Newspaper Page Text
World Topics Enmineot Writers CH CheMashmatonflTimeg II fc AMBfcftUUi H Second News Section i The National Daily SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1922. The National Daily GEORGE BERNARD SHAW SAYS: Down With Prisons! Present Day Punishment Oust Of Keeping With Times EVERY JUDGE SHOULD SERVE TERM IN CELL England's Greatest Satirist Says It Is lard to Convince Ordinary Citizen Criminal Is Rot letter Off Than Be Deserves to Be and In ' deed on Verge of Being Positively Pampered. [ If Prison Does Rot Underbid Slum in Baman ' Nursery Slam Wfl< Be Empty and Prison ' Will Fill THIS tg the first of a series of article* by George Remard Shaw, ?n which he turns the brilliant shafts of his satire on society's attitude and endorsement of imprisonment as a punishment for criminals. Other articles will follow. By GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. TMFRISOffMENT as it exists today is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims; for no single criminal can be as powerful for evil, or as unrestrained in its exercise, as an organized nation. , Therefore, if any person is addressing himself to the perusal of these pages in the spirit of a philanthropist bent on reforming a necessary and beneficent public i institution, I beg him to put it down and go about some ' other business. It is just such reformers who have in the past made the neglect, opposition, corruption and physigal torture of the old common jail the pretext for transforming it into that diabolical den of torment, mischief and damnation, the modern model prison. If, on the contrary, the reader comes as a repentant 6inner let him read on. The difficulty in finding repentant sinners when this crime is in question has two roots. The first is that we are all brought up to believe that we may inflict in juries on anyone against whom we can make out a case of moral inferiority. We have this thrashed into us in our childhood by the infliction on ourselves of such injuries by our parents and teachers, or, indeed, by any elder who happens to be in charge <?f us. The second is that we are all brought up to believe, not now that the king can do no wrong, because kings have been unable to keep up that pretense, but that society can do no wrong. Now not only does society commit more frightful crimes than any individual, king or commoner; it legalizes its crimes, and forges certifi cates of righteousness for them, besides torturing any one who dares expose their true character. * SOCIETY THE GREATEST WRONGDOER A society like ours, which will without remorse ruin a boy body and soul for life for trying to sell news papers in a railway station is not likely to be very ten der to people who venture to tell it that its laws would ehock the Prince of Darkness himself if he had not been taught from his earliest childhood to respect as well as fear them. Judges who have spent their lives consigning their fellow creatures to prison, when some whisper reaches them that prisons are horribly cruel and destructive places, and that no creature fit to live should be sent there, remark calmly that prisons are not meant to be comfortable, which is no doubt the consideration that reconciled Pontius Pilate to the practice of crucifixion. Another difficulty is the sort of stupidity that comes from lack of imagination. When I tell people that I have seen with these eyes a man (no less a man than Richard Wagner, by the way) who once met a crowd going to see a soldier broken on the wheel by the crueller of the two legalized methods of carrying out J that hideous sentence, they shudder, and are amazed ? to hear that what they call medieval torture was used in civilized Europe so recently. They forget that the punishment of half hanging, un mentionablv mutilating, drawing and quartering were on the British statute book within my own memory. The same people will read of a burglar being sen tenced to ten years' penal servitude without turning a hair. They are like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who was greatly reassured when he was told that the pains of hell are mental; he though they could not be so very bad if there was no actual burning brimstone. k When such people are terrified by an outburst of robbery with violence, or Sadistically excited by re | port* of the White Slave traffic, they; clamor to have 7 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. sentences of two years' hard labor supplemented by a flogging, which is a joke by comparison. They will try to lynch a criminal who ill-treats a child in some sensationally cruel manner; but on the most trifling provocation they will inflict on the child the prison demoralization and the prison stigma which condemn it to crime for the rest of its life as the only employment open to a prison child. The public conscience would be far more active if the punishment of. imprisonment were abolished; and we went back to the rack, the stake, the pillory and the lash at the cart's tail. PEOPLE INURED TO IMPRISONMENT The objection to retrogression is not that such pun ishments are really more cruel than imprisonment. They are loss cruel, and far