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Title: Are Prisons Necessary? Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 1887 Language: en Topics: prison Source: Retrieved on September 8, 2014 from http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/prisons.html Notes: Chapter X of Kropotkin’s In Russian and French Prisons
If we take into consideration all the influences indicated in the above
rapid sketch, we are bound to recognize that all of them, separately and
combined together, act in the direction of rendering men who have been
detained for several years in prisons less and less adapted for life in
society; and that none of them, not a single one, acts in the direction
of raising the in intellectual and moral faculties, of lifting man to a
higher conception of life and its duties, of rendering him a better, a
more human creature than he was.
Prisons do not moralize their inmates; they do not deter them from
crime. And the question arises: What shall we do with those who break,
not only the written law — that sad growth of a sad past — but also
those very principles of morality which every man feels his own heart?
That is the question which now preoccupies the best minds of our
century.
There was a time when a time when Medicine consisted in administering
some empirically-discovered drugs. The patients who fell into the hands
of the doctor might be killed by his drugs, or they might rise up
notwithstanding them, the doctor had the excuse of doing what all his
fellows did; he could not outgrow his contemporaries.
But our century which has boldly taken up so many questions, but faintly
forecast by its predecessors, has taken up this question too, and
approached it from the other end. Instead of merely curing diseases,
medicine tries now to prevent them; and we all know the immense progress
achieved, thanks to the modern view of disease. Hygiene is the best of
medicines.
The same has to be done with the great social phenomenon which has been
called Crime until now, but will be called Social Disease by our
children.
Prevention of the disease is the best of cures: such is the watchword of
a whole younger school of writers which grew up of late, especially in
Italy, represented by Poletti, Ferri, Colajanni, and, to some limited
extent, by Lombroso [1]; of the great school of psychologists
represented by Griesinger, Krafft-Ebing, Despine on the Continent, and
Maudsley in this country; of the sociologists like Quételet and his
unhappily too scanty followers; and finally, in the modern school of
Psychology with regard to the individual, and of the social reformers
with regard to society. In their works we have already the elements of a
new position to be taken with regard to those unhappy people whom we
have hanged, or decapitated, or sent to jail until now.
Three great causes are at work to produce what is called crime: the
social, the anthropological, and, to use Ferri’s expression, the
cosmical.
The influence of these last is but insufficiently known, and yet it
cannot be denied. We know from the Postmaster-General’s Reports that the
number of letters containing money which are thrown into the
pillar-boxes without any address is very much the same from year to
year. If so capricious an element in our life as oblivion of a certain
given kind is subject to laws to as strict as those which govern the
motion of the heavenly bodies, it is still more true with regard to
breaches of law. We can predict with a great approximation the number of
murders which will be committed next year in each country of Europe. And
if we should take into account the disturbing influences which will
increase, or diminish, next year, the number of murders committed, we
might predict the figures with a still greater accuracy.
There was, some time ago, in Nature, an essay on the number of assaults
and suicides committed in India with relation to temperature and the
moisture of the air. Everybody knows that an excessively hot and moist
temperature renders men more nervous than they are when the temperature
is moderate and a dry wind blows over our fields. In India, where the
temperature grows sometimes exceedingly hot, and the air at the same
time grows exceedingly moist, the enervating influence of the atmosphere
is obviously felt still more strongly than in our latitudes. Mr. S. A.
Hill, therefore, calculates from figures extending over several years, a
formula which enables you, when you know the average temperature and
humidity of each month, to say, with an astonishing approximation to
exactitude, the number of suicides and wounds due to violence which have
been registered during the month. Like calculations may seem very
strange to minds unaccustomed to treat psychological phenomena as
dependent upon physical causes, but the facts point to this dependence
so clearly as to leave no room for doubt. And persons who have
experienced the effects of tropical heat accompanied by tropical
moisture on their own nervous system, will not wonder that precisely
during such days Hindus are inclined to seize a knife to settle a
dispute, or the men disgusted with life are more inclined to put an end
to it by suicide.
The influence of cosmical causes on our actions has not yet been fully
analyzed; but several facts are well established. It is known, for
instance, that attempts against persons (violence, murders, and so on)
are on the increase during the summer, and that during the winter the
number of attempts against property reaches its maximum. We cannot go
through the curves drawn by Professor E. Ferri, and see on the same
sheet the curves of temperature and those showing the number of attempts
against persons, without being deeply impressed with their likeness: one
easily mistakes them for one another. Unhappily this kind of research
has not been prosecuted with the eagerness it deserves, so that few of
the cosmical causes have been analyzed as to their influence on human
actions.
