Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there is none of the flogging which still goes on in English prisons: such a punishment would be absolutely impossible in France. Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best prisons in Europe. And yet, the results obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in any one of the lock-ups of the old type. ‘The watchword nowadays is to say that prisoners are reformed in our prisons,’ one of the members of the prison administration once said to me. ‘This is all nonsense, and I shall never be induced to tell such a lie.’
The pharmacy at Clairvaux was underneath the rooms which we occupied, and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were employed in it. One of them was a grey-haired man in his fifties, who ended his term while we were there. It was touching to learn how he parted with the prison. He knew that in a few months or weeks he would be back, and begged the doctor to keep the place at the pharmacy open for him. This was not his first visit to Clairvaux, and he knew it would not be the last. When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. ‘Who will care to employ me?’ he said. ‘And what trade have I? None! When I am out I must go to my old comrades; they, at least, will surely receive me as an old friend.’ Then would come a glass too much of drink in their company, excited talk about some capital fun—some capital ‘new stroke’ to be made in the way of theft—and, partly from weakness of will, partly to oblige his only friends, he would join in it, and would be locked up once more. So it had been several times before in his life. Two months passed, however, after his release, and he was not yet back to Clairvaux. Then the prisoners, and the warders too, began to feel uneasy about him. ‘Has he had time to move to another judicial district, that he is not yet back? One can only hope that he has not been involved in some bad affair,’ they would say, meaning something worse than theft. ‘That would be a pity: he was such a nice, quiet man.’ But it soon appeared that the first supposition was the right one. Word came from another prison that the old man was locked up there, and was now endeavouring to be transferred to Clairvaux.
The old prisoners were the most pitiful sight. Many of them had begun their prison experience in childhood or early youth, others at a riper age. But ‘once in prison, always in prison,’ such is the saying derived from experience. And now, having reached or passed over the age of sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in a gaol. To quicken their departure from life the prison administration used to send them to the workshops where felt socks were made out of all sorts of woollen refuse. The dust in the workshop soon gave these old men consumption, which finally released them. Then four fellow prisoners would carry the old comrade to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest would march in front of the procession, mechanically reciting his prayer and looking round at the chestnut or fir-trees along the road, and the four comrades carrying the coffin would enjoy their momentary escape out of prison, the black dog would be the only being affected by the solemnity of the ceremony.
When the reformed central prisons were introduced in France, it was believed that the principle of absolute silence could be maintained in them. But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement had to be abandoned. In fact, even solitary confinement is no obstacle to intercourse between the prisoners.
To the outward observer the prison seems to be quite mute; but in reality life goes on in it as busily as in a small town. In suppressed voices, by means of whispers, hurriedly dropped words, and scraps of notes, every news of any interest spreads immediately all over the prison. Nothing can happen either among the prisoners themselves, or in the cour d’honneur, where the lodgings of the administration are situated, or in the village of Clairvaux, where the employers of the factories live, or in the wide world of Paris politics, but that it is communicated at once throughout all the dormitories, workshops, and cells. Frenchmen are of too communicative a nature for their underground telegraph ever to be stopped. We had no intercourse with the common-law prisoners, and yet we knew all the news of the day. ‘John, the gardener, is back for two years.’ ‘Such an inspector’s wife has had a fearful scrimmage with So-and-So’s wife.’ ‘James, in the cells, has been caught transmitting a note of friendship to John from the framers’ workshop.’ ‘That old beast So-and-So is no more minister of justice: the ministry has been upset.’ And so on; and when the news goes that ‘Jack has got two five-penny packets of tobacco in exchange for two flannel spencers,’ it flies round the prison in no time.
Demands for tobacco were continually pouring in upon us; and when a small lawyer detained in the prison wanted to transmit to me a note, in order to ask my wife, who was staying in the village, to see from time to time his wife, who was also there, quite a number of men took the liveliest interest in the transmission of that message, which had to pass I do not know how many hands before it reached its goal. And when there was something that might specially interest us in a paper, this paper, in some unaccountable way, would reach us, with a little stone wrapped into it, to help its being thrown over a high wall.
