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Title: Prison Life Author: Freedom Press, Anonymous Date: August, 1887 Language: en Topics: Freedom Press, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 1, No. 11, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3097, retrieved on May 1, 2020. Notes: Freedom Press, London
[SECOND NOTICE.]
Are Prisons Necessary? is the title of the concluding chapter of
Kropotkin's account of his prison experiences. "Unhappily, hitherto," he
goes on to remark, "our penal institutions have been nothing but a
compromise between the old ideas of revenge, of punishment of the 'bad
will' and 'sin,' and the modern ideas of 'deterring from crime,' both
softened to a very slight extent by some notions of philanthropy." But
is it not time that we fully recognized the fact that crime, like bodily
disease, is capable of scientific investigation, and of that scientific
treatment which considers prevention the best of cures?
An energetic school of scientific students of crime has sprung up of
late years in Italy and Germany, who have devoted themselves to
searching out the main causes of this painful phenomenon. They have
concluded that there are three groups of such principal causes: the
cosmic, the anthropological, and the social. All these causes, and
especially the first, have as yet been but very imperfectly investigated
; nevertheless, some very interesting facts have been conclusively
established.
Cosmic influence, that is roughly speaking, the state of the weather,
has been shown to have a strong and definitely ascertainable effect upon
human action. To take one instance; an English writer (S. A. Hill, I
-Nature,' Vol. XXIX., 1881, p. 338) has pointed out that in India crimes
of violence correspond in frequency to the amount of moist heat in the
atmosphere. The Italian Professor E. Ferri has collected statistics of
temperature and of the prevalence of "crime against the person," which
show the most striking correspondences.
The anthropological, the distinctively human and individual causes of
crime are still more important. Dr. Loinbroso and his Italian colleagues
have put together many valuable observations on the physical
characteristics of criminals. They have shown that the majority of
prisoners have some defect of brain organization ; that the most brutal
murders have usually been committed by men afflicted with some serious
physical imperfection ; that most criminals have singularly long arms
(suggestive of nearness to the monkey), etc., etc. Researches in
interesting relation with the investigations of our English Dr.
Maudsley, into what he calls the wide "borderland between crime and
insanity."
A crime is rarely due to something which has suddenly sprung up in the
criminal. "Take for instance," says Kropotkin, "a man who has committed
an act of violence. . . . Before this time, probably, throughout his
life, the same person has often manifested some anomaly of mind by noisy
expression of his feelings, by crying loudly after some trifling
disagreeable circumstance, by easily venting his bad temper on those who
stood by him; and, unhappily, he has not from his childhood found
anybody who was able to give a better direction to his nervous
impressibility. . . . And if we push our analysis still deeper, we
discover that this state of mind is itself a consequence of some
physical disease, either inherited or developed by an abnormal life."
" . . . More than that. If we analyze ourselves, if everybody would
frankly acknowledge the thoughts which have sometimes passed through his
mind, we should see that all of us have had some feelings and thoughts
such as constitute the motive of all acts considered as criminal. We
have repudiated them at once; but if they have had the opportunity of
recurring again and again; if they were nurtured by circumstances or by
a want of exercise of the best passions–love, compassion, and all those
which result from living in the joys and sufferings of those who
surround us; then these passing influences, so brief that we hardly
noticed them, would have degenerated into some morbid element in our
character."
"Fraternal treatment to check the development of the anti-social
feelings which grow up in some of us–not imprisonment–is the only means
that we are authorized in applying, and can apply, with some effect to
those in whom these feelings have developed in consequence of bodily
disease or social influences." A remarkable instance of the healthy
influence of fostering the self-respect and kindly feelings of criminals
is given by Dr. Cameron. Speaking of his 30 years of experience as a
prison surgeon, he says that by treating the convicts "with as much
consideration as if they bad been delicate ladies, the greatest order
was generally maintained in the hospital." He was struck with "that
estimable trait in the character of prisoners–observable even among the
roughest criminals–I mean the great attention they bestow on the sick."
These convict attendants are just those prisoners who have an
opportunity of exercising their good feelings, and who enjoy the most
freedom. "The most hardened criminals," Dr. Cameron adds, "are not
exempt from this feeling" of kindly compassion.
The moral necessity for the adoption of a humane and brotherly method of
treating criminals appears the stronger when we turn to consider the
social causes of crime. "The feeling is growing among us that society is
responsible for the anti-social deeds committed in its midst. . . ."
From year to year thousands of children grow up in the filth–material
and moral–of our great cities. The "father and mother leave the den they
inhabit early in the morning in search of any job which may help them to
get through the next week." The children enter life without even knowing
a handicraft."
"I never cease to wonder," adds Kropotkin, "at the deep rootedness of
social feelings in the humanity of the nineteenth century, at the
goodness of heart which still prevails in the dirty streets."
1'In Russian and French Prisons.' By P. Kropotkin. Ward and Downey.
This social morality of the wretched is still more remarkable when we
remember not only the continual flaunting display of the luxury and
license of the rich, but that "everything we see around us–the shops,
the peoples we see in the street, the literature we read, the
money-worship we meet with every day–tends to develop an insatiable
thirst for unlimited wealth," and an impression that the beauideal of
life is to make others work for us and to live in idleness.
About two-thirds of the actual breaches of the law, are so-called crimes
against property." And it is obvious that these will disappear with the
removal of the social injustice which is their cause.
"As to 'crimes against persons,' already their numbers are rapidly
decreasing, owing to the growth of moral and social habits which
necessarily develop in each society, and can only grow when common
interests contribute more and more to tighten the bonds which induce men
to live a common life." "We live now too much in isolation. Everybody
cares only for himself, or his nearest relatives. Egotistical–i.e.,
unintelligent–individualism in material life has necessarily brought
about an individualism as egotistic and harmful in the mutual relations
of human beings." " But men cannot live in this isolation, and the
elements of new social groups–those ties arising between the inhabitants
of the same spot having many interests in common, and those of people
united by the prosecution of common aims–is growing." And where there is
common life there is mutual moral as well as material support,
influences calculated to draw forth the kindly feelings and counteract
those morbid tendencies, which, if unchecked by the growth of better
things, finally corrupt the mind. Where the bonds of common life are
Strong, as in the Chinese compound family or Swiss or Slavonian.
communes, we see its beneficial effects in the low level of crime. We
may expect the like results from the new developments of social life now
springing up around us. "Yet notwithstanding all this, there surely will
remain a limited number of persons whose anti-social passions–the
results of bodily disease–may still be a danger to the community."
Such men and women can only be treated as modern science and humanity
are teaching us to treat the lunatic and idiot. We have ceased to whip
and chain the madman, we are ceasing to lock him up in the mitigated
imprisonment of an asylum. The plan tried by the kind-hearted and brave
peasants of Gheel, in Belgium, of taking the insane into their houses as
members of the family has lately found warm advocates among medical men
elsewhere, notably Dr. Arthur Mitchell in Scotland, where the practice
of receiving lunatics in private families is rapidly gaining ground with
markedly beneficial results.
It is by such self-devoted and compassionate fellowship, not by
imprisonment, that we can hope to redeem the afflicted and erring among
our brethren." All that tends that way," concludes Kropotkin, "will
bring us nearer to the solution of the great question which has not
ceased to preoccupy human societies since the remotest antiquity, and
which cannot be solved by prisons."