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Title: Prisons: Universities of Crime Author: PĂ«tr Kropotkin Date: October 1913 Language: en Topics: prison Source: *Mother Earth* (vol. VIII, No. 8)
Leaving aside the great question of “Crime and Punishment” which
occupies now so many prominent lawyers and sociologists, I shall limit
my remarks to the question: “Are prisons answering their purpose, which
is that of diminishing the number of antisocial acts?”
To this question, every unprejudiced person who has a knowledge of
prisons from the inside will certainly answer by an emphatic No. On the
contrary, a serious study of the subject will bring everyone to the
conclusion that the prisons — the best as much as the worst — are
breeding places of criminality; that they contribute to render the
antisocial acts worse and worse; that they are, in a word, the High
Schools, the Universities of what is known as Crime.
Of course, I do not mean that everyone who has been once in a prison
will return to it. There are thousands people sent every year to prison
by mere accident. But I maintain that the effect of a couple of years of
life in a prison — from the very fact of its being a prison — is to
increase in the individual those defects which brought him before a law
court. These causes, being the love of risk, the dislike of work (due to
an immense majority of cases to the want of a thorough knowledge of a
trade), the despising of society with its injustice and hypocrisy, the
want of physical energy, and the lack of will — all these causes will be
aggravated by detention in a jail.
Twenty-five years ago, when I developed this idea in a book, now out of
print (In Russian and French Prisons), I supported it by an examination
of the facts revealed in France by an inquest made as to the numbers of
recidivistes (second offense prisoners). The result of this inquest was
that from two fifths to one half of all persons brought before the
assizes and two fifths of all brought before the police courts had
already been kept once or twice in a jail. The very dame figure of forty
percent was found in this country; while according to Michael Davitt, as
much as ninety-five percent of all those who are kept in penal servitude
have previously received prison education.
A little reflection will show that things cannot be otherwise. A prison
has, and must have, a degrading effect on its inmates. Take a man
freshly brought to a jail. The moment he enters the house, he is no more
a human being, he is “Number So and So.” He must have no more a will of
his own. They put him in a fool’s dress to underline his degradation.
They deprive him of every intercourse with those towards who he may have
an attachment and thus exclude the action of the only element which
could have a good effect upon him.
Then he is put to labour, but not to a labour that might help to his
moral improvement. Prison work is made to be an instrument of base
revenge. What must the prisoner think of the intelligence of these
“pillars of society” who pretend by such punishments to “reform” the
prisoners?
In the French prisons the inmates are given some sort of useful and paid
work. But even this work is paid at a ridiculously low scale, and,
according to the prison authorities, it cannot be paid otherwise. Prison
work, they say, is inferior slave work. The result is that the prisoner
begins to hate his work, and finishes by saying, “The real thieves are
not we, but those who keep us in.”
The prisoner’s brain is thus working over and over again upon the idea
of the injustice of a society which pardons and often respects such
swindlers as so many company promoters are, and wickedly punishes him,
simply because he was not cunning enough. And the moment he is out he
takes his revenge by some offense very often much graver than his first
one. Revenge breeds revenge.
The revenge that was exercised upon him he exercises upon society. Every
prison, because it is a prison, destroys the physical energy of its
inmates. It acts upon them far worse than an Arctic wintering. The want
of fresh air, the monotony of existence, especially the want of
impressions, takes all energy out of the prisoner and produce that
craving for stimulants (alcohol, coffee) which Miss Allen spoke so
truthfully the other day at the Congress of the British Medical
Association. And finally, while most antisocial acts can be traced to a
weakness of will, the prison education is directed precisely towards
killing every manifestation of will.
Worse than that. I seriously recommend to prison reformers the Prison
Memoirs of Alexander Berkman, who was kept for fourteen years in an
American jail and has told with great sincerity his experience. One will
see from this book how every honest feeling must be suppressed by the
prisoner, if he does not decide never to go out of this hell.
What can remain of a man’s will and good intentions after five or six
years of such an education? And where can he go after his release,
unless he returns to the very same chums whose company has brought him
to the jail? They are the only ones who will receive him as an equal.
But when he joins them he is sure to return to the prison in a very few
months. And so he does. The jailers know it well.
I am often asked — What reforms of prison I should propose; but now, as
twenty-five years ago, I really do not see how prisons could be
reformed. They must be pulled down. I might say, or course: “Be less
cruel, be more thoughtful of what you do.” But that would come to this:
“Nominate a Pestalozzi as Governor in each prison, and sixty more
Pestalozzis as warders,” which would be absurd. But nothing short of
that would help.
So the only thing I could say to some quite well-intentioned
Massachusetts prison officials who came once to ask my advice was this:
If you cannot obtain the abolition of the prison system, then — never
accept a child or a youth in your prison. If you do so, it is
manslaughter. And then, after having learned by experience what prisons
are, refuse to be jailers and never be tired to say that prevention of
crime is the only proper way to combat it. Healthy municipal dwellings
at cost price, education in the family and at school — of the parents as
well as the children; the learning by every boy and girl of a trade;
communal and professional co-operation; societies for all sorts of
pursuits; and, above all, idealism developed in the youths the longing
after what is lifting human nature to higher interests. This will
achieve what punishment is absolutely incapable to do.