These are the remarks of Professor Prins, Inspector-General of Belgian prisons:

Beltrani-Scalia, formerly Inspector-General of Prisons in Italy, is of the same opinion, and remarks that “the cellular system looks upon man as a brother of La Trappe.” (“The Criminal,” p. 329.)

The following passage, taken from Prince Kropotkin’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” refers to a peasant confined solitarily in a cell beneath him in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and with whom he and his neighbour could communicate by knocking.

Finally, this is the judgment of the rector of St. Marylebone, Dr. W. D. Morrison (after more than ten years’ experience as Prison Chaplain): “It tends to have a demoralising effect upon many classes of prisoners.”

Such evidence might be multiplied indefinitely.

Now, sir, in regard to the object of solitary confinement we have surely no need to go behind the finding of your committee:

“It would appear that the main object of the separate” (closed-cell) “confinement had come to be deterrence ... In effect this is the purpose which it must be regarded as now designed to serve.”

In regard to its nature, we have, as surely, no need of other description than its supporter’s, the late Sir Edmund Du Cane’s “An artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health.”

The questions arising, then, are two:—

As to question (a). No support can be gathered for the plea of deterrence from the statistics of penal servitude; mere severity of punishment has never been proved to be a factor of deterrence. When men were hung for horse or sheep stealing those offences were far more prevalent than they are now. Moreover, the nature of their coming punishment is too vaguely known to those who have never been in prison for the thought of solitary confinement to have any deterrent effect on ninety-nine out of a hundred first offenders. Indeed, that it is not sufficiently present to any man’s mind is shown by the fact that so humane a public as ours knows and thinks so little about the suffering of solitary confinement as to have allowed it to remain part of their prison system.

The effect of a period of solitary confinement which comes at the beginning of long years of imprisonment is inevitably wiped out by the monotony of the prison life which follows. Mechanical adjustment to environment is always going on in the human being. Solitary confinement is a smothering process to which the mind must adapt itself, or perish. The mental demoralization remains after the confinement comes to an end, but the consciousness of that mental ruin, the consciousness of the suffering, has become dulled; from his closed cell the convict passes on to the ordinary prison life, actually unable to appreciate the extent of the misery he has undergone. Obviously, moreover, deterrence (if there be deterrence) paid for by mental and moral weakening is not true deterrence; for the acquired power of resistance to crime, if any, is nullified through deterioration of the prisoner’s fibre.

The true deterrence of imprisonment lies in the general fear of loss of liberty; in that nightmare of a thought all details of impending punishment (even if known) mechanically merge.

This solitary confinement, however, is sometimes justified on the ground that it is necessary to buoy the convict up with hope. It is thought that by placing him at the outset in the seventh hell of pain we lessen his sufferings in the minor hells which await him at the expiration of those first dire months. That, sir, is humanity with a vengeance. Imagine this principle logically applied to social life. The husband would beat the wife that she might not so greatly feel the inevitable wear and tear of matrimony; the mother would starve the child that it might experience with more equanimity the ordinary pangs of hunger; the master would withhold wages that the servant might more duly appreciate the receipt of what was due to him. It appears, indeed, to be almost what is called a vicious principle.

To question (b)—Whether a civilized country has the right to retain its offenders in a state of existence absolutely opposed to mental, moral, and physical health, even for the sake of a supposed deterrence—I conceive, sir, but this one answer: Only so long as we do not realize what this solitary confinement means.

Six months (to take the mean sentence) is a short time to a free man; it is an eternity to a prisoner confined in solitude. One hundred and eighty days—four thousand hours, of utter solitude and silence in a cell, which—in the words of Sir Robert Anderson (Nineteenth Century, March, 1902)—“differs from every other sort of apartment designed for human habitation in that all view of external nature, such as might soothe, and possibly alleviate, the mind, is, with elaborate care, excluded”—solitude broken only by one hour a day, of chapel, and walking up and down a yard, by the sight of a warder, three times or so a day, bringing in food; by a ten minutes’ visit perhaps from chaplain or governor.

Four thousand hours of utter solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven—with the prospect of anything from two to twenty years of monotonous routine and loss of liberty to follow! Can a Public Opinion, which succeeds in bringing these facts home to its imagination, justly say that two and a half to twenty years of loss of liberty, with all that this means in prison, is not sufficient punishment for any crime that man can commit, without the preliminary agony of four thousand hours of solitude in a closed space thirteen feet by seven?

