ANOTHER VOICE
The Udenopticon: a libertarian direction for crime and punishment
AUBERON WAUGH
Nothing is more repugnant to true Britons than the idea of freedom, as Mr Peregrine Worsthorne has often pointed out in his great wisdom. Although such repulsive and alien concepts as equality and fraternity can take root — indeed they already have, in many parts of Northern England — the idea of liberty will always cause anxiety, dismay and resentment, except in the one curious sense of freedom from want. Liberty in every broader sense may be all right for some, they say, but it does not have a very high priority among those who have not expressed the slightest desire to stand on their two feet, and who expect to be looked after. Perhaps they will pay lip-service to the idea of freedom, but only out of deference to their university- educated betters, who are expected, in return, to keep them supplied with wheel- barrow loads of £10 notes at the post office every week, or, failing that, to give them a `job', something altogether more difficult and expensive. Or so it may seem to the self-professed libertarian. It is foolish enough for those who instinctively resist the encroachments of the state on their private lives — taking away their money, preventing them from doing things they want to do or, worst of all, making them do things they do not wish to do — to accept the libertarian label, as if the adoption of a bogus and implausible system of political philosophy made their intelligent self-interest some- how more respectable, or likable. One does not, for instance, need to be a self-professed libertarian to object to the behaviour of Cleveland Council in examin- ing children for evidence of sexual abuse who are brought to hospital for quite different complaints, and removing them forcibly from their parents on the slightest suspicion, however unfounded. In fact it diminishes one's outrage if one attributes it to affronted libertarian convictions, rather than to common sense.
The libertarian tendency becomes no less unstable than Marxism as soon as one tries to formulate it into a coherent politic- al programme. This is immediately appa- rent in the issue of crime and punishment, just as it becomes apparent when one tries applying Marxism to problems of incen- tive. Both philosophies are unstable because they ignore huge areas of human nature and human need. Liberty, like equality and fraternity, is a matter of preference and of tendency, rather than an absolute, like God's love for mankind. I merely remark that those, like me, who favour the libertarian against the egalita- rian or fraternal tendencies, to which it is more or less directly opposed, as all three are opposed to .each other, must proceed by stealth to do their little bit of good in modern Britain.
If we followed libertarian absolutes on questions of crime and punishment, then we would have to hail Mr Bernard Goetz as one of our folk heroes. Goetz it was who, feeling himself threatened by four evil-looking black men on the New York subway, stood on his own two feet and gunned them down. But a moment's reflec- tion should convince anyone that life would be more, not less, unpleasant if the Goetzes of this world were free to blast away at any black men (or white women for that matter) who seemed to threaten them. There must be constraints on liberty before any of us, even the libertarian elite, can enjoy its fruits. Confronted by the criminal and hooligan classes generally, one's libertarian passions begin to cool. If belief in liberty, wherever possible, is to come to terms with imperfect human na- ture, then one must somehow formulate a penology which does not directly contra- dict it.
My own proposal would seem to be the opposite of Bentham's Panopticon (one might call it Waugh's Udenopticon) in that every element within it — punishment, deterrence, prevention and reform — is achieved with a minimum of surveillance, a total absence of preaching or guidance, a minimum of state involvement — and also, as it happens, a minimum of expense. Such lessons on social responsibility as emerged from it would be entirely self-taught. Let us first examine the background. Nearly ten decades of so-called 'liberal' (in fact, fraternal) attitudes on the treatment of offenders, policing and education have produced a society where violence and the threat of violence create a major source of public anxiety. They would seem also to have produced a fairly large number of people who are neither self-disciplined enough nor socially responsible enough to be fit to live in a free society, unless they can be reformed.
Waugh's Udenopticon would be sited on an island of high, impenetrable cliffs off the Scottish coast, approached by a single jetty or natural harbour. This area would be sealed off by an unscalable concrete wall, surmounted by barbed wire etc. On the sea side of the wall would live three prison warders, who would spend most of their time playing cards, smoking cigarettes and watching television. They could see nothing that went on in the rest of the island, which would be furnished with concrete bunkers, each with a tap, and nothing else. The guards could com- municate with the prisoners only through a loud-speaker, to call out the prison num- bers of those due for release — and through a chute, down which they would daily send a certain amount of food, with occasional clothing, blankets etc, to be divided among the prisoners as they them- selves saw fit.
The wall could be crossed only by a single passage, leading to two inspection chambers electrically locked on both sides, through which only one person could pass, either way, at a time. When a prisoner's sentence was up, his number (tattooed inside his arm) would be called. If he failed to present himself on the third day, he would be assumed dead, and rations in the chute would be adjusted accordingly.
The Udenopticon would be reserved mainly for prisoners convicted of violence against strangers, most of whom would be serving fairly long sentences, but it would also be used for statutory six-month sent- ences on anyone convicted of carrying a knife or pistol in public. Its purpose, by removing potential thugs from all the benefits of civilised society, and by forcing them to confront the alternative, is to let them learn for themselves to cherish good manners and cultivate social acceptability.
Of course no sane person would ever introduce this programme. Penal reform is a matter of tendency, like everything else. I am merely suggesting a new direction, away from the fraternal and egalitarian lights which have failed.
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