It must be acknowledged also that the inquiry offers many difficulties,
because most cosmical causes exercise their influence only in an
indirect way; thus, for instance, when we see that the number of
breaches of law fluctuates with the crops of cereals, or with the
wine-crops, the influence of cosmical agents appears only through the
medium of a series of influences of a social character. Still, nobody
will deny that when weather is fine, the crops good, and the villagers
cheerful, they are far less inclined to settle their small disputes by
violence than during stormy or gloomy weather, when a spoiled crop
spreads moreover general discontent. I suppose that women who have
constant opportunities of closely watching the good and bad temper of
their husbands could tell us plenty about the influence of weather on
peace in their homes.
The so-called ‘anthropological causes’ to which much attention has been
given of late, are certainly much more important than the preceding. The
influence of inherited faculties and of the bodily organization on the
inclination towards crime has been illustrated of late by so many highly
interesting investigations, that we surely can form a nearly complete
idea about this category of causes which bring men and women within our
penal jurisdiction. Of course, we cannot endorse in full the conclusions
of one of the most prominent representatives of this school, Dr.
Lombroso, especially those he arrives at in one of his writings
[Sull’Incremento del Delitto, 1879]. When he shows us that so many
inmates of our prisons have some defect in the organization of their
brains, we must accept this statement as a mere fact. We may even admit
with him that the majority of convicts and prisoners have longer arms
than people at liberty. Again, when he shows us that the most brutal
murders have been committed by men who had some serious defect in their
bodily structure, we have only to incline before this statement and
recognize its accuracy. It is a statement — not more.
But we cannot follow Mr. Lombroso when he infers too much from this and
like facts, and considers society entitled to take any measures against
people who have like defects of organization. We cannot consider society
as entitled to exterminate all people having defective structure of
brain and still less to imprison those who have long arms. We may admit
that most of the perpetrators of the cruel deeds which from time to time
stir public indignation have not fallen very far short of being sad
idiots. The head of Frey, for instance, an engraving of which has made
of late the tour of the Press, is an instance in point. But all idiots
do not become assassins, and still less all feeble-minded men and women;
so that the most impetuous criminalist of the anthropological school
would recoil before a wholesale assassination of all idiots if he only
remembered how many of them are free — some of them under care, and very
many of them having other people under their care — the difference
between these last and those who are handed over to the hangman being
only a difference of the circumstances under which they were born and
have grown up. In how many otherwise respectable homes, and palaces,
too, not to speak of lunatic asylums, shall we not find the very same
features which Dr. Lombroso considers characteristic of “criminal
madness” Brain diseases may favour the growth of criminal propensities;
but they may not, when under proper care. The good sense, and still more
the good heart of Charles Dickens have perfectly well understood this
plain truth.
Certainly we cannot follow Dr. Lombroso in all his conclusions, still
less those of his followers; but we must be grateful to the Italian
writer for having devoted his attention to and popularized his
researches into, the medical aspects of the question. Because, for an
unprejudiced mind, the only conclusions that can be drawn from his
varied and most interesting researches is, that most of those whom we
treat as criminals are people affected by bodily diseases, and that
their illness ought to be submitted to some treatment, instead of being
aggravated by imprisonment.
Mr. Maudsley’s researches into insanity with relation to crime are well
known in this country. But none of those who have seriously read his
works can leave them without being struck by the circumstance that most
of those inmates of our jails who have been imprisoned for attempts
against persons are people affected with some disease of the mind; that
the “ideal madman whom the law creates,” and the only one whom the law
is ready to recognize as irresponsible for his acts, is as rare as the
ideal “criminal” whom the law insists upon punishing. Surely there is,
as Mr. Maudsley says, a wide “borderland between crime and insanity,
near one boundary of which we meet with something of madness but more of
sin (of conscious desire of doing some harm, we prefer to say), and near
the other boundary of which something of sin but more of madness.” But,
“a just estimate of the moral responsibility of the unhappy people
inhabiting this borderland” will never be made as long as the idea of
“sin,” or of “bad will,” is not got rid of.