Sir, Public Opinion has never yet succeeded in realizing what this so-called separate confinement means. In the year ending March, 1907, we set 1,035 persons, of whom 691 had never been sentenced to penal servitude before, to endure these hours of agony and demoralization. In the year ending March, 1908, we set another 1,179 to endure the same, 749 of them for the first time. At the present moment another thousand, more or less, are undergoing it.

In thus subjecting year by year a thousand persons to nine, six, or three months of an “artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health,” we are annually committing an offence against our reason, of which we reap the full reward in the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of persons already demoralized enough; and an offence against our humanity in reality as great as if we had placed them on the rack.

I by no means lose sight of the fact that this closed-cell confinement falls with different effect on different temperaments; it falls, no doubt, far less heavily on the sluggish and the brutalized than on the nervous types, of which, however, we are now breeding great numbers. But, sir, even the habitual criminal—popularly supposed to dread flogging more than anything—has been known while enduring solitary confinement to beg for the lash in place of it. Sir J. Jebb, giving evidence before the Penal Servitude Acts Commission in 1863, uses these words: “With burglars and reckless characters I think that separate confinement is dreaded more than any other kind of discipline.” And in regard to other effects on the habitual criminal, the words of Professor Prins, above quoted, are significant. The sluggish brutality of many recidivists is produced in the first place by this very process of closed-cell confinement. Man, even the lowest type of man, is a social and gregarious animal—all that is best in him depends on, and is brought out by, contact with his fellow-creatures; if that be not so, our religion and whole social scheme are falsely conceived. Deprive man of all contact with his fellow-man, shut him in upon himself, hopelessly, utterly, month by month, and he will come out of that artificial existence lower and more brutal than when he entered it. Prolonged starvation and agony of the mind is worse than starvation and agony of the body, carrying, as it does, the wreck of the body with it.

We have the right to restrain offenders and to safeguard society; in doing this we unavoidably punish with that already terrible punishment “loss of liberty.” But, sir, we have—surely—not the right to inflict unnecessary and harmful suffering. I recognise to the full that there is no lack of humanity among those who work our prison system; recognise to the full that they would not willingly inflict any suffering that they acknowledged to be unnecessary; but in every department of life those who administer a system are, in the nature of things, with rare exceptions, too habituated to that system, too close to it, to be able to see it in due perspective.

I ask you, sir, and I ask the common sense of the public, whether harmful and unnecessary suffering must not inevitably be endured by the mind, and through the mind by the body, of a human being during these thousands of hours of closed-cell confinement. To answer that question fairly each member of the public has but to ask what would be the effect on himself or herself of nine or six or even three months’ utter seclusion (except for one hour each day) from all sight and sound not only of human beings, but of animals, trees, flowers, and from the sight even of the sky, all but a patch no bigger than a tea-tray. We are on the whole a humane people; and it is not so much a question of our humanity as of our imaginations. The position is plainly this: Those who have to work our prison system perhaps could not do so at all if they allowed their imaginations fair play. The community are too aloof to realize what that prison system means. And so the unnecessary demoralization and suffering caused by this closed-cell confinement goes on at the rate of (for convicts alone) more than four million hours a year!

I do not base the appeal of this letter so much on humanity as on common sense. Why, when we are faced with appalling statistics of criminality, with appalling difficulties in dealing with and reforming criminals, do we deliberately continue a practice which both evidence and reason tell us contributes to the more complete demoralization of such as are already demoralized?

In the Report of your Departmental Committee of 1895 occur these words:

I submit that no unprejudiced man can regard this closed-cell confinement as a humanizing influence, except in the rarest cases, or maintain that it helps to reclaim men and women.

I refer again to this paragraph in the Report of your Committee:

I am credibly informed that the whole matter is one of administration, and can be modified without Act of Parliament. I appeal, then, to you, sir, who have already done so much towards reforming our prison system, to work for the abandonment of this custom of confining convicts in closed cells for nine, six or three months, or any less period, either in local or in convict prisons; to substitute therefore work in association from the commencement of sentence; or, where such is not immediately possible, work in separate cells with open doors. And I would further appeal to you to advocate the reduction of the twenty-eight days, closed-cell confinement endured by prisoners serving sentences of hard labour.

