least possible risk of a repetition of the crime, and the offender the least possible risk of remaining a criminal.

In doing this we cannot, in very many cases, avoid the detention of our criminals; but we can, and should, avoid inflicting suffering on those whom we detain, beyond the already great suffering and deprivation inseparable from disciplinary detention, and all that disciplinary detention implies; for by deliberately superadding such sufferings as solitude, or perpetual unrelieved silence, we do not to any appreciable degree deter others from committing offences, and we do foster in those whom we imprison the disposition to commit fresh offences when they are released.

That diminution of crime, depends not on deterrent punishment, but on wide and impalpable influences—growth of social feeling, spread of education, betterment of manners, decrease of intemperance, improvement in housing, a hundred other causes—is plain from the official statement lately issued. “The members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857, in spite of the fact that in the interim population has almost doubled.” And this in the face of admittedly milder penal measures! For further evidence that mere severity of treatment does not deter we need only look at the comparative success of the Elmira Reformatory in the United States, and the Borstal institutions here. Under these systems, which allow the offender some kind of natural life, the percentage of those who return to crime is most notably smaller.

Crime is disease—if not in the medical, in the moral sense of the word. It is either the disease of weakness, or of unbalanced self-will, or the disease of inherited taint. We have fought against this conclusion because we still harbour the spirit of revenge; but as knowledge advances we shall, we must, accept it. And the sooner we do accept it the less money we shall waste, the less harmful and unnecessary suffering shall we inflict.

The difficulties of judicial and prison administration are enormous, the force of prejudice encountered by reforming administrators terrific—all the more terrific because these prejudices, in the main conscientious, are wholly reinforced by the fact that change means trouble and expense, by fears of making things worse, by all the accumulated momentum of “things as they are.” For a man with any understanding in his composition it is impossible not to sympathize with those who, administering justice, earnestly desire to do their best, and are often, one is sure, sick at heart from the feeling that what they are doing is not the best.

It rests with public opinion in this country to re-animate our attitude towards crime; to shake itself free of our muddled conceptions of the object of punishment; to scotch once for all the spirit of revenge; to rise to a higher, more scientific and incidentally more economic, conception of our duty towards criminals. Let us get rid of the idea that we are protecting society and reforming offenders by inflicting suffering that we falsely call deterrent. Let us change our prisons into Borstal Institutions, and let us do it as soon as is humanly possible. Loss of liberty is, next to loss of life, the most dreaded of all fates; it has, in and by itself, almost all the deterrent force that is needful. There may be here and there men who prefer to be detained under strict discipline to being at liberty; but if there be, it can only be said that the conditions of their lives outside prison must constitute a disgrace to our civilization, and that our penal system cannot safely or justly be allowed to rest on any acquiescence in that disgrace. In the last annual report of the Borstal Association occur the following words:

“It is not a namby-pamby method. . . . The panic-monger who prophesies that the ambitious youth of the working classes will still clamour for admission through the gateway of crime to the advantages of Borstal, would be regarded as a humorist by those who have been there and ‘have had enough and learnt sense.’ ”

Let us, then, take discipline and loss of liberty as our sole deterrents, and on those whom we deprive of liberty let us use all the resources of a common sense that shall refuse to apply to criminals methods which would be scouted in the reform of human beings outside prisons.

All evidence shows that mere, so-called deterrent, severity is useless. Let us no longer fly in the face of evidence. Let us conform to facts. If we seriously desire to reduce crime to its irreducible minimum we must go to work like doctors.