Unhappily, hitherto 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
the time, we hope, is not far distant when the noble ideas which have
inspired Griesinger, Krafft-Ebing, Despine, and some of the modern
Italian criminalists, like Colajanni and Ferri, will become the property
of the general public, and make us ashamed of having continued so long
to hand over those whom we call criminals to hangmen and jailers. If the
conscientious and extensive labours of the writers just named were more
widely known, we should all easily understand that most of those who are
kept now in jails, or put to death, are merely people in need of the
most careful fraternal treatment. I do not mean, of course, that we
ought to substitute lunatic asylums for prisons. Far be it from me to
entertain this abhorrent idea. Lunatic asylums are nothing else but
prisons; and those whom we keep in prisons are not lunatics, nor even
people approaching the sad boundary of the borderland where man loses
control over his actions. Far be from me the idea which is sometimes
brought forward as to maintaining prisons by placing them under
pedagogists and medical men. What most of those who are now sent to jail
are in need of is merely a fraternal help from those who surround them,
to aid them in developing more and more the higher instincts of human
nature which have been checked in their growth either by some bodily
disease — anemia of the brain, disease of the hearth, the liver, or the
stomach — or, still more, by the abominable conditions under which
thousands and thousands of children grow up, and millions of adults are
living, in what we call our centres of civilization. But these higher
faculties cannot be exercised when man is deprived of liberty, of the
free guidance of his actions, of the multifarious influences of the
human world. Let us carefully analyse each branch of the moral unwritten
law, and we shall always find — as good old Griesinger said — that it is
not due to something which has suddenly sprung up in the man who
accomplished it: it is the result of effects which, for years past, have
deeply stirred within him. Take, for instance, a man who has committed
an act of violence. The blind judge of our days comes forward and sends
him to prison. But the human being who is not overpowered by the kind of
mania which is inculcated by the study of Roman jurisprudence — who
analyzes instead of merely sentencing — would say, with Griesinger, that
although in this case the man has not suppressed his affections, but has
left them to betray themselves by an act of violence, this act has been
prepared long since. 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 in 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. The cause of the violence which has brought him into the
prisoners’ dock must be sought long years before. 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; some disease of the hearth, the brain, or the digestive
system. For many years these causes have been at work before resulting
in some deed which falls within the reach of the law.
More than that. If we analyse ourselves, if everybody would frankly
acknowledge the thoughts which have sometimes passed through his mind,
we should see that all of us have had — be it as an imperceptible wave
traversing the brain, like a flash of light — some feelings and thoughts
such as constitute the motive of all acts considered as criminals. We
have repudiated them at once; but if they had 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.
That is what we ought to teach our children from the earliest childhood,
while now we imbue them from their tenderest years with ideas of justice
identified with revenge, of judges and tribunals. And if we did this,
instead of doing as we do now, we should no longer have the shame of
avowing that we hire assassins to execute our sentences and pay warders
for performing a function for which no educated man would like to
prepare his own children. Functions which we consider so degrading
cannot be an element of moralization.
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. And that is not a Utopia; while to fancy that
punishment is able to check the growth of anti-social feelings is a
Utopia — a wicked Utopia; the Utopia of “leave me in peace, and let the
world go as it likes.”
Many of the anti-social feelings, we are told by Dr. J. Bruce Thompson
and many others, are inherited; and facts amply support this conclusion.
But what is inherited? Is it a certain bump of criminality, or something
else? What is inherited is insufficient self-control, or a want of firm
will, or a desire for risk and excitement or disproportionate vanity.
Vanity, for instance, coupled with a desire for risk and excitement, is
one of the most striking features amidst the population of our prisons.
But vanity finds many fields for its exercise. It may produce a maniac
like Napoleon the First, or a Frey; but it produces also, under some
circumstances — especially when instigated and guided by a sound
intellect — men who pierce tunnels and isthmuses, or devote all their
energies towards pushing through some great scheme for what they
consider the benefit of humanity; and then it may be checked, and even
reduced almost to nothingness, by the parallel growth of intelligence.
If it is a want of firmness of will which has been inherited, we know
also that this feature of character may lead to the most varied
consequences according to the circumstances of life. How many of our
“good fellows&” suffer precisely from this defect? It is a sufficient
reason for sending them to prison?
Humanity has seldom ventured to treat its prisoners like human beings;
but each time it has done so it has been rewarded for its boldness. I
was sometimes struck at Clairvaux [2] with the kindness bestowed on sick
people by several assistant in the hospital; I was touched by several
manifestations of a refined feeling of delicacy. Dr. Campbell, who has
had much more opportunity of learning this trait of human nature during
his thirty years’ experience as prison-surgeon, goes much farther. By
mild treatment, he says, “with as much consideration as if they had been
delicate ladies [I quote his own words] 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.” “The
most hardened criminals,” he adds, “are not exempt from this feeling.”