Than this great and necessary reform I can conceive none that will, at a single stroke, remove so much harmful and unnecessary suffering, or do more to reconcile our Penal Laws with Justice and Common Sense.

(2)

“... I was at X. Prison on Tuesday, at Y. Prison yesterday. Saw all the officials, and talked with twelve convicts....

“It was suggested to me at X. that I ought to stay some days there and see every convict. I would be willing, if you will allow me, to stay some days at X. Prison, see every convict, and keep record of the answers obtained from each one as to the effect on him of separate confinement. I think they would speak to me freely. From all I hear, and certainly from its situation and general airiness and lightness, X. Prison is the best of the four collecting prisons, and there would be no danger of getting an impression more unfavourable to separate confinement than I should get from seeing each convict in all four prisons.

“An expression used during our conversation the other day leads me for a moment into the deeper and wider significance of this question. It was the expression ‘a downright enemy of society’ used of a certain class of prisoner. I have been thinking over that phrase ‘a downright enemy of society’ to see if one more meditation on it would correct the conclusions of a hundred previous meditations, but I do not feel that it has. I think of it like this: Every now and then, seldom enough but still too frequently, we come across children, in all classes, who, from the age when they begin to act at all, show that there is something in them warped, distorted, inherently inimical to goodness. It is in them, of them, a taint in their blood, a lesion of their brain. They grow up. They are not insane, but they have a blind spot, a place in their souls or internal economy—or whatever you like to call it—that some mysterious, rather awful, hand has darkened. They are doomed from their birth by reason of that blind spot sooner or later to become criminals, that is, to commit some action which is not consonant with the actions of those who are born without this blind spot; some are not found out, some are. When found out they are known as ‘the criminal type.’ They form a portion, not perhaps a very large one, of our convicts. Can those, who have had the good fortune to be born like their fellows, punish these unfortunates for the sake of punishing them, for the sake of avenging society? I cannot bring myself to think so.

“These are not, however, the bulk of our convicts. The greater part of them are those who are born more or less normal, but with what is called a weak character.^[5] I don’t know if you have ever been much amongst those classes which supply the vast proportion of our criminals; if you have, you will recognize, as I do, what a wonderful thing it is that so small a proportion of them become criminals. You will have seen the very dreadful struggle they have against luck from the time when they begin to know anything. You will feel, as I do, that keeping their heads above water is, and must be, touch and go with them from day to day; they’ve just a plank between them and going down, and a very little extra sea (it runs high all the time) tips that plank over. Many of them are bred in slums and garrets where the only real God is Drink. When they go under, they are suddenly up against the most inexorable thing in life, Law and Order, to whose mercilessness every citizen subscribes in self-defence, whether he will or no. When they have paid their debt to Law, they emerge into the same conditions against which they were too weak by nature to stand up before, with the one weapon they had, character, either gone or gravely damaged. It is not remarkable that they go down again, and then again, and so on, until they become ‘enemies of society.’

“It seems to me that gentlemen (I speak in the spirit), holding as their creed the duty of putting themselves in the place of others, cannot reconcile it with that creed to punish for the mere sake of punishing those whose chances in life have been so vastly inferior to their own.

“These general considerations must be platitudes to you, and I feel that you do not, any more than I, believe in punishment as a means of revenging society, but merely as a means of protecting society by restraining and trying to reform the offender. Society (I speak in the widest sense of heredity and environment) makes the offender; it can restrain, but it cannot with justice exact vengeance from the victims of its own shortcomings.

“All hope of real diminution in crime and criminals (in default of better social conditions) depends, in my belief, not on the infliction of ‘deterrent suffering’ in prisons, but, first, on the extension of probation, and your splendid Borstal system; secondly, on abolition of ‘tickets of leave,’ and that vicious principle of not having done with the offence when you have paid the penalty for it; thirdly, on a moderate, humane, and reformatory use of the principle of detention of the hopeless recidivist; fourthly, on the increase of humanizing influences brought to bear on prisoners in prison. I give full weight to the necessity for not making prison life a treat, and to the consideration that what would be hell to us may be comparative ease to the habitual criminal; but I think that, with ‘closed-cell’ confinement abolished, society might still make its mind easy. The man who will come back to prison life from choice, so long as he can get his bread in freedom, does not exist; the cumulative force of hard and regular work, of silence, of no tobacco, of no drink, of no knowledge of what is going on outside, of being ordered about from morning to night, of being, a number, not a man, of losing all touch with his family and friends, above all, of utter monotony, of the sense at the best of being in school, at the worst of being in slavery, of the feeling of having whole years sponged out of his life (for a man does not live in prison), may not be easy to grasp for those who live in liberty themselves, but it is none the less tremendous.