less permanently injurious. The decisive objection to them is that they are sports in disguise. The pleasure to the spectators, and not the pain to the criminal, condemns them. People will go to see Titus Gates flogged or Joan of Arc burnt with equal zest as an entertainment. They will pay high prices for a good view. They will reluctantly admit that they must not tor ture one another as long as certain rules aro observed; but they will hail a breach of the rules with delight as an excuse for a bout of cruelty. Yet they can be shamed at last into recognizing that such exhibitions ?are degrading and demoralizing; that the executioner is a wretch whose hand no decent person cares to talte; and that the enjoyment of the spectators is fiendish. They then seek for some form of torment which can give no sensual satisfaction to the tormentor, and which is hidden from public view. This is how imprisonment, being just such a torment, became the normal penalty. The fact that it may be worse for the criminal is not taken into account. The public is seeking its own sal vation, not that of the lawbreaker. BETTER TO SUFFER IN PUBLIC EYE. L I I It would be far better for him to suffer in the public eye, for among the crowd of sightseers there might bo a Victor Hugo or a Dickens, able and willing to make the sightseers think of what they are doing and ashamed of it. The prisoner has no such chance. He envies the unfortunate animals in the Zoo, watched daily by thousands of disinterested observers who never try to reform a tiger into a Quaker by soli tary confinement, and would set up a resounding agita tion in the papers if even the most ferocious man eater were made to suffer what the most docile cbnvict suffers. Not only has the convict no such protection; the secrecy of his prison makes it hard to convince the public that he is suffering at all. There is another reason for this incredulity. The LIKE PONTIUS PILATE JUDGES who have spent their lives consign ing their fellow creatures to prison, when some whisper reaches them that prisons are horribly cruel and destructive places, and that no creature fit to live should he sent there, re mark calmly that prisons are not meant to he comfortable, which is no doubt the considera tion that reconciled Pontius Pilate to the prac tice of crucifixion. ? ? ? Another difficulty is the sort of stupidity that comes from lack of imagination. When / tell people that / have seen with these eyes a man (no less a man than Richard Wagner, by the way) who once met a crowd going to see a soldier broken on the wheel by the crueller of the two legalized methods of carrying out that hideous sentence, they shudder, and are amazed to hear that what they call medieval torture was used in civilized Europe so recently. vast majority of our city populations are inured to im prisonment from their childhood. The school is a prison. The office and the factory are prinons. The home is a prison. To the young who have the mis fortune to be what is called well brought up it is some times a prison of inhuman severity. FALSE BEUEFS ARE PREVALENT This imprisonment in the home, the school, the office, and the factory is kept up by browbeating, soolding, I bullying, punishing, disbelief of the prisoner's state ments and acceptance of those of the official, essentially as in a oriminal prison. The freedom given by the adit's right to walk out of his prison is only a freedom to go into another or starve; he can choose the prison where he is best treated; that is all. On the other hand, the imprisoned criminal is free from care as to his board, lodging, and clothing; he pays no taxes, and has no responsibilities. Nobody expects him to work as an unconvicted man must work if he is to keep his job; nobody expects him to do his work well, or cares twopence whether it is well done or not. Under such circumstances It Is very hard to convince the ordinary citizen that the criminal is not better off than he deserves to be, and indeed on the verge of being positively pampered. Judges, magistrates, and secre taries of state are so commonly under the delusion that people who have ascertained the truth about the prisons have been driven to declare that the most urgent necessity of the situation is that every judge, magistrate, and secretary of state in control of prisons should serve a six months' sentence incognito, so that when he is dealing out and enforcing sentences he should at least know what he is doing. When we get down to the poorest and most oppressed of our population we find the conditions of their life so wretched that it would be impossible to conduct a prison humanely without making the lot of the criminal more eligible than that of many free citizens. If the prison does not underbid the slum in human misery, the slum will empty and the prison will fill. MOST CRUEL OF PUNISHMENT This does in fact take place to a small extent at present, because slum life at its worst is so atrocious that its victims, when they are intelligent enough to study alternatives, instead of taking their lot blindly, conclude that prison is the most comfortable place to spend the winter in, and qualify themselves accord