SOME REACTIONS TO PUNISHMENT
, By MARK BENNEY
Rarely, indeed, did sinners prove themselves as penitent as the young man in Jeremy Taylor's anecdote ; nevertheless it was on the pious hope that they might that the English penal system was built. Solitude and silence are the attributes of eternity ; they are not punishments, they are the con- ditions in which men may best receive their punishments. Thus the cellular system and the silent system of our prisons were conceived in the austere broodings of Penn and Howard, and were adopted by the ascetic spirit of Victorian England after receiving their form from the gaunt, fierce-eyed fanatics of Pennsylvania. It seems a strange attitude to a modern mind, but while piety remained the dominant social force it was the only possible one. Now, however, piety has gone from the penal system. We are left to define our own attitude to the grim prisons it has deposited in our midst.
We can best do that by asking, in the light of new know- ledge, what are the effects of imprisonment ? And directly we do that we find ourselves questioning not only the failures, but the very successes on which the pious penologists of former days prided themselves. As an instance of this we may take the young man with so deep a sense of sin that he was not content with a single death. Where Jeremy Taylor saw an instance of divine grace, psycho-analysis has taught us, for good or bad, to see only an acute manio- depressis e state. We get the picture of a young man who is evidently in the throes of a severe psychic conflict, one effect of which is to produce in him a strong psychopathic need for punishment. It is very probable that his crime was committed in order to gratify this need for punishment. For such a case punishment would be the reverse from punishment : a sentence of imprisonment might well be an inducement to commit another crime in order to receive another sentence. Nor would imprisonment resolve the young man's psychic conflict. Since we no longer impose capital sentences for violent robbery, the only way to redeem such a man from a criminal future is by psycho-analytical therapy.
That particular instance has illustrated one of the paradoxes which criminal psychology has brought to light. We have been accustomed to think that men go to prisons because they commit crimes. It is now well established that frequently men commit crimes in order to go to prison ! Nor does this apply only to tranio-depressive cases. In my own opinion I believe this rule holds good for a very large proportion of recidivist crime. After a man has served a fairly long sentence of imprisonment, he finds that behind and apart from the surface frustrations and privations of the prison, there is a deep contentment to be found there, a sense of peace and security, even a strange sense of participation which may be of the nature of Levy-Bruhl's Participation mystique. These satisfactions are largely unconscious ; the conscious mind of the prisoner is preoccupied with the unpleasant aspects of the prison. But on their return into a world that lacks peace and security, a world whose flux frightens and confuses the mind, a need for the deep, serene satisfactions of the prison asserts itself.
The knowledge of this need may be repressed frcm consciousness by the memory of the physical sufferings of the prison ; and then the urge manifests itself in irrational impulses. Men throw up jobs and return to crime for no reason other than a vague, unformulable discontent. They run absurd risks and make absurd blunders in committing their crimes. And when you meet them later in prison, and ask them why they committed the crimes which brought them back, they can only scrape their feet uncomfortably and mutter, "I was fed up!" There is an illuminating study to be made some day on the mistakes which bring criminals back to prison. It is too facile to say, as Dr. Burt has said, that "crime is a senseless, sorry way of compassing one's ends," that " those who perpetrate crimes are usually simpletons," and that therefore their mistakes can be put down to stupidity. Stupidity is no simple, imponderable quality, but the effect of complex repressions and inhibitions.
No: we have to accept the fact that men may commit crimes, not from a simple, stupid desire to get hold of some- one's property, but as a dramatic attempt to deal with their own particular conflicts. As an example of this I may cite the case of a quiet, intelligent leptosomic youngster I once met in Chelmsford Gaol. He left prison after an eighteen months' sentence, fully determined that in future he would lead an honest, industrious life. He found work, introduced himself into new, respectable circles, and began to court a pretty girl with the intention of settling down to a steady married life. But one day, on impulse, he took his girl into a fashionable photographer's shop and ordered an expensive cabinet photograph of her. The girl protested, knowing' that he couldn't afford it ; but although he could not explain why, he insisted on having the photograph-. Some weeks later he found himself back in a prison cell, with the photograph staring down at him from the shelf. And then—and only then—he realised that he had had the photograph taken because he had known, deep within him, that he would return to prison, and would want some souvenir of his girl that he might show to his fellow-prisoners with pride.
It is a sorry fact that the adaptation to prison which can be clearly seen at work in this youngster has been long conipleted in a large number of the men who fill Dartmoor. These are old men for the most part ; but the prisons set apart for younger convicts, such as Chelmsford Gaol, are raising a generation of lags to take their. place. And their harmful effects are by no means confined to the quiet, unsociable leptosomic types so far dealt with. Perhaps the chief psychological defect of the modern prison, as a penal function, is the negative, passive character of its punishments. For it is a psychological law in the active, sociable types of men that what they suffer passively they tend to live out actively. After a year or two of sexual privation, they go out into the world to have more loves than ever Lucian knew. After long periods of humiliation they find a sadistic joy in humiliating others. After years of confinement, they discover a claustrophobic inability to remain alone or in a small room for more than a few Minutes on end. Adaptation to normal social life, while they remain at the mercy of such reactions, is well-nigh impossible. The one indubitable effect of imprisonment on such men seems to be to encourage them to commit ever more vicious and violent crimes.
It really does seem, then, that society should choose its punishments more carefully if it would discourage crime. The tendency of the times, however, points rather in the opposite direction. While there is a well-informed body of opinion working, on the whole successfully, towards the amelioration of imprisonment, there are signs of in- creasing harshness in the judiciary, expressing itself in the resort to longer sentences and more frequent use of corporal punishment. This calls for the consideration of yet another reaction to punishment—the reaction of the society that inflicts punishment on others. The class- conflicts within the community seem to play an analogous part to the psychic conflicts within the individual. As the struggle for property grows more acute, the propertied classes grow more viciously and violently attached to their possessions. By the same process they come to feel that they can only be detached from their property by vice and violence ; and so thieves become more vicious and violent in their eyes every day. The irrational attitude produces irrational punishments—and will continue to do so, pre- sumably, until the class-conflict is resolved one way or the other. It is very significant that the only serious attempts at prison reform in this century have been those of Socialist Russia and Fascist Italy. !
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