“It is perhaps superfluous to remind you, who for so many years have been fighting for and achieving reforms, of what a queer, hypnotizing influence ‘things as they are’—in fact, the existing system has on the minds of those who are constantly confronted with it; and to beg you for that reason to take due discount from the evidence of those who are necessarily under that hypnotic influence; just as no doubt you will, without my begging you, take discount from my appeal on the ground that I am an outsider.

“I can’t close this letter without saying that it’s impossible to go over our prisons and not see that the country has in yourself a great reforming administrator; I shall consider it a rare piece of good fortune if any words of mine help to bring about in your mind the belief that this particular feature of our prison system, closed-cell confinement, requires immediate mitigation and ultimate elimination, except in individual cases....”

---

(3)

A Minute on Separate Confinement

By the courtesy of the Prison Commissioners, to whom my thanks are due, I visited these convicts in their cells, and conversed privately with each one of them for from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour. I put certain definite questions to each in regard to the effect of separate confinement on themselves, and, so far as they could tell me, on other prisoners, prefacing each conversation by the information that I was in no way connected with the prison authorities. My object in the course of these conversations was to get behind the formal question and answer to the man’s real feelings. I met with no hostility, defiance, or conscious evasion in any single case. In some cases a word or two was sufficient to bring a rush of emotion. Several men were in tears throughout the interview. In the majority of cases, however, I found it difficult to get the prisoners to express themselves; and in some cases formal answers, stolidly given, were reversed by some sudden revelation of feeling evoked, as it were, in spite of the prisoner’s self. Generally speaking, I judged that feelings were understated rather than overstated.

The summary of these interviews is as follows: (sixty convicts interviewed):—

Of these:

Eight preferred separate confinement to working in association, and were not conscious of harmful	Category A.
Fifteen would prefer work in association, but (1) Having suffered from their separate confinement, had got more or less used to it (three cases). (2) Were suffering, but thought it was good for them (three cases). (3) Were so incapable of expressing their experiences, that no definite answer could be got from them (nine cases).	Category B.
Thirty-seven preferred association; suffered severely from separate confinement; and asserted that they had been harmed; that all prisoners were harmed, and some driven crazy.	Category C.

Of the eight convicts in Category A, who preferred separate:

The following phrases taken from notes made immediately after each interview indicate the general nature of the suffering experienced by prisoners separately confined:

I could not get an admission from any prisoner that the suffering they underwent in separate confinement deterred them from coming back to prison. The two reasons they assigned for coming back to prison were:

It is obvious, however, that the separate period is almost universally regarded as much the worst part of the sentence.

My reasons for believing that, in spite of this, separate confinement is not, in fact, deterrent were given in my open letter to the Home Secretary (the Nation, May 1st and May 8th, 1909); this belief has been strengthened rather than weakened in the course of this investigation. As a final result of these visits I record my deliberate conviction that no competent observer with any knack of getting at men’s feelings, and the opportunity of conversing in private and as a private person, with the prisoners could come to any other conclusion than that an immense amount of harmful and unnecessary suffering is inflicted by closed-cell confinement extending over the periods (especially the longer periods) now prevailing. It is my belief that if the authorities were able to adopt this method of getting at the real state of the case the system would not remain unaltered for a single day.

(4)

“... Every day that passes with this question undealt with means so many thousand hours of solid, tangible, harmful, removable misery. There is a distinction between this particular kind of misery and any other experienced by man in a state of society such as we now have in England. There is no other form of acute, prolonged misery enforced on people in such a way as that they can by no possibility avoid it. The old saying, ‘He deserves all he’ll get and more,’ stultifies itself the moment it is looked into; the plea of deterrence does not hold water; and this misery stands out stark—a survival from the philosophy (!) of the dark ages....”