ingly by commiting an offense for which they will get six months. But this consideration affects only those people whose condition is not defended by any responsible publicist; the remedy is admittedly not to make the prison worse but the slum better. Unfortunately the admitted claims of the poor on life are very modest; and the moment the treatment of the criminal is decent and merciful enough to give him a chance of moral recovery, or, in incorrigible cases, to avoid making bad worse, the official descrip of his lot become so rosy that a clamor arises against thieves and murderers being better off than honest and kindly men; for the official reports tell us only of the carc that is taken of the prisoner and the ad vantages he enjoys, or can earn by good conduct, never of his sufferings; and the public is not imaginative or thoughtful enough to supply the deficiency. What sane man, I ask the clamorers, would accept an offer of free board, lodging, clothing, waiters in attendance at a touch of the bell, medical treatment, spiritual advice, scientific ventilation and sanitation, technical instrncQon, liberal education, and the um oI ft JAIL REPORTS NEVER TELL OF SUFFERING Vast Majority of City Populations Inured to Imprisonment From Childhood?School Is a Prison, Office and Factory Arc Prisons, the lome Is a Prison?To the Yonns: Who Have the Misfortune to Be "Well Brought Dp" It Is Sometimes a Prison of Inhuman Severity. carefully selected library, with regular exercise daily and sacred music at frequent intervals, even at the Ritz Hotel, if the conditions were that he should never speak, never sing, never laugh, never see a newspaper, and write only one sternly censored letter and have one miserable interview at long intervals through the bars of a cage under the eye of a warder t And when the prison is not the Ritz Hotel, when the lodging, the food, the bed, are all deliberately made so uncomfortable as to be instruments of tor ture, when the clothes are rags promiscuously worn by all your fellow prisoners in turn with yourself, when the exercise is that of a turnspitt, when the ventilation and sanitation are noisome, when the instruction is a sham, the education a fraud, when the doctor is a bully to whom your ailments are all malingerings, and the chaplain a moral snob with no time for anything but the distribution of unreadable books, when the waiters are bound by penalties not to speak to you except to give you an order or a rebuke, and then to address you as you would not dream of addressing your dog, when the manager holds over your head a continual threat of starvation and confinement in a punishment cell (as if your own cell were not punish ment enough), then what man in his senses would voluntarily exchange even the most harassed freedom for such a life, much less wallow luxuriously in it, as the Punch burglar always does on paper the moment anyone suggests the slightest alleviation of the pain of imprisonment! HAS NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN. Yet people cannot be brought to see this. They ask, first, what right the convict has to oomplain when he has brought it on himself by his own misoonduct, and second, what he has to complain of. You reply that his grievances are silence, solitude, idleness, waste of time, and irresponsibility. The retort is: "Why call that torture, as if it were boiling oil or red hot irons or something like that? Why, I have taken a cottage in the country for the sake of silence and solitude, and I should be only too glad to get rid of my responsibilities and waste my time like a real gentleman. A jolly sight too well off, the fellows are. I should give them hell." Thus imprisonment is at once the most cruel of punishments and the one that those who inflict it without having ever experienced it cannot believe to be cruel. A country gentleman with a big hunting stable will indignantly discharge a groom and refuse him a reference for cruelly thrashing a horse. But it never occurs to him that his stables are horse prisons, and the stall a cell in which it is quite un natural for his horse to be immured. In my youth I saw the great Italian actress Ristori play Mary Stuart; and nothing in her performance remains more vividly with me than her representation of the relief of Mnry at finding herself in the open air after months of imprisonment. PRISONERS IN THEIR STABLES. When I first saw a stud of hunters turned out to grass they reminded me so strongly of Ristori that I at once understood that they had been prisoners in their stables, a fact which, obvious as it was, I had not thought of before. And this sort of thoughtless ness, being continuous nnd unconscious, inflicts more suffering than all the malice and passion in the world. In prison you get one piled on the other; to the cruelty that is intended and contrived, that grudges you even the inevitable relief of slepp and tries to make that a misery by plank beds and the like, is added ths worse cruelty that is not intended as cruelty, and, when its perpetrators oan be made conscious of it all, deludes them as a ghastly semblance of pampered in dnlfenos. tOaWfWfcl >?>*. fcr ?ur O.*>*?? >