And he says elsewhere: “Although many of these men, from their former
reckless life and habits of depredation might be supposed to be hardened
and indifferent, they have a keen sense of what is right or wrong.” All
honest men who have had to do with prisoners, can but confirm the
experience of Dr. Campbell.
What is the secrete of this feature, which surely cannot fail to strike
people accustomed to consider the convict as very little short of a wild
beast? The assistants in hospital have an opportunity of exercising
their good feelings. They have opportunities of feeling compassion for
somebody, and of acting accordingly. Moreover, they enjoy within the
hospital much more freedom than the other convicts; and those of whom
Dr. Campbell speaks were under the direct moral influence of a doctor
like himself — not of a soldier.
In short, anthropological causes — that is, defects of organization —
play a most important part in bringing men to jail; but these causes are
not causes of “criminality,” properly speaking. The same causes are at
work amidst millions of our modern psychopathic generation; but they
lead to anti-social deeds only under certain unfavourable circumstances.
Prison do not cure these pathological deformities, they only reinforce
them; and when a psychopath leaves a prison, after having been subjected
for several years to its deteriorating influence, he is without
comparison less fit for life in society than he was before. If he is
prevented from committing fresh anti-social deeds, that can only been
attained by undoing the work of the prison, by obliterating the features
with which it inculcates those who have passed through its ordeal — a
task which certainly is performed by some friends of humanity, but a
task utterly hopeless in so many cases.
There is something to say also with regard to those whom criminalists
describe as qualified assassins, and who in so many countries imbued
with the old Biblical principle of a tooth for a tooth, are sent to the
gallows. It may seem strange in this country, but the fact is that
throughout Siberia — where there is ample opportunity to judge different
categories of exiles — the “murderers” are considered as the best class
of the convict population; and I was very happy to see that Mr. Davitt,
who has so acutely analyzed crime and its causes, has also been able to
make a like observation. It is not known as generally as it ought to be
that the Russian law has not recognized capital punishment for more than
a century. However freely political offenders have been sent to the
gallows under Alexander II and III, so that 31 men have been put to
death during the preceding reign and about 25 since 1881, capital
punishment does not exist in Russia for common-law offences. It was
abolished in 1753, and since that time murderers are merely condemned to
hard-labour from eight to twenty years (parricides for life), after the
expiration of which term they are settled free for life in Siberia.
Therefore, Eastern Siberia is full of liberated assassins; and,
nevertheless, there is hardly another country where you could travel and
stay with greater security. During my very extensive journeys in Siberia
I never carried with me a defensive weapon of any kind, and the same was
the case with my friends, each of whom every year travelled something
like ten thousand miles across this immense territory. As mentioned in a
preceding chapter the number of murders which are committed in East
Siberia by liberated assassins, or by the numberless runaways, is
exceedingly small; while the unceasing robberies and murders of which
Siberia complains now, take place precisely in Tomsk and throughout
Western Siberia, whereto no murderers, and only minor offenders are
exiled. In the earlier parts of this century it was not uncommon to find
at an official’s house that the coachman was a liberated murderer, or
that the nurse who bestowed such motherly care upon the children bore
imperfectly obliterated marks of the branding-iron. As to those who
would suggest that probably the Russians are a milder sort of men than
those of Western Europe, they have only to remember the scenes which
have accompanied the outbreaks of peasants; and they might be asked
also, how far the absence of executions and of all that abominable talk
which is fed by descriptions of executions — the talk in which English
prisoners delight most — has contributed to foster a cold contempt for
human life.
The shameful practice of legal assassination which is still carried on
in Western Europe, the shameful practice of hiring for a guinea an
assassin to accomplish a sentence which the judge would not have the
courage to carry out himself — this shameful practice and all that
hardly-imaginable amount of corruption it continues to pour into
society, has not even the excuse of preventing murder. Nowhere has the
abolition of capital punishment increased the number of murders. If the
practice of putting men to death is still in use, it is merely a result
of craven fear, coupled with reminiscences of a lower degree of
civilization when the tooth-for-tooth principle was preached by
religion.
But if the cosmical causes — either directly or indirectly — exercise so
powerful an influence on the yearly amount of anti-social acts; if
psychological causes, deeply rooted in the intimate structure of the
body, are also a powerful factor in bringing men to commit breaches of
the law, what will remain of the theories of the writers on the criminal
law after we have also taken into account the social causes of what we
call crime?
There was a custom of old by which each commune (clan, Mark, Gemeinde)
was considered responsible as a whole for any anti-social act committed
by any of its members. This old costume has disappeared like so many
good remnants of the communal organization of old. But we are returning
to it; and again, after having passed through a period of the most
unbridled individualism, the feeling is growing amongst us that society
is responsible for the anti-social deeds committed in its midst. If we
have our share of glory in the achievement of the geniuses of our
century, we have our part of shame in the deeds of our assassins.
From year to year thousands of children grow-up in the filth — material
and moral — of our great cities, completely abandoned amidst a
population demoralized by a life from hand to mouth, the incertitude of
to-morrow, and a misery of which no former epoch has had even an
apprehension. Left to themselves and to the worst influences of the
street, receiving but little cure from their parents ground down by a
terrible struggle for existence, they hardly know what a happy home is;
but they learn from earliest childhood what the vices of our great
cities are. They enter life without even knowing a handicraft which
might help them to earn their living. The son of a savage learns hunting
from his father; his sister learns how to manage their simple household.
The children whose 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, enter life not even with that knowledge. They know no
handicraft; their home has been the muddy street; and the teachings they
received in the street were of the kind known by those who have visited
the whereabouts of the gin-palaces of the poor, and of the places of
amusement of the richer classes.
It is all very well to thunder denunciations about the drunken habits of
this class of the population, but if those who denounce them had grown
up in the same conditions as the children of the labourer who every
morning conquers by means of his own fists the right of being admitted
at the gate of a London dockyard, — how many of them would not have
become the continual guests of the gin-palaces? — the only palaces with
which the rich have endowed the real producers of all riches.
When we see this population growing up in all our big manufacturing
centres we cannot wonder that our big cities chiefly supply prisons with
inmates. I never cease to wonder, on the contrary, that relatively so
small a proportion of these children become thieves or highway robbers.
I never cease to wonder 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, which are the causes that relatively few
of those who grow up in absolute neglect declare open war against our
social institutions. These good feelings, this aversion to violence,
this resignation which makes them accept their fate without hatred
growing in their hearts, are the only real barrier which prevents them
from openly breaking all social bonds, — not the deterring influence of
prisons. Stone would not remain upon stone in our modern palaces, were
it not for these feelings.
And, at the other end of the social scale, money that is representative
signs of human work, is squandered in unheard-of luxury, very often with
no other purpose than to satisfy a stupid vanity. While old and young
have no bread, and are really starving at the very doors of our
luxurious shops, — these know no limits to their lavish expenditures.
When everything round about us — the shops and the people we see in the
streets, the literature we read, the money worship we meet with every
day — tends to develop an insatiable thirst for unlimited wealth, a love
for sparkish luxury, a tendency towards spending money foolishly for
every avowable and unavowable purpose; when there are whole quarters in
our cities each house of which reminds us that man has too often
remained a beast, whatever the decorum under which he conceals his
bestiality; when the watchword of our civilized world is: “Enrich
yourselves! Crush down everything you meet in your way, by all means
short of those which might bring you before a court!” When a part from a
few exceptions, all — from the landlord down to the artisan — are taught
every day in a thousand ways that the beau-ideal of life is to manage
affairs so as to make others work for you; when manual work is so
despised that those who perish from want of bodily exercise prefer to
resort to gymnastics, imitating the movements of sawing and digging,
instead of sawing wood and hoeing the soil; when hard and blackened
hands are considered a sign of inferiority, and a silk dress and the
knowledge of how to keep servants under strict discipline is a token of
superiority; when literature expends its art in maintaining the worship
of richness and treats the “impractical idealist” with contempt — what
need is there to talk about inherited criminality when so many factors
of our life work in one direction — that of manufacturing beings
unsuited for a honest existence, permeated with anti-social feelings!
Let us organize our society so as to assure to everybody the possibility
of regular work for the benefit of the commonwealth — and that means of
course a through transformation of the present relations between work
and capital; let us assure to every child a sound education and
instruction, both in manual labour and science, so as to permit him to
acquire, during the first twenty years of his life, the knowledge and
habits of earnest work — and we shall be in no more need of dungeons and
jails, of judges and hangmen. Man is a result of those conditions in
which he has grown up. Let him grow in habits of useful work: let him be
brought by his earlier life to consider humanity as one great family, no
member of which can be injured without the injury be felt by a wide
circle of his fellows, and ultimately by the whole of society; let him
acquire a taste for the highest enjoyment of science and art — much more
lofty and durable than those given by the satisfaction of lower
passions, — and we may be sure that we shall not have many breaches of
those laws of morality which are un unconscious affirmation of the best
conditions for life in society.
