PRISON REFORM.
WE are altogether in agreement with the spirit in which Mr. Winston Churchill is attacking the subject of prison reform, and as far as we can see the practical details of his proposals are sound and reasonable. Now, however, we desire to deal, not with these specific reforms, but with the general principles which should govern our prison system. Let us begin by saying that we have no sympathy whatever with those who imagine that the world could get on without the punish- ment of crime. There is a well-known saying of Frederick the Great to which most men will give a general assent. " Every man," he said, " has a wild beast inside him. Few know how to keep it in chains. Most of us give it a loose rein when not held back by the terrors of the law." No doubt there are a number of men and women in the world to whom these words mean nothing now, and probably never will mean anything. However greatly they were tempted, they would through their own goodness and strength of character -be able to resist the temptation. Indeed, of such people it might almost be said that they would not even know that they were being tempted, so impossible would wrongdoing seem to them, and so perfect would be their power of control. For the mass of mankind, however, temptation does mean the danger of yielding, and here comes in the inexpediency, to use the mildest word, of making temptation an excuse for crime. In a way no doubt we all regard it as an extenuating circumstance. Yet to systematise this weakness, for weakness it is, is not only to give crime the rein, but to withdraw support from human beings at the moment when they most need it. When the wild beast is fiercest—and he is, of course, fiercest when a man is most tempted—is just the time when the chains should be strongest. Let any person think out in cold blood a. situation in which he or she would be sorely tempted to do a wrong act. In such circumstances, which- of the two following reflections is the more likely to produce successful resistance,—the result which in the abstract every one must desire ? (1) " If I do wrong society will not condemn me, for it will understand how terrible is the temptation to which I am being exposed. The world knows that it would be asking more than it has a right to ask of human nature to require me to hold out." (2) " The temptation is very great, but neither the law nor society will find be j any excuse for me in that fact. My punishment will just as terrible. Though I may be more pitied than the man who was tempted less, such pity will do me no good, and will not reduce my sentence by one hour." Clearly the man who wishes to keep from evil will prefer that the second reflection rather than the first should occupy his mind. By making the greatness of temptation a ground not only for pity but for a relaxation of punish- ment, we are in truth doing a deadly injury to the tempted man, depriving him of the handrail between the narrow path of safety and the abyss. Or, to go back to Frederick the Great's metaphor, we are weakening the chain which holds the wild beast within us.
Though the attitude of the State towards crime must be stern and unyielding in the interests not only of society as a whole but of each individual as a possible, nay, probable, subject of temptation, it must not be supposed that we favour in any degree the idea of vin- dictive punishment. No doubt all acts, good or evil, have their consequences. Though we may believe the central mystery of the Christian religion to be that the broken arcs will at last be made into a full circle, and the supreme miracle will be performed by which in the end the chain of consequences will be broken and atonement accomplished not in its derived but in its originating sense, still for us wrong remains wrong and crime crime. It is no business of the State to concern itself with the ultimate issue, or to usurp or parody the offices of the Almighty. The sin and the sinner must be left to the mercy, as we believe, or, as others may hold, to the vengeance, of God. The concern of the State is solely to prevent the commission of crime. It cannot attempt to dive into men's hearts to know their motives, or to judge in the highest and final sense. True, it must be merciful, but not with the pretence that to know all is to pardon all. To do that would indeed be to mistake its functions.
Punishment, of which imprisonment is in the modern world the main engine and instrument, must have as its end the prevention of crime. There are clearly many ways in which crime can be prevented. The simplest and easiest plan in the abstract, though, as will be seen, the most difficult in the concrete, would be, after having established the status of criminality in a man, to shut him up and to say :—" You are a criminal We will by keeping you in prison take care that you shall not follow your criminal proclivities any more." But men cannot be fairly ticketed in this way, or rather the majority of men cannot. There are no doubt some cases in which the wild beast within has broken the chain altogether. Perhaps he never was chained at all, and can only be kept from criminal acts by physical restraint. In most cases, however, what we have to deal with is merely a weakening of the chain. The wild beast can break or slip the chain very easily, but still it is there. In these instances, when we are not in a position to declare that the individual is a hopeless criminal who will prey upon society unless society protects itself by shutting him up, our essential object must be to mend the chain so that the human being with whom we are dealing when restored to freedom will be in a position to keep his wild beast in order. In other words, the reformation of the criminal is our object. Unfortunately, however, this, though so easy to state in words, is exceedingly difficult to carry out in practice. By the nature of things we are obliged to have a general prison system, and yet nothing is made more clear by experience than that treatment which will reform one man will have a non-reforming or deteriorating effect upon another. Apart, too, from the difficulty of dealing with each individual case separately, there comes in the personality of the criminal. We must never forget that it is to his