Cellular imprisonment is no obstacle to communication. When we came to Clairvaux and were first lodged in the cellular quarter, it was bitterly cold in the cells; so cold, indeed, that when I wrote to my wife, who was then at Paris, and she got my letter, she did not recognize the writing, my hand being so stiff with the cold. The order came to heat the cells as much as possible; but do what they might, the cells remained as cold as ever. It appeared afterwards that all the hot-air tubes in the cells were choked with scraps of paper, bits of notes, penknives, and all sorts of small things which several generations of prisoners had concealed in the pipes.
Martin, the same friend of mine whom I have already mentioned, obtained permission to serve part of his time in cellular confinement. He preferred isolation to life in a room with a dozen comrades, and went to a cell in the cellular building. To his great astonishment he found that he was not at all alone in his cell. The walls and the keyholes spoke round him. In a day or two all the inmates of the cells knew who he was, and he had acquaintances all over the building. Quite a life goes on, as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only that life often takes such a character as to make it belong entirely to the domain of psychopathy. Kraft-Ebbing himself had no idea of the aspects it takes with certain prisoners in solitary confinement.
I will not repeat here what I have said in a book, ‘In Russian and French Prisons,’ which I published in England in 1886, soon after my release from Clairvaux, upon the moral influence of prisoners upon prisoners. But there is one thing which must be said. The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as ‘the criminals’ proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as a preventive measure against anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them and for rendering these offences worse and worse after a man has received prison education. Everyone knows that the absence of education, the dislike of regular work acquired since childhood, the physical unpreparedness for sustained effort, the love of adventure when it receives a wrong direction, the gambling propensities, the absence of energy and an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others, are the causes which bring this category of men before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature—each one of them—which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as there are prisons. Incarceration in a prison necessarily, fatally, destroys the energy of a man, and still more kills his will. In prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will. To possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble. The will of the prisoner must be killed, and it is killed. Still less is there room for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to destroy free contact with those outside the prison and within it with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy. Physically and mentally he is rendered less and less prepared for sustained effort; and if he has had formerly a dislike for regular work, this dislike is only the more increased during his prison years. If, before he first came to the prison, he soon felt tired by monotonous work, which he could not do properly, or had a grudge against underpaid overwork, his dislike now becomes hatred. If he doubted about the social utility of current rules of morality, now, after having cast a critical glance upon the official defenders of these rules, and learned his comrades’ opinions of them, he openly casts the rules overboard. And if he has got into trouble in consequence of a morbid development of the passionate sensual side of his nature, now, after having spent a number of years in prison, this morbid character is still more developed—in many cases to an appalling extent. In this last direction—the most dangerous of all—prison education is most effective.
In Siberia I had seen what sinks of filth, and what workshops of physical and moral deterioration the dirty, overcrowded, ‘unreformed’ Russian prisons were, and at the age of nineteen I imagined that if there were less overcrowding in the rooms, and a certain classification of the prisoners, and healthy occupations were provided for them, the institution might be substantially improved. Now, I had to part with these illusions. I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners, and their results for society at large, the best ‘reformed’ prisons—whether cellular or not—are as bad as, or even worse, than the dirty lock-ups of old. They do not ‘reform’ the prisoners. On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases, they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect. The thief, the swindler, the rough man, and so on, who has spent some years in a prison, comes out of it more ready than ever to resume his former career; he is better prepared for it; he has learned how to do it better; he is more embittered against society, and he finds a more solid justification for being in revolt against its laws and customs; necessarily, unavoidably, he is bound to go farther and farther along the anti-social path which first brought him before a law court. The offences he will commit after his release will be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labour colony. In the above-mentioned book I wrote that prisons are ‘universities of crime, maintained by the state.’ And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine.