| At its best, any prison is so unnatural
a form of segregation from normal life that-- like too-loving parents and too
zealous religion and all other well-meant violations of individuality-it helps
to prevent the vicitims from resuming when they are let out, any natural role in
human society. At its worst, the prison is almost scientifically designed to
develop by force--ripening every one of the antisocial traits for which we
suppose ourselves to put people into prison (I say "suppose", because actually
we put people into prison only because we don't know what else to do with them).
The prison makes the man who is sexually abnormal, sexually a maniac. The prison
makes the man who enjoyed beating fellow drunks in a bar-room come out wanting
to kill a policeman. Probably we cannot tomorrow turn all the so-called criminals loose and close the jails--though, of course that is just what we are doing by letting them go at the end of their sentences. No society cannot free the victims. Society has unfitted liar freedom. Doubtless, since the Millennium is still centuries ahead, it is advisable to make prisons as sanitary and well-lighted as possible, that the convicts may live out their living death more comfortably. Only keep your philosophy straight. Do not imagine that when you have by carelessness in no inoculating them, let your victims get smallpox, you are going to save them or exonerate yourselves by bathing their brows, however grateful the bathing may be. |