World Topics
Enmineot Writers
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CheMashmatonflTimeg
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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.
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