immediate interest to deceive us as to what will be the best and most appropriate treat- ment of his case. Moreover, this power to bamboozle the persons whose business in life it is to reform them is in most prisoners exceedingly great. The complications which arise in the problem of punishment, even if we define the object of punishment as solely the reformation of the prisoner, are many and serious. They are immensely aggravated by another con- sideration to which we dare not refuse attention. Besides making punishment reformative, we must make it deterrent. To make it deterrent in the case of the individual may no doubt be considered as a part of reformation. But we must do more. We must think not merely of the prisoner, but also of society as a whole,—not merely of the prison inmates, but of the innocent persons outside who are liable to be tempted to crime, and who need the handrail supplied by the suggestion : " If I yield to temptation the law will punish me and find no excuse in the magnitude of my temptation." We must use the punishment of the prisoner as a proclama- tion or advertisement to the world in general of what are the consequences of crime and wrongdoing. If we do not do that, but concentrate our efforts solely on the reformation of the prisoner, we do injury to other tempted men. Those who leave our prisons will, in fact, be telling hard-tried persons with dreadful iteration that the consequences of crime are not so very awful. We must not help a tempted man to say to himself :—" If I do it and am not discovered, I shall have my desire and be happy. Even if I fail, I shall not be so very badly off. Imprisonment cannot be worse than the hell of misery in which I am now living, and from which I can get free by the deed I contemplate. Besides, I have as good a right to happiness as this other man. Why should I condemn myself to misery ? "
Here we arrive at the whole difficulty of our prison system. We are obliged to make it at one and the same time reformative of the individual and deterrent to others. This means that it must be severe, or, to use the proper word, terrible. It must not merely inspire terror in the wrongdoer so as to prevent him from doing wrong a second time. It must also provide a warning to every man under temptation,—terrifying not vaguely but in deadly earnest. To show how necessary it is to maintain the terrifying character of punishment, we may glance for a moment at a branch of this problem dealt with in another article in our issue of ,to-day. It is a commonplace among students of crime that murderers are frequently found to have killed before. The man who kills once and is not discovered is tempted to fresh crimes. When the second temptation comes he cannot but reflect how easily he got off on the first occasion, and what nonsense it is to talk about the brand of Cain on a man's brows. He is like a man who has done a very daring gymnastic feat with ease and success. Why, then, should he not do it again ? From that fact we may judge how essential it is that punishment should be terrible.
It is the old story of the middle course, of that compromise between incompatibles which the facts of ordinary human life are always compelling us to adopt. We have got to make our system of imprisonment deterrent, —that is, we must make it very far from pleasant, but at the same time we must not make it so terrible as to brutalise the prisoner. For example, if, as seems likely, solitary confinement does not prove very effective as a deterrent, but demoralises the prisoner, we ought not to use solitary confinement, or at any rate only when it can be shown to be beneficial. If some form of physical torture could be shown to have a deterrent effect, and also could be shown not to brutalise the prisoner or those who administered it, it might no doubt be used in order to make imprisonment terrible. Experience, however, has shown that no form of torture can be employed without brutalising not only the man tormented but those who administer it, and therefore, in spite of its deterrent effect, it has rightly been abandoned, except—for there is nothing absolute in these matters—in the case of flogging young offenders.
In prison reform we have to grope our way more or less in the dark. Nevertheless we may feel that some progress has been made, and that we manage prisons and prisoners better than we did. For ourselves, we believe that the question of the recidivist, or habitual criminal, is still the greatest unsolved problem. Surely there must be a point at which habitual criminality— that is, complete loss of control over the wild beast—is proved. If so, it is folly to let the prisoner out from time to time to prey upon society. At present there is an ascertained number of men and women who may be said without any exaggeration to pass their lives in prison, with occasional holidays, during which time they commit offences against society and demoralise those with whom they mix. Clearly the withdrawing of these holidays would be a benefit to all concerned, to the prisoner and to the State. No doubt the definition of habitual criminality is not an easy one to make, and no doubt also there is something appalling in the thought of shutting the prison doors once and for all upon any individual. This objection, however, might be met by giving power to the prison authorities to let out even an habitual criminal who had been condemned for life if convinced that they were justified in such a course. Meantime it must not be forgotten that in cases of detention for life it would be possible to deal much less harshly with the prisoners than at present, —to treat them, in fact, more like lunatics than ordinary prisoners.
We admit that in what we have written we have not been able to make any very helpful or hopeful sug- gestions ; but we may, we think, plead that it is worth while every now and then to look at the problem as a whole, and to consider the enormous difficulties with which it is surrounded. We wish Mr. Winston Churchill all possible success in his attempts at prison reform, and we are exceedingly glad that he has undertaken the task. At the same time, nothing but good will, we feel sure, be done by facing all the facts connected with the problem of imprisonment.
Previous page