Two-third of all breaches of law being so-called “crimes against
property,” these cases will disappear, or be limited to a quite trifling
amount, when property, which is now the privilege of the few, shall
return to its real source — the community. 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.
Of course, whatever be the economical bases of society, there will
always be in its midst a certain number of beings with passions more
strongly developed and less easily controlled than the rest; and there
always will be men whose passions may occasionally lead them to commit
acts of an anti-social character. But these passions can receive another
direction, and most of them can be rendered almost or quite harmless by
the combined efforts of those who surround us. We live now in too much
isolation. Everybody cares only for himself, or his nearest relatives.
Egotistic — that is, unintelligent — individualism in material life has
necessarily brought about an individualism as egotistic and as harmful
in the mutual relations of human beings. But we have known in history,
and we see still, communities where men are more closely connected
together than in our Western European cities. China is an instance in
point. The great “compound family” is there still the basis of the
social organization: the members of the compound family know one another
perfectly; they support one another, they help one another, not merely
in material life, but also in moral troubles; and the number of “crimes”
both against property and persons, stands at an astonishingly low level
(in the central provinces, of course, not on the sea-shore). The
Slavonian and Swiss agrarian communes are another instance. Men know one
another in these smaller aggregations; they mutually support one
another; while in our cities all bond between the inhabitants have
disappeared. The old family, based on a common origin, is
disintegrating. 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. Their growth can only be
accelerated by such changes as would bring about a closer mutual
dependency and a greater equality between the members of our
communities.
And yet, notwithstanding all this, there surely will remain a limited
number of persons whose anti-social passions — the result of bodily
diseases — may still be a danger for the community. Shall humanity send
these to the gallows, or lock them up in prisons? Surely it will not
resort to this wicked solution of the difficulty.
There was a time when lunatics, considered as possessed by the devil,
were treated in the most abominable manner. Chained in stalls like
animals, they were dreaded even by their keepers. To break their chains,
to set them free, would have been considered then as a folly. But a man
came — Pinel [3] — who dared to take off their chains, and to offer them
brotherly words, brotherly treatment. And those who were looked upon as
ready to devour the human being who dared to approach them, gathered
round their liberator, and proved that he was right in his belief in the
best features of human nature, even in those whose intelligence was
darkened by disease. From that time the cause of humanity was won. The
lunatic was no longer treated like a wild beast. Men recognized in him a
brother.
The chains disappeared, but asylums — another name for prisons —
remained, and within their walls a system as bad as that of the chains
grew up by-and-by. But then the peasants of a Belgian village, moved by
their simple good sense and kindness of heart, showed the way towards a
new departure which learned student of mental disease did not perceive.
They set the lunatics quite free. They took them into their families,
offered them a bed in their poor houses, a chair at their plain tables,
a place in their ranks to cultivate the soil, a place in their
dancing-parties. And the fame spread wide of “miraculous cures” effected
by the saint to whose name the church of Gheel was consecrated. The
remedy applied by the peasants was so plain, so old — it was liberty —
that the learned people preferred to trace the result to Divine
influences instead of taking things as they were. But there was no lack
of honest and good-hearted men who understood the force of the treatment
invented by the Gheel peasants, advocated it, and gave all their
energies to overcome the inertia of mind, the cowardice and the
indifference of their surroundings.
Liberty and fraternal care have proved the best cure on our side of the
above-mentioned wide borderland “between insanity and crime.” They will
prove also the best cure on the other boundary of the same borderland.
Progress is in that direction. All that tends that way 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.
[1] Cesare Lombroso (1835 — 1909) Professor of psychiatry and
criminologist. He purported the existence of a link between criminality
and certain physical characteristics. This hypothesis is nowadays
discredited. His work encouraged also a more humane treatment of the
convicts.
[2] The former Abbey of St. Bernard at Clairvaux in France had been
transformed by the state rulers into a prison where Kropotkin was
detained from 1883 to 1886 on charges of being a member of the
International Workingmen’s Association which had been outlawed by the
state rulers after the Paris Commune of 1871.
[3] Philippe Pinel (1745 — 1826) Physician and advocate of a psychiatry
pioneering the humane treatment of the mentally ill.